The Most Frequently Patched Games @ PC Games Hardware

magerette

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PC Games Hardware has a short op-ed on some of the most patched games around (it's the slideshow at the bottom of the page) including Fallout 3 with a modest 6 patches, The Witcher(7), Gothic 3(14) and Vampire the Masquerade:Bloodlines(31). Obviously some of these are content patches or the like, and don't always mean the game is bad as they point out:
Patches are both a blessing and a curse for games. What has been daily routine for PC gamers for years, is now even affecting the consoles. But a game that is often patched isn't necessarily bad. Quite the contrary is the case: Many developers offer new content or features with the patches. An example is Company of Heroes that received a DirectX 10 mode via patch. In C&C Red Alert 3 the multiplayer balancing has been tuned with more than ten patches and the game was upgraded with new maps. So patches don't necessarily are bad news.[sic] But of course there are also negative examples, like the unfortunate Gothic 3, which actually had been a good game but the flood of bugs in the release version made it almost unplayable. Furthermore there are games that are patched even before they hit the markets - such updates are called Day Zero Patches.
More information.
 
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And they don't mention anything about NWN's 60 or so?
 
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There are patches for different reasons. NWN is a "living game", in which patches often add new features, especially for the modding tools.

I see many patches as a good thing. It means that the developers care about their product. It doesn't necessary mean the game was broken on release, and all games of some size have bugs, even the unpatched ones. In fact, console games are nowadays patched frequently as well. RE5 was patched with an online-mode while I was playing it and Little Big Planet gets new patches almost every week.
 
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There are patches for different reasons. NWN is a "living game", in which patches often add new features, especially for the modding tools.
Same with many other games that they do bother to talk about.
 
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Yeah, it was an odd selection of games--I was surprised to see Dominions 3 in there--almost all the patching done for that game was content as well. It's possible they just aren't into NWN--most of the games were pretty recent.
 
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The patches for NWN usually have bug fixes in them also and are not just content patches. They also missed several others including Sacred which has had a very large amount of patches in it's life time.

PS. The patches for "The Witcher" were pretty much exclusively content patches and the speed up of load times and restoration of dialog wern't really bug fixes since the game was fine by default so that would be considered just an improvement on the original game.
 
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Fallout 3 with a modest 6 patches

This article would've been much stronger with a bit of fact-checking and a model to exclude content patches. Fallout 3's is a good example; patch notes indicate 3 patches were fix patches, the others are updates to add achievements for the DLCs.

So yeah, as the others remarked, nice idea for an article, but could've used a bit more work.
 
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I think that a person who wrote this article didn't even bother checking what games are mostly patched but just selected random games and put them in article.
 
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