Normally Friday would be patch day, but this is not patch day and so there are no patch notes. In the belief that getting to know the minds of developers can shed light on their work, herein lies a short discussion of games-patching and how we feel as players when considering patcher programs.
Yes, they serve a purpose. Unfortunately, most PC games are released in a beta state, so they need to get patched. Selling a half-finished game isn’t part of this discussion, but maybe later.
I am not sure if any of you are like me, but I have ended up with a lot of patching programs over the years. Every time I start Windows, the system chugs as every one of them tries to connect to the update server; Adobe wants to check for new updates to Flash and Acrobat, Java needs to check for an update, Quicktime is terrified it might be out of date, Google wants to check its suite of tools (half of which are not installed) are up to date, Windows itself often wants to connect, my anti-virus program starts downloading new definitions, my firewall checks for new versions of itself…
Half of these things are not even running, just updating themselves (whether you want them to or not) on the off-chance that you will use them this time. Even if you remove them from start-up, they re-load themselves the next time to open a file they are configured to handle. Gamers end up with Punkbuster running at this point, together with the anti-cheat app that came with the Korean MMO you are trying out this week and at least one heavily-obfuscated DRM ‘helper’ that is making sure Nero and Daemon Tools aren’t running.
Next come the programs that you know you really don’t need to constantly update and which ask you for permission before adding themselves to the boot-up sequence, but you tell them to run at start-up anyway. Steam is the obvious one, but there’s also Desura, EA’s ‘Origin’ alternative to Steam, the Turbine updater for any Lord of the Rings Online or D&D Online players and dozens of similar apps. You also end up running Xfire, Raptr, maybe even an IM client or two (Trillian if you use too many and want to keep them together) which load at start-up.
Here’s the point where we enter as a videogame developer. You just waited five minutes for Windows to load and unfortunately, you are running an older version of our game. What is the least-intrusive way of making sure you have the right version?
Right now, adding a new updater to the start-up sequence doesn’t make sense. Steam, Desura and IndieCity (we like IndieCity) will all update the game by default, while Linux repositories (oh, for a Windows equivalent) can keep that format up to date. Bioware and Blizzard’s games just check for updates when you start the game, so that provides a fall-back for those who bought direct or even on a physical medium. We’ll need to talk to the techy people, but the patch files should not be as epic as anything from WoW, so putting the updater in the launcher app should be more of a speed-bump than a road-block when you go to start playing.
Essentially, half the gamers will see their chosen service updating the game silently. Those who don’t will get asked to update if there is a new version, but I can’t imagine penalising anyone for not updating. The only other time an update could be triggered is when trying to join a server with a higher version number, but anyone playing over the ‘net should have an internet connection ready to update the game and those on a LAN can just copy the files across.
Of course, all this could change if the techies tell me I am running my mouth off without getting their input, but there’s my vision, for what it’s worth.
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