Dragon Age 2 - Patch Update - Bioware Working on a Patch

blatantninja said:

I really do miss the days when most games that went to market went completely ready to play.

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I don't know.. was there ever really a time when it was like that for PC games?

Both Drakensang games were terrifyingly bug-free - in my opinion.

But on the other hand I'm also a fan of them ...

JDR13 said:

I don't know.. was there ever really a time when it was like that for PC games?

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The only game prior to about '98 that I remember ever getting a patch for was Ultima VII. U7 had some bug in it that certain Intel386 chips would lock up at a critical part of the game. I remember after talking to their support, they shipped me all new discs of the game, which really surprised me because I'd never seen that before.

Now, I'm not saying that the games were all perfect by any means, but it just seems like there were significantly less show stopping bugs, either content or technology wise, back then. The worst one I can think of to date is Civ IV. When it came out, it didn't work on almost any ATI video cards. You could see the units, but the map tiles were all black. How did that ever pass QA?

I remember a *lot* of PC games needing patches, especially crpgs. Although I didn't fully get into PC gaming until around 1995. Pick any crpg you can think of from back then, and look it up. I guarantee you nearly every one has at least 1 patch.

It seemed to me that console games were far less buggy back in those days compared to now.

JDR13 said:

I remember a *lot* of PC games needing patches, especially crpgs. Although I didn't fully get into PC gaming until around 1995. Pick any crpg you can think of from back then, and look it up. I guarantee you nearly every one has at least 1 patch.

It seemed to me that console games were far less buggy back in those days compared to now.

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Same memories here. Also before patches games still had bugs usually, they just never got patched.

Doom was the first game I remember having a bunch of patches. Even then we had to use command line FTP software to pull the patches down and check somebody's finger (think: extremely primative Facebook status) to see that there was a patch to get.

Before that, there just wasn't enough of an Internet to do it. You would have to call long distance to the company's BBS or pray a local board had the patch. There would be plenty of bugs but there wouldn't be any way to fix them. Worse yet, if somebody else found a work-around for the bug, they couldn't tell you about it. It was just you, the program, config.sys, and autorun.bat.

DoctorNarrative said:

Same memories here. Also before patches games still had bugs usually, they just never got patched.

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This. Games just didn't get patched. Obviously they were generally less complex and typically didn't have to run on thousands of different hardware configurations. When I owned a c64 it was like a console in quality but the bugs were there. The PC has always been a mess but at least we dont have to play games with memory managers anymore (unless you are using dosbox).

I tend to blame graphics drivers for a large class of bugs and hardware for a good portion of the rest (in general hardware problems has been few since XP for me). The remaining ones are the software bugs which are the least forgivable since they are presumably in the hands of the developers and could be caught.

JDR13 said:

I remember a *lot* of PC games needing patches, especially crpgs. Although I didn't fully get into PC gaming until around 1995. Pick any crpg you can think of from back then, and look it up. I guarantee you nearly every one has at least 1 patch.

It seemed to me that console games were far less buggy back in those days compared to now.

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95? Jesus you haven't been playing long at all.

I never even knew what a patch was until Privateer 2 where they sent me a floppy disk in the mail with the patch for the game. Without it the game kept crashing during the cutscenes which was the best part. The movie for that game was great, the gameplay not so much.

Before that I never needed a patch for any game that was released. There may have been a few bugs in some of the games, but nothing so dire that it couldn't be overlooked or took away from the enjoyment of the game.

DA2 hasn't that much bugs, DAO had quite more I think but also not that much if you consider its size.

I'm not sure older games was so exempt of bugs, the point is Internet plus reactive players through forums highlight bugs much better. Ha well also it's right that the ability to patch easily through Internet after release has triggered some projects management to perhaps be less picky about bugs. But I'm not sure it's right anymore because the bugs amount at release can clearly have disastrous effects on sells.

Alas I sadly think bugs or fake bugs and reactions they trigger are one of the reason why games avoided more than in past to collect tricky puzzles or tricky stuff, it's because those sort of features often trigger numerous report of bugs and irritated players, when it's more a fake bug and a player that didn't understood something.

For DA2 I noticed nothing about Merrill but also it's possible I got a problem without notice it. But tactics interface has little bugs, it's strange but DAO had the same, it's when your action is to use an object, sometimes it disappear from the tactics setup. The second is the jump to can also disappear but I suppose it's a way to warn you that you have changed the tactics list and this changed the tactic slot where your jump was going too, perhaps not a bug this one.

Also I think there's some bugs related to tactics, for me the Wait is unclear and the bug is at least that it isn't well documented about what it is supposed to do (I bet that sort of stuff isn't documented on purpose to minimize list of bugs from players!).

I still haven't understand why sometimes, a character I control doesn't do what I order him, I think it happens more with close range rogues. I noticed one case which is probably normal and not a bug but is tedious, it's about interruption, you try cast a spell, get interrupted, the spell isn't cast and is reset so you have try to cast it once more. I think the same thing can happen with movements, at least when you use key to move, not sure but almost.

blatantninja said:

It is really sickening that its basically expected that patches will be necessary now. I realize that games are infinitely more complex than they were 20, even 10 years, ago, but I really do miss the days when most games that went to market went completely ready to play.

Come on people, do some QA work!

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Games had to come ready to play. The Internet provided a tube to deliver patches. So, as an adaptation, developpers reported part of the cost of QA on the buyers.
Just a way to get the most of a situation. Early players pay for doing the QA side of looking for bugs, especially those nasty ones hard to find, this saves up money and you can deliver cheaply the corrective patches to all.

Games came with bugs as spotting all of them is so demanding. But games had to come with a higher QA than nowadays, as patches can be delivered so easily.
Betas can be released much easier than it was possible.

The best example is console games, really. Before the Xbox 360 came out there were no console patches, they did not exist. Once the 360 came out and offered that ability though BOOM, pretty much every single console game of any note gets a patch.

And some Japanese console games were quite complicated. Impossible to iron out every possible bug but they were used to release good QA games.

figment said:

Games just didn't get patched.

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OSses didn't as well. That's why the outcry of scorn happened when IBM released its "Fixpacks" for OS/2 ...

I think what I mean maybe is that the games were more refined when they shipped. They had bugs, but finding a show stopper in a released game was exceedingly rare. With the ease of distributing patches digitally though, it seems now that developers/publishers are more intent on making a deadline than putting out a polished game, figuring they can just patch it later.

Can you imagine something the ATI issue with Civ IV happening before the internet was prevalent? It would result in massive returns that cost money.

Are you joking? Game not compatible with a specific hardware was far to be rare. There's definitely some games I never succeed make works well during the first half of 90's.