Inexile released a patch for Wasteland several days ago that has had the unfortunate effect for some people of breaking their saves, preventing transitions between game areas, and various system performance-related game crashes.

The first two of which are pretty irritating and game breaking but may well be solved via future patches. However, according to a developer posting on the Wasteland forum on steam, the reported issues they are now receiving are mostly (9/10) performance-related and due to 'out of memory' situations.

The developer says that there's nothing that they can do about these problems... but it does bring up a good question as to where the responsibility lies in relation to them?

If a customer buys a game which initially works on their system but then the recommended (let alone minimum specifications) end up changing due to patches should the developer in some way compensate the customer if that means that the customer can no longer play the game they paid for?

If no disclaimers were made during initial purchase, then I think the only responsibility the developers have are to allow play of the game without the requirements of the patches. All games should come with fine text disclaimers on which sections' system requirements (not recommended) may change in the future.

Yeah but...a week after initial release they increase the minimum requirements and make the game unplayable for some people who bought it day one? That is not OK, even with a "Disclaimer." It's not clear exactly what happened here, but sounds crappy if they raised the requirements.

I think that if the minimum requirements really were increased like this, then Inexile or Valve should offer refunds or some other alternative to people who had already purchased the game. What this situation says to me is that Inexile either rushed out Wasteland 2, didn't test enough, weren't accurate with the system requirements, or possibly a combination of all of all those things.

I mean really, imagine if they initially said that the game would run on Intel HD 5000 graphics, then a week after release put out a patch that bumped that up to a discrete graphics card somewhere around a GTX 560 Ti.

There's more to this story. The developer said that most of the crashes people were reporting were caused by insufficient memory on 32-bit operating systems with 4GB of RAM. 32-bit OSes cannot address more than 3GB of RAM, and 4GB of RAM is the stated minimum/recommended system requirement. The game can still run on 32-bit OSes with only 3GB of RAM, but it's a tight squeeze and requires turning down the game's graphical settings and closing any memory-intensive background applications.

I saw that Wasteland 2 updated today on steam and went to check it out, the list of improvements made me think of this thread so I figured I'd share:

http://wastelandrpg.tumblr.com/post/99930440396/wasteland-2-patch-2-58154-release-notes

Highlights

- Large amount of memory optimizations, particularly with audio, to improve performance and stability on lower-spec systems and 32-bit operating systems.

- Fixed enemy “unlimited AP” movement bug that allowed them to sometimes move much farther than intended.

- Extensive improvements and fixes to California questlines, particularly in Hollywood and Griffith Park. May require you to load an older save file before Hollywood to fully benefit.

- Added a travel speed toggle to the world map, allowing you to zip and zoom around if you so please (doesn’t affect encounters, only travel speed).

- Added a new UI when CNPCs are recruited. This lets you more easily compare their stats and choose to dismiss one when a new one offers to join.

- Custom portraits will now work correctly when Windows account username contains non-English characters.

- Added support for “Very Large” text.

- Added 50 messages to load screens containing gameplay hints and tips.

- Loading now continues when the game is tabbed out, and pauses after finishing.

- Further UI fixes and improvements, such as new and correctly used icons.

- Many localization updates and bug fixes across all languages.

The first line being the most important but some nice changes overall, more on the list at the link.

Does this change anyone's opinions on the issue at all?

Anyone running a 32-bit OS in 2014 probably shouldn't be trying to play modern video games anyway. It's been holding PC gaming back for a while now.

Dolphin, the GameCube/Wii emulator, recently dropped 32-bit support and have seen enormous improvements in recent months.

@starfoxa: fair, but the issue here is more that they were advertising support that wasn't technically very possible after a patch. Which means the system requirements changed for people buying new on steam at least. While I would like to see more games designed with our modern hardware in mind, nothing wrong with some companies trying to support older machines I guess if they are up to the challenge otherwise.

@amikron: I think you are hung up on the patch after release aspect of the story. The developers might have messed up by saying their game supported 32-bit OS's, but this is more an issue of people not understanding what the minimum and recommend requirements are of a PC release.

Minimum requirements are the absolute bare-minimum hardware specs that are needed to launch and run the program. They are NOTand have never been the minimum specs required to have the game in a playable state. PC gaming has worked this way since the early eighties and I am not saying that it is ideal, but it should be common knowledge by now, so I have zero sympathy for someone who tried to run the game on the minimum requirements; they should have known better.

You see, making a PC game is a lot more difficult than you would expect. Developers have to code for a nearly infinite number of individual variables and sometimes that means shit changes. Then there is the fact that every time you change a line of code you create a dozen new bugs, and ALL game releases are a balance between what are acceptable bugs and what are not acceptable. In this case, I can easily imagine a scenario where there was a game-breaking bug, and the only way to fix it was re-write a certain portion of the code. That code change could have the result in increasing the ram usage, so the developers would then be in a scenario where they can either fix the bug, or increase the total RAM usage by 32Mb (just guessing) which could be enough of a change to fuck things up.

@monetarydread: Oh no, I'm not hung up on it at all. I simply knew that people had varying opinions in this thread and was curious if there were any changes in this opinion in light of the new patch. I personally do understand the differences and very much understand requirements as a long time PC gamer who builds their own computers.

I think there is merit to the discussion regardless of our knowledge on the reality of supposed system requirements. Thank you for your reply.

@amikron: that definitely raises my appreciation for their ongoing post-release support, which by most accounts does seem to have significantly stabilized the game and made some positive tweaks to the experience.