When a Patch is Just Too Late to Save a Game

[D_Money]

We ask for a lot and the companies try to deliver a lot. So it goes both ways. The problem I do have is when a company over commits themselves knowing its limitations (resources/project funding).

[fistofrage]

Pretty pointless buying a game at release right now. Especially an EA sports game. I mean how many wasted hours did we have trying to make the abysmal AI playable when the sliders didn't work.

[shigogouhou]

Sports games especially get murdered by the patch system. For example, I passed on NCAA 09 this year after NCAA 08 had bugs galore (my first and only midnight release purchase, no less, what a great way to start that tradition right?), figuring I'd pick it up after it was patched.
As of right now, I can get NCAA 09 used on Amazon for $35; I save $25 and EA gets $0 from me (well, technically half of what the original owner paid for it), all because of the patch system. That price is only going to go down after the holidays, up until it's practically free once NCAA 2010 is released in July.

[Jeru3131]

So true. I had the same issue with Ncaa. By the time the patch came out my copy was back at Eb as a trade in for madden, which soon after was used as a trade in for nba 2k.

[bigwill33]

Some great comments gents. I feel many of your pains and agree with a good bit of what you guys are saying too.

However, I am from the mindset that patches are good, but there is a long way to go in perfecting on what they can do and how and when they can be released.

After being around the industry for nearly the past decade I believe strongly that gaming companies don't try to release broken products. But yes they are on a tight time line and that has to be met above all else. My main reason for stating this is because I know how many games were just broken before consoles were able to have patches at all. And I know if given the chance the developers would have fixed those problems any way possible and in fact usually have it fixed as point 1A for the next release.

I am sure if you think back you can recall an NCAA, Madden, Live, or NHL from EA that was just junk and unplayable in the past, well before patches existed. So to me that goes along way in ruling out the argument that patches are crutches.

Still with that being said and in relation to the article I would hope that future games bring a better and more efficient time table for patch release. With a strong agreement that games can be fixed and tuned well into the next games development cycle. Even if it means adding more people to work on the process, though I doubt that ever happens.

[Tycobbler]

If you don't know by now perhaps you never will. Dev's hype the game, people feed into it, and are let down by their own high expectations. It's further felt when you're made to wait an additional set period for the update/patch when you allready want what you want when you want it. Future practice for the masses- Day 1 game release. Read reviews, laugh at the early birds, learn from their mistakes. Days 2-whenever patch/update. When that day comes further peruse the forums, weigh the pro's and con's and then and only then make your final decision on what to do.
A patch is never to late, it's your patience that simply cannot wait.

[OMT]

Couple things...

1) We don't rush the game because we know we can patch. We have and use the same amount of time to make the game as we have since we first made it. It is a one year game, so we are very strict with our scope to make sure it is done on time.

The first patch is free. After that they cost a lot of money and are only released when necessary. We hope that there are no big issues that need to be fixed in the patch, and since we get a free one we look at releasing one every year and try to add something additional to the game. However, we are pretty restricted on what we CAN include in a patch.

2) Beta testing... not sure how you can do this with a console game. Our disc builds can only be played on special consoles or devkits. For a disc to run on the retail kit, it needs to be encoded by the manufacturer (MS or Sony in the case of NCAA).

Are there any console games out there that have a public beta?

[rhombic21]

Halo 3 did some sort of public beta for the online portion of the game. Seems like you could figure out some type of limited beta system that maybe only used two teams and one stadium, but would at least allow people to play around with the general gameplay.

My thoughts on your patch system are that you guys simply are inefficient with what you do. You release minimalist patches, when you really could quite easily do a lot more.

I'm coming from online play, but this year the following things were not addressed in the patch, and there's really no reason for them not to be. I'm not talking about adding new graphic displays or anything super complex like that. I'm talking about tweaks to the gameplay engine:

- DL get pushed to ground way too often. I'm not saying they need to "win" more often, but a huge part of the problem with your pass rush is that 2 or 3 guys get knocked to the ground, so then when somebody does beat their guy, extra blockers come over and pick him up. Surely there's a way that you guys can tweak this so that the animations that are resulting in DL ending up on the ground play out less often.

- Man to man coverage is useless. It's simply terrible. Surely there is some way that you guys could have relatively easily tweaked man coverage to not be so horrible.

- Field Goals can be kicked from way too far out. I can easily make 55 yard kicks with average kickers. Seriously, this can't be hard to tweak.

- QBs are ridiculously accurate, even on the run and way behind the LOS. There are a whole host of ways that you could easily address this, many of which have been implemented on Madden.

- Playbooks are simply incomplete. I talked with Anthony White at community day, and I understand that he has a lot on his plate pre-release with Madden coming out a month later, but there's really no reason at all that you guys could follow up with some type of downloadable content later in the year that had updated playbooks. Hell, even if you just take plays and formations that are used in Madden, it would expand the NCAA playbooks a ton.

Your standard appears to be "only fix in a patch if it's absolutely necessary, fix all other things the next year." You need to abandon that approach. Your standard ought to be "if we can reasonably fix this with a patch, then we ought to do so." Patch it in when the problem is identified, and then fix it permanently for the next year.

And look, you guys sat on feedback for a month and a half and did nothing with it, which is why your gameplay patch took over a month after release to hit. I'm not saying that you had to finalize it based on the feedback that you had, but many of the problems that we pointed out were things that everybody (even the developers who we were talking to) agreed was a problem. So there's no reason that somebody shouldn't have been working on getting all of those things patched during the lag between when the disc goes gold and when it ships. That way, you have a starting place to address more than just the most glaring problems when you start receiving feedback from the community.