Gaming patches are taking the piss

[Down by Law]

Right, I've just put DOOM in my PS4 as i fancied a quick 30 minutes of splattercore fun, on a new PS4 console that replaced my launch machine. The game starts and as soon as it begins the screen tears all over the place. I remember buying this game day one and there was a small patch that fixed the screen tearing right away.

 

Roll forward to now, the latest patch is TWENTY ONE GIGS. I don't care about the multiplayer, I only want the single player screen tearing to be fixed. I'll have to leave the PS4 on rest mode all night to download that, which is a chronic waste of time, money , energy and bandwidth, to download 18 odd gigs of files I don't give a toss about, I just want the screen tearing gone.

 

So now I have 2 problems : I can just not bother to play the game again, or I can download this enormous fucking patch, which will then hold 70 gigs of my hard drive to ransom if I ever want to play it without screen tearing. This is a major bother. To be honest, as much as I love the game, I'll probably sell it because of this.

 

Driveclub is another bad example. I gave this to my stepfather for his birthday a month ago and I said 'wait till you see the thunderstorms in this, it's proper mind blowing stuff' except again, the latest patch is about 17 gigs, he's capped on 10 gig a month as he only usually goes on Facebook etc, so he'll never get to see those effects unless he changes his broadband package.

 

And the idea of having to change a broadband package to see a feature in a game you've already paid for is to me, completely bonkers.

 

The Driveclub one is a bit niche, but the DOOM one is a real piss taker as it's impossible to enjoy the game with the screen tearing. Surely there needs to be some kind of implementation to hotfix stuff like that on consoles.

 

end rant

[Nespresso]

What a coincidence. Jim just dropped this video.

 

 

Tecmo Koei's solution is... creative I guess?

 

[Bacon Horsemeat]

I think in the previous gen MS mandated small, sub 10MB? patches, ensuring that any patch would be quick and seamless. Which I remember it was. Not sure what the case is now with the Xbone.

[gooner4life]

16 minutes ago, Bacon Horsemeat said:

I think in the previous gen MS mandated small, sub 10MB? patches, ensuring that any patch would be quick and seamless. Which I remember it was. Not sure what the case is now with the Xbone.

 

Unlimited the same as on PS4.

 

i tell you what else takes the piss, I had 25gb of space on my PS4 earlier and couldn't download a 1.8gb patch for black ops 3 until I removed a couple of things to free up almost another 10gb.

 

and game saves, why are they so fucking huge now? Nearly 10gb's of my space is used on game saves.

[Spacehost]

I do wonder if you could have a patch history option or whether that might just be a massive pain in the ass for users for a very small and specific use case.

[NEG]

It's nice that, outside of the nightmares at launch back in 2012 system update and transfer-wise, none of this happens on Wii U. The most I've had to wait on an update is 20 minutes at best, usually more like 2-3mins.

 

Then again, I stick to disc titles, where the games are, gasp, actually on the disc. I'm well aware downloading Metroid PrimeTrilogy takes a while. At least that's expected as a download title.

[pastry]

I'm in a new house and our much-loved telecom giant (Telstra – like BT, only even more shite/slow) can't seem to install a copper phone line. Been waiting since February. So, I'm stuck on a 4G dongle giving me 50Gb for $150 a month – about 100 quid! It's $10 for every extra 1Gb.. To compound the problem, I work from home too as a digital designer/dev, so I really have to watch it.

 

Suffice to say I can't afford to download patches like that either. I did once and it cost me an extra $60 in top ups that month.

 

I 100% agree you should be able to choose which patches to download and apply, and can't really believe this isn't already implemented. Seems lazy.

[Salsa Party Animal]

Time for Clamp down on these patches and stick to say 500mb instead of reinstalling whole game. 

 

[Vin]

Brought out the old 360 on the weekend for a bit of Gears 3 horde, required patch was 4mb. Felt good man. Later switched to the PS4 for some Until Dawn, required patch was 11gb. Felt real bad man. 

[HarryBizzle]

5 hours ago, gooner4life said:

 

Unlimited the same as on PS4.

 

i tell you what else takes the piss, I had 25gb of space on my PS4 earlier and couldn't download a 1.8gb patch for black ops 3 until I removed a couple of things to free up almost another 10gb.

 

and game saves, why are they so fucking huge now? Nearly 10gb's of my space is used on game saves.

 

Driveclub saves take the mick. They're enormous and broke my cloud save thing before the space was increased.

[Gotters]

Its not just the games - if you don't play regularly the damn console needs to be updated before you can get to the bit where you need to update the game

[Opinionated Ham Scarecrow]

I've had the urge to have a blast of both Destiny and The Division recently, but the respective 30 and 45 gb patches soon killed off that idea. It's got particularly mental the last few years, though I do remember Witcher 2 having an 18gb patch back in 2011.

 

That gets a pass tho cos Witcher

[Goose]

My wife bought a copy of Elder Scrolls Online on Sunday (Xbox One version). This isn't the newer version of the game, it's the first version released. 

 

Put the disc in - update - 37GB!

[Mr. Gerbik]

13 minutes ago, Gizamaluke said:

I've had the urge to have a blast of both Destiny and The Division recently, but the respective 30 and 45 gb patches soon killed off that idea. It's got particularly mental the last few years, though I do remember Witcher 2 having an 18gb patch back in 2011.

 

That gets a pass tho cos Witcher

It also gets a pass because it transformed the game into a drastically improved and transformed director's cut/game of the year version with lots of new content free for everyone. Instead of being yer average "we need 20GB to fix our broken game"-type patch. But yeah, mostly because Witcher

[Lothar Hex]

It wouldn't be so bad if, like mentioned in that Jim Sterling video, the Xbox and PS networks were able to allow patches to be downloaded at a decent rate but due to how they're built they only allow slow as fuck download times.

 

I think the piss take came to a head when Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 came out, and the game was 5 gigs by itself, while the "day one" patch was 8 GIGS!

 

Essentially you were downloading the rest of the game!

[Mr. Gerbik]

11 minutes ago, Goose said:

My wife bought a copy of Elder Scrolls Online on Sunday (Xbox One version). This isn't the newer version of the game, it's the first version released. 

 

Put the disc in - update - 37GB!

Well, to be fair - you get into an MMO you really shouldn't expect otherwise. For other genres the complaints are justified, but I'd think the constant content updating/adding/rebalancing is inherent to a MMO.

[HarryBizzle]

18 minutes ago, Lothar Hex said:

It wouldn't be so bad if, like mentioned in that Jim Sterling video, the Xbox and PS networks were able to allow patches to be downloaded at a decent rate but due to how they're built they only allow slow as fuck download times.

 

I think the piss take came to a head when Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 came out, and the game was 5 gigs by itself, while the "day one" patch was 8 GIGS!

 

Essentially you were downloading the rest of the game!

 

On both consoles I've only ever managed to max out my connection over a wired connection. Xbox wifi is far superior to PS4, though. 

[DeciderVT]

31 minutes ago, Gotters said:

Its not just the games - if you don't play regularly the damn console needs to be updated before you can get to the bit where you need to update the game

The other day I turned on my PS4 to play the RE7 demo again and needed to update the firmware, so I waited for that. Then the demo needed an update, so I waited for that too. It looked like it was going to take a while, so I put the PS4 into rest mode. When the PS4 was shutting down, I saw another system update message. I thought that two successive system updates was taking the piss but on looking closer, saw that the PS4 was now off and that it was my Sony-branded smart TV that needed an update now as well. (I have no idea what this update added, other than my TV now displaying "VR Tuner" as the source when PSVR is plugged in.)

 

By this point I'd abandoned the idea of playing the PS4 and went to play the Vita in bed instead, which also needed a firmware update so I could sync my Rogue Legacy cross-save data. Absolutely farcical. Then I'd forgotten what my recently-changed PSN password was and ended up reading a book instead.

[Droo]

Look what we have guys, VR, games and console UI which can be refreshed in an hour or two...

 

 

 

 

[Vorgot]

This has annoyed me since the release of the PS3 and 360. Even when they added the ability to patch games on the original xbox people were delusional that devs wouldn't use the possibility to release buggy games with the knowledge that they could fix them later. And here we now are in a world where day 1 patches are increasingly commonplace, and it's bloody annoying. I remember having to replace some Dreamcast games because they were bugged, but I bet Devs spent a lot more time on QA then than they do now.

 

I know games are more complex these days, stuff like Skyrim etc was bound to have some issues, but it has made devs very lax on testing, even small PSN titles almost always have patches. When I get a new game now I expect it to be patched, that's not the way things should be. 

[PaB]

It doesn't really bother me. I think you have to have an unlimited fast connection these days, and if you don't have that then you are going to be compromised in some form or other. I think the benefits of post release patches outweigh the drawbacks.

[Camel]

It's a good job unlimited fast connections are available to everyone.

[macosx]

Seems now if you don't play a game for a weeks you get hit with massive updates. As @jonamok said in another thread, I'm a bit loathe to install anything on my PS4 with the Pro coming along and all the data transfers again.

[Mallet]

What about people playing these games in 10 years time, will the servers hosting the patches still be up?

[Vorgot]

I agree that the benefits are great, but devs are abusing the system by relying on patches to hit release dates. I have a number of friends who have consoles and no internet connection, or a capped one, and the beauty of being a console owner has been completely removed by them no longer being "insert game, play now" devices. 

[nakamura]

Why have the patch sizes increased so much? Do they not bother to keep them small given the HD space or are the assets often that much bigger? 

[PaB]

10 minutes ago, Camel said:

It's a good job unlimited fast connections are available to everyone.

If I didn't have a fast unlimited connection it would bother me more. But since I do, it doesn't.

[Mr Cochese]

Surely there's no way a patch can be gigabytes in size without it containing significant amounts of non-code assets? Code is pretty tiny in the grand scheme of things. Why are they having to update the assets so much?

[Lorfarius]

5 hours ago, NEG said:

It's nice that, outside of the nightmares at launch back in 2012 system update and transfer-wise, none of this happens on Wii U. The most I've had to wait on an update is 20 minutes at best, usually more like 2-3mins.

 

Then again, I stick to disc titles, where the games are, gasp, actually on the disc. I'm well aware downloading Metroid PrimeTrilogy takes a while. At least that's expected as a download title.

 

That's because none of the Wii U games are any of the big open sandbox style types that struggle with the download problem, 3rd parties just don't release huge games on it. Having said that in the early days of the system didn't WatchDogs struggle?

[Harsin]

I wish I could go back in time Kyle Reese style to warn of the dark future in store when patches first started becoming a thing on console and people were going 'Don't worry, they'll only ever be small and for essential things, it'll never end up like on PC'.