Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself
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Put another way, let's say the actual delta between original and "patch" version is 20GB (11GB new + some changed stuff). There's two ways to ship this:
(1) Create a delta patch file that can be applied on top of the 45GB base version (20GB)
(2) Repackage the entire thing into a complete install (54GB)
If you do only (1), anyone installing for the first time after the "patch" version is released is downloading an extra 9GB and going through a longer installation process.
If you are expecting that only a small percentage of your total install base has downloaded the base game (45GB), it also really doesn't make sense to produce both (1) and (2): You're incurring extra dev and testing time to produce a package that saves you a tiny fraction of your overall bandwidth usage. You also end up with an install base that is partially installed fresh (2) and partially patched (1) which means subsequent updates also have to test both scenarios -- and if you had a bug in applying the patch, you have an even harder time later to try reconcile it for the same reason.
If you do only (2), which is what I suspect this is, then anyone downloading after its release just downloads the 54GB version. The small percentage of people with the initial version have to download an extra 30-ish GB, but it saves you (as the developer) a bunch of testing time and risk.
The PS4 needs 96gB free because its digital installers work by downloading everything, then copying things to where they need to go, and then deleting the download. At 99.99% installed, there are two copies of the game on disk, and if there's not enough space for that, the install fails.
We had to know it was inevitable.
Luckily I had a hard disk. I don't even remember that BaSS had 15 disks! That must have taken a whole evening to install that thing. But it took only 12 MB on the hard disk although that was 10% of the whole disk capacity. Times sure have changed.
http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/list.php?list_disks_option=m...
Time to dust off the Amiga emulator :-)
Later I realized I could have done the job, and faster, using just two disks: one in the computer writing the disk images and one in laptop reading the disk (and then swap disks & overwrite with the next image). D'oh!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5o6NQmEA-8
(Yes, this was a real, official thing that was available from Microsoft)
I was then setting up my own little TCP/IP network with a NFS server on my two machines, connected via coax Ethernet using NE2000 network cards.
Thank goodness for CD-ROMs. Only a few years after that, I was able to just go into a computer store and just buy a single CD with Yggdrasil (or RH or Slackware) which made the whole process much easier. As long as your system could boot off of CD-ROM... sometimes you still needed to make a boot disk.
Either Wing Commander II or Gabriel Knight was the most floppies (both around 12).
Oh well look on the bright side: its better than no patches. Bethesda has a history of ignoring bugs. They let Skyrim on PS3 wither on the vine.
Probably will check it myself in a week once I visit my father.
Turns out, you have to rent both discs to play! One to install (which took like two hours for me, if not more), and one to play. I guess you only need to rent one disc after that, but they're still getting at least $6 out of anybody that wants to play.
(edit: for the PC version, that is; and even that might depend on the year you got the thing. Also found a Reddit thread with the box on display)
Compressed distributions that are expanded for install have been used at least since floppies were the main distribution media for isn't all to fixed disks.
Distribution media (and the fixed disks they install to) may be on the order of 5 orders of magnitude larger now, but that hasn't changed.
Additionally, as another commenter pointed out, the majority of assets are in formats that support native compression (textures and audio) and thus won't compress too well a 2nd time.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13575/sony-releases-128-gb-bd...
Someone should calculate how many petabytes of Internet transfer capacity are wasted annually solely due to bad algorithms used in performing software updates. It'd be a surprisingly large figure.
Firefox has historically shied away from complicated patch algorithms for this reason among others. (To be fair, of course, we're also dealing with several orders of magnitude less data than AAA games are...)
Patching small to moderate sized resources transactional ly might be a solved problem, but I imagine doing so on large resources in an acceptable time frame may not be for this use case.
That's where bundling all your data files into a single large archive bites you in the butt. Individual files the game uses ain't gonna be that large.
Perhaps they could break stuff apart prior to shipping, but I imagine that could cause a lot of QA headaches as sure it should all work perfectly fine if a solution is used that transparently supports both combined and split formats, but who wants to bet the ship date of a multi-hundred million dollar project on that?
I sometimes wonder if games were distributed on cartridge again if they would be more thoroughly tested before being released.
Plus, they'd load a brazillion times faster.
This includes a game I work on, because it's built in a version of Unreal where we do not want to drastically change the packfile format and modify the build process to handle this case.
Bethesda is really bad at tech. They use a ancient engine that binds physics calculation to frames and can't go over 60 FPS. They warned Fallout 76 fans during the Beta that they should not click the "Update" button (big download, game screwed). They trust the game client 100%. You can hack/cheat in this multiplayer game by changing INI files with a text editor.
If the file is smaller than 10x the base patch unit size: don't bother just add the whole file as a single unit / send it all for each update.
Else: Create a manifest of the file: Size on Disk, Checksum of file, Name of file mapping to (one or more) list of segments within file by segment offset, segment size, segment checksum. A custom list might be provided by a resource packer that is aware of assets / code segments within the file.
A website will provide an interface that has a list of file names to target size/hashes.
There will also be a list by size/hash that enumerates the segment lists within the file.
To update, the file size/checksum would be computed and the manifests obtained from the server; these would be compared to the files on disk and invalid segments/files discarded.
The target version would then be selected and the target manifests collected. First limited by filename and then optionally project wide, segments would be matched first checking size then checksum. There are a couple different methods that might then be optimal depending on the desired outcome, which depend on disk space, operating system support for hard-linking/de-duplicating subsegments of a file, if the media is known to be an SSD or spinning rust, etc.
However, in any event, that infrastructure allows for easily checking and upgrading / repairing to any version from any version at the expense of storing a small quantity of metadata and having full copies via the actual delivery service for segments on file. The backend might also have de-duplication of the stored data as a bonus.
This is probably a very naive implementation of compression via de-duplication and should be obvious to anyone skilled in this form of art.
It would be a rather large figure, but I'd wager that superfluous video streaming (eg, video advertising, or youtube/netflix autoplaying to no audience) overwhelmingly dwarfs any bandwidth wasted on suboptimal update delivery.
When downloading from a fiber connection to a PS4 HDD the bottleneck is likely the HDD's speed. To merge a file you would need to at least read it and write it again, which is at least twice as slow as simply downloading it. Alternatively you can pay the cost by seeking constantly instead (like a texture per file), which may be even slower and probably sucks at runtime.
(This has sort of happened. Valve managed to roll out a version of the launcher for Linux a while back which used instructions not available on older CPUs, and crashed before it reached the point where it could check for updates. Was a pain. Normally, if Steam exits uncleanly they force an update check immediately on next restart, but if it never gets that far you're screwed.)
Well, one pirate group compressed all the .wav files into MP3s and wrote a quick batch script to decompress them all back into the .wav's. Turned a 700 megabyte download into a little under 100 megabytes.
Similarly with all the other resources that would be used on its journey between the data center and the end user. You’re wasting time if you could send an efficiently-generated 2 gig patch instead of a 60 gig file, especially for users in remote places. You’re taking up more space and cycles on your CDN. CPUs switch from idle power consumption to active. Every stage you can think of takes some amount of power and other resources, and if you’re delivering an unnecessarily huge file, you’re wasting everything it took to run all the steps along the way.
(54 GB) / (3 days) = 1.66666667 megabits per second
To really drive this point home, even the FCC agrees with the above poster:
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/guides/broadband-speed-...
I played Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 side by side. By the end of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been mostly playing the same game for 10 years (all of Todd Howard's games since TES4[1]). I almost stopped playing near the end. Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played. Todd Howard has lots of work to do if I'm going to get another one of his games.
I'm watching Cyberpunk 2077 intently.
[0] They leave the "entertaining" ones in. It's usually up to modders to fix what they can. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-S...
In writing in RPGs, I will dock some points from Larian. Recently tried Divinity:Original Sin. The setting and the writing was so generic.
They solved this in Fallout 76. Can't be accused of having shallow characters if you put no characters in the game!
Then again, there was a large gap between trying Fallout 3/NV and Fallout 4, so maybe my perception changed.
Not quite. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas.
Fallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. The main quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a pathetic boss fight. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as one dimensional with only one purpose in life. There are some cool side stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part.
New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. Who's good or bad is murky. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. Take for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor. There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you significantly participate in them. The main story branches off into about 4 very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4.
Back in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas[0]. I remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet!
one of my reactions to fallout 3 was that unlike the original fallouts, it wasn't funny.
For me, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and any subsequent Bethesda games based on this engine are automatic no-buys for me at this point. I sincerely hope Fallout 76 sells poorly (relative to other Bethesda titles) so that they can get the message where it hurts.
”I think most people that aren't making games use the word 'engine', you know, they think of 'engine' as one thing, and it's, we view it as technology, right? so there are lots of pieces, and every game, parts of that change. Whether it's the renderer, the animation system, the scripting language, the AI, the controls... so, some people talk about Gamebryo but that's, like, we haven't used that in a decade.”
”And a lot of it is, some of it is middleware, whether that's Havok animation here, and, so 76, we changed a lot of it. You know, it's an all new renderer, new lighting model, new landscape system, and then, when you go to Starfield, even more of it changes. And then Elder Scrolls 6 which is really out in the horizon, even more of that will change there.”
The quote is translated from a video interview in German here:
https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd...
Here is an English translation of the video interview:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/t...
I mean this is a company that currently releases a multiplayer game without any anti-cheat, anti-tamper technology. Cheating in Fallout 76 will be as hard as locating the config files and changing them with your text editor.
It would be a start if they automatically adjusted the value based on the refresh rate of your monitor.
People point at the right speech moments, look disappointed appropriately, a timer then fires for a story option that's only open for five seconds. It looks so much more _alive_ than a Bethesda game.
There's hints of it back in Witcher III if you know where to look but I'm super excite for 2077.
I'd expect to read that on /r/games but not on HN :-(. Engines are source code, they can be fixed and many are fixed (some even descend from codebases older than the NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation engine). The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine, not that their codebase's history goes back more years than whatever time delta the marketing teams of mainstream companies have convinced the gaming public is supposed to be "good" by arbitrarily changing the name or version of their engines.
Unless we're talking about a brand new studio or tiny developer, no engine is being made from scratch anymore - especially in the AAA space. Even id Tech 6 traces its lineage to Quake 1 in 1996 (Carmack said at some point in the mid-90s that he starts new games from scratch, but that was up to Quake 1 and since then every new engine is an improvement to the existing codebase). Same with Unreal, LithTech (latest version being LithTech Firebird and used in Shadow of War), RAGE (which is based on earlier AGE from before Rockstar bought Angel Studios), Serious Engine and of course NetImmerse/Gamebryo as well as a bunch of others (and note here that i'm only mentioning engines that started in the 90s - if we go forward a little bit, a ton of "modern" engines started in early 2000s).
The framerate bug everyone mentions? By keeping the fixed timestep that they already have with their framerate capping, uncapping the framerate, decoupling the game updates and ensuring they are called at ~60Hz (or whatever they want) and interpolating the visual state between update states they'll have the currently best approach for 60+ Hz displays with barely touching most of their systems (mainly the rendering code), let alone rewriting everything from scratch.
(as a sidenote i always find it funny when people think that Bethesda will make a brand new polished and bugfree engine when they do not give enough time to their programmers to fix issues in their existing engine that are often minor)
> which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018
According to Steam's hardware survey only a combined 1.28% uses an ultra-wide monitor as of October 2018. In perspective, that is almost the half of a combined 2.47% that uses non-widescreen resolutions and more than twice the users using 1280x1024 than users using 2560x1080 (the most common ultra-wide monitor resolution).
I mean, considering 160 million active users (or so, last time i checked) this is still an estimated around 2 million users, but that is only a tiny bit higher than the percentage of Linux users (0.72%) and less than half of the percentage of Mac users (2.84%) that Bethesda is completing ignoring - so i don't exactly expect them to put any effort towards a tiny percentage of ultra-wide monitors either (which, if we consider porting studios like Feral than handle everything themselves and only need a code dump from the original developer, might actually need more work from Bethesda's side than making the game available on Linux and Mac).
Not that i excuse their lack of support for ultra-widescreen, mind you (especially considering that it is trivial to have if you also don't screw up FOV tweaking - which btw, Bethesda also does). But the proportion of PC gamers using ultra-widescreen isn't really anything special to affect their decisions.
That said, I will admit that my language could have been more precise. It's less that they won't "move away" from their old engine, and it's more that they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times. Anyone who has played Oblivion can attest to the fact that, even if they've swapped out the terrain system or the lighting effects system, their new games are just reskinned copies of Oblivion, complete with all the same bugs, quirks, idiosyncracies, and lack of decent PC support that's always been there.
In the past Bethesda has relied on modders dealing with things like supporting modern monitors. Now that's not possible with Fallout 76, so the poor PC support becomes much more pronounced.
For what it's worth, I think it's hard to draw too many conclusions from the Steam hardware survey, because that's including everyone with Steam. Instead of asking how many Steam accounts have a 21:9 resolution monitor, it would be better to ask how many potential PC buyers of Fallout 76 have a 21:9 resolution monitor, and I suspect the number is higher than 2 million. You have to keep in mind many of those 1080p 16:9 folks have Steam on an old desktop or a laptop that couldn't even run Fallout 76 decently -- there are plenty of 2D indie games that would still justify having Steam installed.
> they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times
This is very different from "moving away" from their old engine and isn't just a matter of language precision: one requires rewriting everything from scratch in a multiyear project that is a big undertaking on its own (with results that are very likely to not be as stable and bug free as people would imagine) that practically no company with an existing codebase does anymore (especially at the stage and size of Bethesda), whereas the other requires fixing a few subsystems that are already there and a tiny fraction of their existing codebase that can be done as part of their updates between games. It is certainly a much smaller change than the renderer updates they've done so far.
About the Steam hardware survey, every PC gamer has Steam installed (there might be a few who do not, but they either only play one or two games, like Battlefield or somesuch, so they do not really matter as far as PC audience comes, or they are so few that they are statistically insignificant - for all intents and purposes Steam has a monopoly on the market and both developers and publishers use every single statistic it provides as pretty much The Truth). With that in mind, PC buyers for Fallout 76 - or any other AAA game - are inside this audience, either as a whole or as a subset, so this 2 million is actually the best case. In practice it is most likely lower because not every single one of those 2m gamers would be interested in Fallout 76 (it isn't like having an ultrawide monitor is some sort of requirement to like the game :-P).
Not every PC gamer is in the potential target audience of Fallout 76. That doesn't increase the numerator -- it dramatically decreases the denominator, making those 2 million a much bigger percentage.
Either way, I feel vindicated with Fallout 76 now being the lowest rated Fallout game in history, selling >80% fewer copies than Fallout 4, etc. Hopefully Bethesda learns a lesson from this and starts putting in the same effort as their peers in the industry.
> their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine
...because it is a common thing to say about Bethesda. But the reality is that they can stick with their engine just fine - they just need to fix their bugs. The problem isn't that they keep using their engine, everyone does (as you already wrote in the first paragraph here), the problem is that they do not give their programmers the necessary time to fix the issues with their engine.
They do need to fix their physics and modernize frame rates and aspect ratios but other then that I hope they never change to some completely different engine. Loading in Bethesda games is always much faster than most other games too.
But FO76? I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist, they might as well have just released it as a DLC for FO4 because it seems completely pointless as is.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/06/windows-10-october-updat...
From what I found it was a reasonably well known bug too.
Back in the day games used to release on carts and we could not patch them. Now that we have Day1 patches and people expect bugs, production companies shoot for earlier release dates because they can.
Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, and I thought New Vegas was about 10x better than Fallout 3.
To be fair, Fallout 2 (my entry to the series, and a game I still love) is famous for being utterly bug-ridden and full of incomplete/broken quests. Disappearing car, anyone? :P
But Fallout 3 used the 3rd party Gamebryo engine anyway, so the engine wasn't really developed by Bethesda either.
A little insight here, not sure whether this is the full story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-br...
Did the other recent big open world games (Witcher 3, Horizon) have similar issues when they were released?
- No integrated voice chat for Switch, an existing mobile device is used instead
- Significant delay between product launch and paid online service availability
- System upgrades included on-cart for the system so you're not in a situation where you need a system update but don't have online access so you can't play the game you just put in your system
- DLC is actually bonus content, not an integral part of the game split off about 50% through development and stuffed behind a paywall to drive pre-order upgrades
- "Day one DLC"/"On disc/cart DLC" not the primary upsell mode on the Switch for Nintendo developed games - instead, free content packs and paid content packs are slowly released when they're done
Sony and Microsoft seem to treat online services as an integral part of their product, make money when a developer has to publish a patch (after the first submitted patch), and seem to encourage a ridiculous amount of microtransaction DLC (example: There are a ton of DLC packs for LittleBigPlanet 3, including packs of three Marvel, DC, and cartoon characters, all priced at about what a child would get for allowance in a week, Sony taking a 20%-30% of each sold, naturally).
As a result, it seems that Nintendo really does their level best to release games without showstopping bugs because they aren't as reliant on the online component to patch their games. I remember there being a bug in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (on the Wii) that would cause you to lose your progress if you triggered it[1]. Nintendo apologized, issued updated discs, and put up a Wii channel that would fix your save data if it was corrupted by this bug.
[1] More info: https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Skyward_Swo...
My updated one had a few of these but I could play for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Also, I never played the release version of it but apparently my dad gave up on fallout 3 on his ps3 when a hacking glitch gave him unlimited stats and made the game pointless.
RDR2 definitely has more going on than BotW. BotW is large, but mostly empty.
You can fast travel via stage coach or train (for a fee) or one-way out of camp with the fast travel map (if you've purchased it).
I understand wanting players to experience the world, but later on I just want to get things done
I'm certain that people more talented than me worked on BOTW, and it is definitely polished, but I think it's probably wrangling less complexity to sparsely populate miles and miles of grass with one of a half-dozen "attack player when get close" enemy types.
Might want to double check with the speed running community on that.
https://www.nintendoenthusiast.com/2018/10/18/speed-glitch-b...
As well, this is Bethesda's first multiplayer game, so expect it to have a lot more bugs than your typical Bethesda launch.
eh?
For what it's worth, Playstation does have stuff in their policy that says something along the lines that games that don't have online have to be on the blue ray console physical disk, but since this is an online only game, it's okay for the disk not to have everything.
I don't love this policy, but as someone who rarely even buys physical versions of the game anymore, I don't really think it's that big of a deal. The game is online only, it's not that crazy that you have to download stuff on day 1. /shrug
EDIT: Plus, a lot of this comes from the publishers breathing down the game devs necks to get the game out ASAP, esp before the holidays. So they put super tight deadlines on the games, and then that requires the devs to work out all the bugs and final code pretty much all the way up until the launch date. It's not like the past where you had to get it right on the first try for the physical copy because there was no way for a user to download a patch.
I love VS Code, but I'm really happy I'm mostly off of MS for development.
Back around when that comic was written, Computer Gaming World had a policy of only reviewing the unpatched versions of games. That became increasingly untenable and they eventually had to scrap the policy.
The parent probably figured it was Half-Life 2 because the HL2 launch was a disaster. It was one of the first games requiring online activation and the servers were completely overloaded.
I once had to service an acura with a recall for failed half shaft seals on the drivetrain. no big deal, about an hour of labor and a trip through the carwash but the computer in the service tech office kept telling me the part was on order 2-3 weeks.
2 weeks go by and there is an enormous fragile package on my workbench. It is an entire carbon fiber driveshaft assembly for the vehicle im working on, with a replacement axle shaft. Both are required to be installed, with old parts sent back to the guys at the factory. now my labor is 4-6 hours with an alignment, balance and a test drive because some factory worker decided picking up a final product was simpler than picking out a part from that assembly.
I bet the Fallout 76 change is the same. Massive CI, its already being tested at the final assembly level, just reinstall everything and dont worry about it.
Sounds like money in your pocket.
He works for Tesla now and he's happier with the fixed hourly pay. It fosters actual team work and cooperation instead of people fighting over who gets the best jobs.
Software is now "ship it quick and fix it later" and that's wrong.
So we live in the world of ship it broken/incomplete, just so a PM can hit their date, quality of the game be damned.
I prefer Valve Time to make sure things are as quality, complete and correct as possible [1].
The worst part about these 50GB games and 'patches' is that it takes a few days to get it down sometimes with the data capped/throttled ISP 'networks' we have settled for milking us out of transfer, and big games like this really let them hinder your 'network' for a few days, knocking you offline, data/packet loss and more as they think you are doing something malicious with their 'smart' 'network' throttling.
Even with auto-updates turned off, the PS4 will download patches when in rest mode. I used to love renting games at Redbox, but the rise of huge patches makes that impossible. I rented the Modern Warfare remaster thinking it was an old game and would mostly work out of the box. I was shocked to see it try to download a 40 GB patch. I canceled the download and played the game without the patch and returned the game the next day (it's not a remaster; they re-made everything and it stinks). The next day, I turned on my PS4 to see it had downloaded and installed the patch without me. 5% of my data cap, gone.
An aside, I stumbled across https://physicalgames.wordpress.com/ps4-update-sizes/ a few months ago and like to reference it before making any purchases. Fallout 74 is a hard pass for me.
I know you can set it to a mode where it can stay minimally powered on and update itself, but I use it so infrequently why would I waste all that power?
Back in 1985 I got a BBC Micro for Christmas. I turned it on. Beep Boop and I had BASIC in front of me. Anything that doesn't do that magic will get my fist shaking while the onion on my belt wibbles around damn it :)
2. Assets are bundled via the zip like mechanism, and individual "zone maps" are separated by hard loading screens. If you travel from 1 continent to another in WoW you get a had loading screen as assets are unloaded, and reloaded.
3. Which continent you log into is the only one you _need_ data for, so as you log in the client can prioritize certain assets higher then others.
4. Blizzard/Activision have a lot of experience with this. In 2008 blizzard had 10mil + players downloading 4GiB+ patches within 24hours so they've had a while to tune and make adjustments as this is part of their core customer experience.
5. Large publishers don't general optimize for this, because the people who whine about it largely already gave you their money and aren't likely to refund/return (in some avenues it is impossible).
They removed that functionality years ago.
Not only that, but they will buy the next game and the next one too. This is the reason so much game software is buggy, bloated, and user-hostile: people keep buying it, release after release. You’re rewarding the company for crap! The whole “buy, complain, buy the next one” cycle keeps products of all kinds awful.
I gave it a pass because it requires 100+ GB for a full installation.
For one game.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-...
I have a 500GB drive for my games. I can't justify burning 20% of it for a single game.
I've had this drive a few years now. If I did it today, I'd definitely buy a larger one.
Even if you use the hard drive for only games, if all of the games you wanted to install were that size, you'd be limited to 20 games. On a 1TB hard drive.
That said, I don’t understand how bug fixes can be so big, because presumably the aforementioned art files would change substantially in the case of software fixes.
Assuming that I’m mot wrong about the proportion of a modern game being art, that lends credence to the idea mentioned elsewhere in this thread that there was straight-up missing content in the original release.
But only 4% of a HDD.
Your problem is what again?
I really didn't get enough time to play during Beta (often were during times I had appointments or work), and while I would see players like Shroud having tons of fun with friends , only a small number of my friends play on PCs and few of those will get Fallout76. There were a lot of bugs which I hadn't seen, but also I wasn't convinced this game is worth it.
On the other hand some of the gameplay I saw from Shroud showed that complaints of quests being boring and enemies being too weak, while they might have been true in the beginner areas, were not problems if you simply went to the right areas of the map.
Day 1 patch or no, I don't like the practice of the physical media just being a Steam/Uplay/Bethesda installer with a download code for the game.
Seriously, they were pretty honest and upfront about their Beta and did it in the truest sense. "There are bugs in the game! It's total trash!". Yea... that's why you run betas... to find the bugs. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
More than likely there was an issue with their patch tool too, thus it's a whole new download. Haven't bought the game yet, but I see nothing they're doing as "ridiculous".
If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a redemption code for the digital download version?
That's why I still prefer physical versions of games. Both me and my wife have our own separate accounts on the services.
https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/act...
With PSN you can have two people playing the one purchase of a game simultaneously.
I honestly don't remember the last time I bought software on physical media.
It's okay to me that the nice decorative card rack keeps growing, right next to the Totem shelves in most stores. If I'm going to download the whole thing anyway, I might as well not waste shelf space in my home on the Totem.
The original Xbox One plan included lending, giving away, and trading games, it just intended to cut out the Gamestop middle man and let you do it directly Gamertag to Gamertag. That's what Microsoft was really punished for, cutting out the Pawn Shops.
We should be demanding our rights in the digital stores (and securing them in copyright reforms and regulations, if need be), not fighting for bits of plastic that pretend to be rights.
The Wii shop for example will be going down for good soon, making purchases not already on the console inaccessible. A copy of a Gamecube game on the other hand will work until the disk physically breaks.
We absolutely should be fighting for digital store rights, but focusing on physical discs isn't the right way to solve that.
I'm lucky enough to have very high speed broadband with no monthly limits, and I gather from the tone of your comment that you are too. But it's not universal and patches like this cause a lot of problems for people who aren't as privileged as us.
It's basic dev 101. Your user is stupid and will do everyone wrong. It's flat out amazing when you stand behind someone that uses a bit of software you built, took the time to make everything as straight forward as possible. But they find how to break it in crazy ways.
I agree that this is the standard for modern online games... I had friends really into destiny 2 and they tried to get me to play. As soon as I realized the game was 'online only' i was like fug this man. I had been playing soulsborne games offline on an old xbox 360 for years with no complaints. Nowadays shit is fucked with most games, they expect you to be online and paying extra. No thanks!
As someone else said, i think the trend is 'game as a service' rather then a "game" in traditional sense. Sony has put out some good single player offline capable games, i just have the think the re-occuring revenue of these GaaS games (fortnite, fallout, etc) is SO damn high that the business value ends up guiding decisions.
Personally, I like the fact that they are patching and continuously patch. This strikes me as the devs want to make sure there are as few problems as possible and will do everything they feasibly can. Instead of "Oh well, it's shipped, it is what it is."
Also, I agree with you - Their patch tool is pretty terrible..
Perhaps due to the way the game files are packaged up, but unless they edited every model and sound file, you shouldn't need to redownload the whole thing.
Maybe it's due to their DRM? But even rsync can handle better updates :)
There’s really no winning.
At the end of the day, the hardcore side are the ones who usually determine if a follow up will be successful or not; balancing both audiences is likely an exercise in frustration and futility.
At that size, they should have some sort of delta update tool.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to say “sorry, this beta must be deleted and the full game must be retrieved.” That’s the life of a beta tester.
As I understand, the discs that need the huge update aren't beta discs, they're what you can go buy in the store.
I usually hear "games as a service" derided as a combination of lazy bugfixing and wanting a constant stream of money. But anyway, "service"-level patches don't need to be very big. A code fix or a new item aren't going to cause any major churn.
But it's like "I bought this package that said it's salt on it. It's not sweet at all! Why isn't this like sugar? This should be like sugar!"
Later, they complain a pack of sugar is too sweet.
"I'm so pissed over what EA did with Battlefront" What did they all do? Buy Battlefront 2. "I hate EA!" They still buy EA games. "I hate online only games!" They buy online only games. Gamers are such a whining bunch of babies and you can downvote me all you want.
There are alternatives and options out there.
But gamers are such a childish (usually literally) and entitled bunch that I've noticed it's hard to take most of their criticism seriously about anything. The only criticism I've agreed with lately is the rise of lootboxes. Everything else just reminds me of a non-technical manager trying to tell developers how easy something should be because it was easy to write it down as a Trello card.
For example, there's a common meme on /r/gaming about how lazy/selfish Bethesda is by not include a single-player mode. As if it's some trivial undertaking. Same with Bethesda reusing its engine instead of "just" building a new one.
What gamers never seem to realize is that their demands are no different from the ideals of the developer. There probably isn't a single person at Bethesda who wouldn't want to work <40hrs/week incrementally improving the game to perfection for a few more years, or working on a cool single-player campaign with fresh ideas.
Meanwhile, criticism is easily squished when the financials come out. If enough gamers bought and enjoyed the game to make the venture profitable, then criticism is exposed as nothing but a wishlist, not as the damning evidence gamers like to think they're circle-jerking over.
I mean, for a community of devs, I'm really trying to figure out all the "None of this makes sense." You'd figure on HN, most people would start speculating why instead of throwing shit in the dev's face. I work on only small to medium sized projects. Nothing to the scale of what this game is. But I've been contracted to fix, have seen and heard about far worse problems than just a new build download patch.
Replaced entire engine with a new one that is not terrible