Day-one patches are the new normal

No Man’s Sky will receive a massive day-one patch that adds a ton of new content and gameplay elements to an already humongous game. This would be just fine, except a few retailers across the nation started selling the game early — it comes out on Tuesday, but some people (including reviewers) were playing it late last week. The patch, which includes the actual finished game with all of its bells and whistles, requires these early players to delete their saves and start over when No Man’s Sky actually comes out. Developers at Hello Games wiped No Man’s Sky’s servers on Sunday and they’re doing the same thing today.

And there’s nothing wrong with any of this.

Some players feel cheated (“I bought the game, so why can’t I keep my progress?”), and others think that a day-one patch is a sign developers are trying to ship an unfinished game (“Isn’t that just a cop-out so they can start making money without doing their jobs?”). These perspectives are not only entitled, but they misunderstand the modern game development process.

Day-one patches are the new normal — and, hell, they’re not even that new.

When Microsoft attempted to sell the Xbox One as an “always-on” console in 2013, the idea received so much backlash that the company changed its entire next-gen ecosystem. Microsoft abandoned the idea of a console that had to be constantly connected to the internet, while Sony crowed that the PS4 was never designed to be always-on.

However, in practice, both of these consoles rely heavily on online connections. Many major, AAA games — even single-player experiences — won’t function without first connecting to the internet, and all games receive multiple patches throughout their life cycles. Some of these patches are small, but some are large updates to the core of a game’s mechanics or playability. Modern consoles are not always-on, but they are mostly-on.

Within this mostly-on ecosystem, not only are developers able to release day-one patches; they’re encouraged to do so. Getting a game certified on consoles is an arduous, bureaucratic process filled with complex forms, weird benchmarks and a thousand ways to get rejected. Nuclear Throne co-creator Rami Ismail laid out the certification process in a blog post last night, and he noted that especially in the case of disc-based games, like No Man’s Sky, developers often submit their builds months in advance.

“If you’ve got months to improve upon a game that went through cert, do you think you would leave those months?” Ismail asked. “Do you think audiences would appreciate a developer just kind of doing nothing for three months? Can you imagine the Kickstarter outrage if a developer, three months from launch, posted, ‘We’re done, it’s good, we’re not touching it again until you get to play in three months?’ Anybody arguing that a game should be done when it goes ‘gold’ is living in the ’90s.”

Besides, not only are games today more connected than they were in the ’90s, they’re vastly more complicated on a technical level. Patches are more prevalent in general because there’s more that can go wrong or need tweaking for a game to operate as its creators envisioned. This doesn’t just apply to console games, either; PC games are just as huge and many also require an internet connection at some point.

The ability to roll out a day-one patch is a crucial facet of a mostly-on ecosystem, in which developers and console manufacturers assume all players have access to the internet, at least for a little while. Long enough to download an update, if not an entire game.

A day-one patch is not a sign that the developers are trying to pull a fast one on players or that they snuck an unfinished game through certification. Sure, it seems like some games simply aren’t done when they hit consoles — we’re looking at you, Assassin’s Creed Unity — and those are worthy of our ire, especially if we’ve just dropped $60 on a supposedly AAA experience. However, day-one patches on their own are not sinister. They’re simply part of the modern game development process.

Sean Murray and the rest of Hello Games were thrust into the limelight the day they revealed the first trailer for No Man’s Sky in late 2013, and they’ve been working under its harsh glare ever since.

“We’re under a pretty intense spotlight right now, and hopefully it’s easy to imagine how hard it would be to switch off from that, or how deeply we care about people’s first impression of the game,” Murray wrote in a post about the day-one update yesterday. “In fact most of us were back here the day after we went gold, working on this update. We’re already proud of what we put on a disk, but if we had time, why not continue to update it?”

No Man’s Sky in particular is a passion project. You can hear it in the way Murray talks about devouring sci-fi novels as a kid and how he dreamed of one day playing a game that allowed him to explore entire universes from the comfort of his couch. The game gained attention because it’s gorgeous, and it kept us hooked because of its premise: the idea of unencumbered cosmic exploration unlike anything we’ve ever been offered in a video game. It’s a huge project and a new experience in the gaming world. And now, with the day-one patch, it’s even better than we could have imagined.

In this case, a day-one patch is not only normal — it’s ideal.

‘Darksiders’ rides again on PS4, Xbox One and Wii U

Aside from the next Legend of Zelda Wii U owners don’t have much to look forward to in terms of forthcoming games. Breath of the Wild is the lone glimmer of hope in the console’s twilight years, but there could be another — perhaps even before that new Zelda makes its debut next spring. If those folks are hankering for something similar, albeit with a post-apocalyptic take, maybe Darksiders: Warmastered Edition will fit the bill.

The game is a mash-up of classic Zelda tropes (specifically its puzzles, dungeon designs and boss battles), RPG elements and the God of War series’ combat. Except here, you’re playing as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, War. In 2010, Darksiders: Wrath of War was initially available on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and published by the now-defunct THQ. It spawned a sequel where you played as a different horseman, Death, before the franchise was sold off with the rest of THQ’s assets in 2013.

With little to no fanfare, last year Darksiders 2 was remastered under the awkwardly subtitled Deathinitive Edition and released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with higher-res graphics and a bunch of add-on packs. Seeing as how the original was a Wii U launch title, Nintendo’s console didn’t see that revamped version.

This chance to see where the cult-classic series started doesn’t have a release date yet, but developer Nordic Games promises native 1080p resolution, doubled texture resolution and a few other graphical tricks. Unlike the PC, PS4 and Xbox One editions, though, the Wii U’s aging hardware will only run the game at 30 FPS versus 60 FPS on Windows and Microsoft and Sony’s consoles. With the Gamescom tradeshow in Germany around the corner, expecting more details to surface about the game is a fairly safe bet.

Via: Polygon

Source: Nordic Games

Crowd Play puts the audience in control in Telltale’s ‘Batman’

There are plenty of gripes that your choices in Telltale’s point-and-click adventure games don’t make a difference in how their stories play out. But with the studio’s take on Batman, that appears to be changing. What’s more, you won’t be the only one making the often incredibly difficult narrative decisions. The studio is introducing feature called “Crowd Play,” and according to Shack News it’s something you turn on at the outset of a game. Doing so creates a shareable web link, and people with the URL can vote on different dialog options, which are then tallied live onscreen.

Before you think that you could totally screw over someone’s custom-created Dark Knight, however, know that the host might still have control. There are two types of Crowd Play. One will give the peanut gallery the final say, while the other will let the player override the voting masses. On paper, it sounds perfect for folks streaming on Twitch or YouTube. But the reality is that latency between a stream and the viewers is still too great to offer any sort of real-time response. Telltale debuted it at San Diego Comic Con over the weekend, using the crowd in attendance as fodder. Creative communications head Job Stauffer says that Crowd Play will work with anywhere from “two to 2,000-plus” people helping the host make their choices.

When we spoke with Telltale at E3 this year, marketing head Richard Iggo said that the studio has big ideas for the Caped Crusader. “Our plan and our goal, and what we are going to do is turn things completely on their head for you, as the player and also for Bruce Wayne. There’s going to be things which are very, very different to the established canon.” If you find yourself in the crowd on August 2nd, maybe shy away from making choices that’d bring a smile to the face of director Joel Schumacher. You know, the guy responsible for Batman Forever and nipples on the Batsuit.

Via: Game Informer

Source: Shack News