Patches! Noooo!

[Big Jack McBastard]

As I'm freshly 'putered I'm on a bit of a mad grab for games that passed me by, at the moment I'm installing Neverwinter Nights 2 along with it's expansions and bejaysus is there some patching going on! I've never seen it's like in all my puff. So I got to thinking, (as I had abundant time to do so) bar MMORPGS what's the most patched game you've ever encountered, be it by the size of the updates or the sheer number of them?

Or to put it another way: What's been the most buggy, glitchy pile of shouldn't-have-been-released-until-this-kind-of-shit-was-fixed, gaming that you've come across?

Extra points for games that stopped dead in their tracks mid-way through and needed to patched so folk had any chance of finishing them.

[Steve Lampkins]

Apparently Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has stupidly large patches, thanks to them having to practically recompile the game and reinstall every time (vast simplification).

[hoverdonkey]

Football Manager from any year you care to mention doesn't count I suppose

[jutl]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_First_Encounters

[Still Not George]

Or to put it another way: What's been the most buggy, glitchy pile of shouldn't-have-been-released-until-this-kind-of-shit-was-fixed, gaming that you've come across?

Temple of Elemental Evil, which was not only bugged to death, Troika died shortly after its release so it never got any official fixes and the fans had to fix it themselves.

[Consignia]

It wasn't noticeably buggy, but Little Big Planet was patch hell seemingly every fucking time I turned on at least 3 new patches were dictated. With the PSN distribution system not really up to the job, I just had to give up which was a real shame because I really enjoyed playing the user created levels.

[jutl]

It wasn't noticeably buggy, but Little Big Planet was patch hell seemingly every fucking time I turned on at least 3 new patches were dictated. With the PSN distribution system not really up to the job, I just had to give up which was a real shame because I really enjoyed playing the user created levels.

The LBP patches were kind of necessary because they added the DLC stickers and costumes so that you could see it on other players and in levels that others had created. The difference between Xbox Live and PSN for patching is - apparently - that Microsoft have a patent on distributing patches as deltas on home consoles, unbelievable as that may seem. 

[Zetetic]

The difference between Xbox Live and PSN for patching is - apparently - that Microsoft have a patent on distributing patches as deltas on home consoles, unbelievable as that may seem.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the fact that prior to 3.40, PS3s were unable to update their firmware using delta patches?

Any mention of patches usually deserves mention of Boiling Point:

- fixed: the snake wasn't able to bite you while you were crawling;
- fixed: size of the moon;
- fixed: posters in bar vanish as you turn away from them;
- fixed: dog does not cast shadows;
- fixed: a metal clanking sound plays, if the user's character stabs the curtains;
- fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level;
- fixed: npc die on contact with grenades, and not from the actual explosion;

Enjoyable enough, and impressive in its own way, game, but something of a mess. I've tried Xenus: White Gold, and it's much the same in those respects, if a little less flakey.

[Consignia]

The LBP patches were kind of necessary because they added the DLC stickers and costumes so that you could see it on other players and in levels that others had created. The difference between Xbox Live and PSN for patching is - apparently - that Microsoft have a patent on distributing patches as deltas on home consoles, unbelievable as that may seem.

I take your point about LBP, but the patches were irritatingly frequent that sapped all my fun out of it.

[jutl]

Are you sure you're not thinking of the fact that prior to 3.40, PS3s were unable to update their firmware using delta patches?

No, I'm pretty sure it is for all PSN content. For example the Move 'updates' to already released titles were just the entire multi-GB Move versions packaged for download.

edit to add: there's discussion of the issue here although no conclusion as to why Sony don't use deltas.

[jutl]

I take your point about LBP, but the patches were irritatingly frequent that sapped all my fun out of it.

They were annoying - but the alternative would be preventing people from accessing user levels that contained DLC they hadn't purchased, which is arguably far cuntier.

[Zetetic]

Edit: Ignore me, I'm speaking balls.

[MojoJojo]

The LBP patches were kind of necessary because they added the DLC stickers and costumes so that you could see it on other players and in levels that others had created. The difference between Xbox Live and PSN for patching is - apparently - that Microsoft have a patent on distributing patches as deltas on home consoles, unbelievable as that may seem.

Hmmm... a patent on using diffs for patching seems a bit unlikely (rsync is 14 years old!) - although patent law is a bit crazy.
It's possible the issue is the amount of encryption Sony use-  googling around quickly it seems that encryption is optional for 360 xex files [nb] They still have to be signed [/nb], but the posts I found seem to imply it's necessary for Sony executables.
Using diffs on encypted files won't work (the whole file will be different from one small change).

I suppose it's also possible MS have some patent on diff'ing/patching encrypted files, although I have difficulty imagining how such a thing would work.

[Zetetic]

That was my inclination, but I ended up concluding the vast majority of XEX are encrypted, but without a firm answer. SNG might know more. I suppose one approach might be that the Xbox 360 allows patching of executables following decryption (so long as the patch is signed etc.), which would allow for meaningful delta patches. I can just about imagine that being a sufficiently convoluted chain to allow for patenting in the US.

[Mister Six]

Temple of Elemental Evil, which was not only bugged to death, Troika died shortly after its release so it never got any official fixes and the fans had to fix it themselves.

Likewise Vampire: Bloodlines, although the fan-patched version is absolutely fucking glorious so we win in the end.

The worst game I ever played pre-patch was Fallout 2, which starts out strongly but collapses a little way in due to all the conflicting missions, etc. Unsurprisingly the most buggy game I've played recently has been Fallout: New Vegas, created by many of the same people.

[jutl]

Hmmm... a patent on using diffs for patching seems a bit unlikely (rsync is 14 years old!) - although patent law is a bit crazy.
It's possible the issue is the amount of encryption Sony use-  googling around quickly it seems that encryption is optional for 360 xex files [nb] They still have to be signed [/nb], but the posts I found seem to imply it's necessary for Sony executables.
Using diffs on encypted files won't work (the whole file will be different from one small change).

I suppose it's also possible MS have some patent on diff'ing/patching encrypted files, although I have difficulty imagining how such a thing would work.

It's possible that the patent is in respect of the use of the technology in an orchestrated manner with home consoles as clients. Still, I can't find any direct reference to which patent this is, so it may just be a delusion among Beyond3D posters. It is a pretty well informed forum, though, with a larger than normal contingent of actual console developers.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Fifa 11 has quite a lot of bugs, including it crashing after season games, two Birmingham City teams showing up in the league and weather not being how it should be. EA (who are notoriously slow and useless with patches) released an official patch which not only didn't fix any of these problems, actually added more bugs. Luckily some clever souls made their own patches which fix all these problems and make the game run awesomely.

[Whug Baspin]

I seem to remember a game called Alice's Adventures in Videoland for the C64 which barely made it past the first screen before crashing.

[Phil_A]

In Cold Blood on the PS1 must've been the most shockingly bug-filled game released for the system. The worst glitch was that sometimes when you moved from one screen to another, the display would switch to show the screen before the one you'd just left. And this was supposed to be a game where you sneaked around a base avoiding guards, MGS style. Needless to say it was quite difficult to do this when you couldn't fucking see where you were! How this got past any kind of quality control is a mystery.

But worst of all was the Windows port of Space Quest IV. Broken beyond belief. To start off with, it forced you to manually switch to 640x480 256 colours before you could play, but that was the least of it's problems. Regardless of your intervention, Roger would frequently ignore your commands wander off on his own unstoppable journey, which, as this was a Sierra game, usually meant to his certain death. They didn't even fix the speed to compensate for faster processors, so the game was unplayable beyond the point where you had to sneak onto a spaceship before some evil dudes appeared and zapped you, because the evil dudes would just appear the moment you walked on screen, and kill you.

[Geraint]

Temple of Elemental Evil, which was not only bugged to death, Troika died shortly after its release so it never got any official fixes and the fans had to fix it themselves.

was this the one that, unpatched, had a bug where uninstalling the game formatted your hard-drive? because that's definitely the winner

[Big Jack McBastard]

Ooh now I'm intrigued, that sounds like a wonderful little 'feature'.

[madhair60]

was this the one that, unpatched, had a bug where uninstalling the game formatted your hard-drive? because that's definitely the winner

Wasn't that Myth or its sequel?

[Geraint]

Ooh now I'm intrigued, that sounds like a wonderful little 'feature'.

i'm sure there used to be a bit about it on wikipedia but googling around...

There are games out there with literally hundreds of bugs. Temple of Elemental Evil: the game has had three official patches and the bug count is still over one hundred. One of the nastiest bugs in that game was when you try to uninstall the game, it will actually format your hard drive. That bug was fixed in the first patch, but it was nasty surprise for people that uninstalled the game before patching....

more recently there was a patch for EVE Online (so compulsory to play, as it's an MMORPG), that made Windows XP unbootable if you had more than one hard drive.