Not a Patch on the Original

It wasn’t so long ago that, at least on the home consoles, the contents of your cartridge (or disk) held the entirety of your video game and the idea of modifying these contents was both a laughable suggestion and a reason to invest in a gaming computer. Bugs, glitches and even design choices you disliked were to be always in your game and on your nerves, and the workaround was either an official retail re-release or cheating device, and neither of them grew on trees. Given time and technology, our gaming expositions have become readily known to anybody with access to the Internet (read: everybody) and the opinions of a million nerds on what feature(s) of their latest purchase sucks are available to the developers themselves. No longer do we sleep in a bed of Hyper Turbo Championship Special DX editions or tedious patches; there are no excuses for releasing anything other than a perfect product.

Boot up any modern console game for the first time and you’ll almost certainly see an update being downloaded and installed. What does it do? Why do you need it? How can there already be a patch for the game when it only came out last week? So often will these questions run through my head as I wait for some mysterious yet apparently necessary update to be applied to my video game. On the one hand, the sheer ease with which a game can be patched up and fixed raises modern gaming’s hand high above the bloodied mess that were previous generations’ efforts but on the other hand too often will boxes fly up into your face telling you to download something to combat a phantom error that you can’t even read about. Have game developers decided that they can send a game to print while they continue to work on it? You may recall a mild annoyance with Fable 2 and its multiplayer being added as a patch update. It was freely available on release day, but does that excuse Lionhead from showing the public the feature (at that year’s E3 demonstration) and then leaving out of the gold product? I suppose it does, since the content was available immediately and freely on day one. If they had released it any later, then what is now a vague maybe-memory could have been a deal breaker. Let’s not forget that Xbox 360 updates don’t generally tell you what exactly you’re updating your game for, so the difference between a new feature and a minor glitch fix is ambiguous at best.

This sounds all well and good with sweeping statements about theoretical customers, but the truth is that it’s difficult to not notice when a huge update drops (especially with the Xbox Experience) and even harder to care when a small one does. There are very few cases where somebody would actively seek out to learn every aspect of a minor update, and even for the major enthusiasts who would really care that x attack now takes y milliseconds longer to execute, most updates are done in earnest and with only a positive response (if any at all.) Recently, Team Fortress 2 received one such important update which added new maps and weapons in addition to altering existing attributes of the game. Diehard fans, first-time players and lapsed gamers alike were met with an alternate, queer method of providing them with the new weapons from the established “get achievements, get weapons” method from previous TF2 updates: the weapons are given out randomly, regardless of player performance or even participation over a course of time that donates the goodies to some in minutes while leaving others out in the cold for hours until they receive their first unlockable weapon – quite possibly one that they already own from a previous update. It’s the exact opposite of the previously mentioned system where gamers are given an update and not told what it is: Valve slathered the hype upon its fans over the course of a week through its official website with details of the new items, and then made actually getting them a five-hour long dice roll. They had intended to stop users from grinding or hacking the achievements that unlocked the locked weapons, and now players line up to get a spot on a server where they will stand still indefinitely. Probably not the desired outcome.

The possibilities in this networked generation for games to be constantly updated, improved expanded are never-ending. Why nobody has yet fully capitalised on what seems to me as a relatively simple idea is unknown. I want to see lists of fixes, virtual suggestion boxes and seamless content distribution, and I want to be able to access the content I paid for without jumping through any arbitrary hoops. Doubly so if the content isn’t free, and don’t even get me started on locking away content for the sole purpose of selling it to you post-release. I’ll be here all night!