The UPDATE for Dead Rising 3 has just been released. It is 13GB, or more than half of the damn size of the entire game.

Had to buy the retail title because the download would be insane? Have a slow connection? Bandwidth cap that requires you to pay more or have your speed throttled once you've used too much data? Not want to devote a space on your hard drive to half the size of an entire game for an UPDATE? Microsoft and Capcom don't really seem to care.

I just really hope I don't see Sony pull this crap. At this point, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I'm hoping it doesn't happen.

There are REASONS people said that they weren't ready for always online. MS and Sony would both be wise to remember that.

And isn't Dead Rising 3 a co-op game? If one friend can easily download the update, won't that break compatibility between the two versions? At that point, you don't even have the option of declining the update without no longer being able to play co-op with your friend.

Mod Edit: Changed title and moved to Dead Rising 3 forum.

Other option is just to not patch the game at all.

You seriously can't expect games to be getting bigger but for patches to stay the same size. While in this case 13GB does seem like a lot I'm not sure what the patch contains. If it's additional assets/videos etc. then the size makes total sense.

Just seems to me like you're hating on the Xbox one for no reason, Sounds like you want companies to stop upgrading things and advancing things just so the small minority don't get upset.

It seems a bit misdirected to single out just Microsoft and the Xbox One about this.

PC and PS4 games have been impacted by this just as much, and even the 360 and PS3 both came to increasingly rely on sizeable patches over time. In the case of the later, the PS3 was actually a bigger offender because devs/pubs could assume there was a sizeable hard drive (Gran Turismo 5/6 being the most notorious offender).

Not really. I've even said that I'm hoping that Sony doesn't do the same, which would lead to me "hating on" both of them for this. And I didn't excuse Capcom for their part in this either.

One theory is that the update contains new DLC that will be a required download, and then sold as a simple unlock. If that's actually the case--and the download doesn't include a bunch of new free content for all players--then I don't really think I need to explain the reason why forcing people with bandwidth caps to download half the game's size in DLC content that they're not even interested in buying isn't a cool thing to do.

I've seen somewhat larger next-gen updates already, which is to be expected, but 13GB is excessively excessive.

Never owned a PS3 until recently, and I haven't updated many games. I did notice that Dragon's Dogma is a 12GB download on that console, but at least that's an entire game. I'm not even remotely upset or surprised over the size of the full Dead Rising 3 game, because of course games are going to be that size with the new generation of consoles. But an update that is over half the size of the full game is just ridiculous.

And I haven't noticed it on the PS4 yet, but I'd be happy to hear about specific examples. What's the largest required update size--just game patches, not including DLC--that you've seen on the PS4? I played on an Xbox 360 for all of the last console generation, and I certainly don't remember seeing any mandatory game updates that were half the size of the full retail download.

Maybe the DLC content can be accessed if you join a friend's co-op game with the DLC? Then you'd need to have it.

Patches half the size of the game is nothing new. When PC games came on disc it wasn't entirely unheard of to have several hundred MB patches. Hell, some games require you to download the entire game again for patches.

This "issue" has nothing to do with microsoft or sony. If Capcom need to release a 13GB patch to update their game then so be it, the other option is to not update the game at all which will be "punishing" far more people than just those who can't download the patch.

So did anyone figure out yet what the 13GB patch is all about? There is no way it is just fixes. Maybe 1080P support? DLC would be a bit too much as well in my opinion.

Next gen y'all.

I'm afraid you're complaining about something that is steadily becoming the norm for all platforms.

IF you have bandwidth caps and all that jazz, yah I can sympathize, this situation sucks for you. Unfortunately it is something that will keep going forward until disc's completely disappear, and as seen by how both consoles turned out this generation both manufacturers are steadily pushing towards this vision of an all-cloud future. Sony might be all hot on disc's now, if only to stick it to Microsoft, but the fact that they didn't integrate hardware backwards comparability, and are instead promoting their new Online service to purchase your old games yet again in order to play them on their new system shows that they too are moving towards cloud gaming.

Look at eBooks. It is the biggest scam of the ages in that eBooks are about a tenth the cost to distribute for publishers, yet prices haven't changed all THAT much. I'm sure Sony and Microsoft can't wait to finally stop stamping discs, making boxes and distributing to retailers where they're forced to share profits when they could be simply hosting these games on their own servers and taking in 100% of the profit - and I'm sure game prices won't see a significant price drop because of it. Steam does sales, but Sony and Microsoft sure ain't Steam.

I would buy a lot less games if I couldn't own the actual case and disc and I'm sure I'm not the only one. We're so far from seeing that happen it's hilarious people still talk about it in my opinion.

@xalienxgreyx: It already happened on the PC and it will most likely happen this generation on consoles. Not 100% but much much more digital than now.

A ton of people buy Steam games and don't bat an eyelash at not having boxes if not for the ease of purchase then for the fact that in this very online-centric world we live in, Steam enables people to display their gaming collection for everyone to see, unlike that bookcase at home with stacks of boxes that no one will ever see.

For as many people like yourself who don't want to let go of those game boxes, there are others who have and don't really regret it. A couple of years ago, like literally over 6, I would be there with you about the boxes. As it is now, we don't get cool game manuals or other goodies that a long time ago was the norm.

question, do you know what the patch notes are of the update?

You know, steam isn't that great with updates. I came to my sister's house, opened up my laptop to check steam christmas sales and then her stereo started skipping it's music. Turns out Dota2 needed a 250 mb update it was just messing up my sister's streaming music. Had to pause it and reorganize what is priority on updates, but like it immediately just updated it when I opened the laptop.

From reddit I saw that someone's game size increased by 1.5GB after the patch - that means that the remaining 11.5GB is patching already existing data.

Data of that size must either be:

a) Movies - why anyone would patch that unless there is a legal reason is beyond me.

b) Models and textures. This might be an optimisation and perhaps there'll be frame-rate fixes etc.

To be honest, all this is fine, we have to remember that this is a launch window game and that things were going to go wrong. We are early adopters at this point - and yeah, I hope that this isn't going to become the norm.

fomgaf

It's all relative. The maximum size of games on the new generation of consoles is way bigger than the PS3/360 so it makes sense that the patches will be bigger as well.

It sucks if you have bandwith caps or a slow connection but I guess that's the price you pay for new hardware?

@bigjeffrey: Thanks

Sounds ok to me. The biggest gripe I had here is that the One does delete shit automatically so I imagine, if you have not played Dead Rising for a long time and it now suddenly was deleted. Then you have to download all this stuff again which would kind of suck, since you can not decide what to delete and what not.

Hooray for the terrible future of videogames.

I'm only speculating, but just because the patch is that large, it doesn't have to mean it carries changes to large files like video or textures, does it?

I'm no games programsman, but couldn't it be the case that the way they structured the file system for their game results in large single data files that actually contain lots and lots of smaller elements, so that even if you only actually change a few bytes, for example, a value in a text file or some lines of code, you'd still have to replace the whole thing? (5 commas in that sentence. Seems ugly...) I feel like I've certainly seen games on Steam that I suspect operated in such a way, downloading several gigabytes for balance updates that should be very small. It could be the case that most of that 13gb is data that you already have.

As I said though, pure speculation.

Maybe the patch is in response to The Caravella® Method™ for rapid levelling.

It sounds to me like, because the game is co-op, they are releasing this patch so that when you play with others you are able to see their downloaded content without having bought it yourself. In the end this could either mean that they're releasing a pretty sizable add-on for the game in the future, or they're going to release a shit ton of separate dumb little DLC items.

So they are patching 13gb of content into everyone's game that if you want to access you'll have to pay in the future?

gaming has become truly offensive.

I mean, if what they have for you is 13gb (which, agreed, is a bigass patch), what do you want 'em to do exactly? Not patch the game? Patch it a little at a time so people don't go over their bandwidth cap?

As I understand it, the game's not broken, nobody is forcing you to patch the game and you got to buy it on a disk, so what more do you want?

Has that ever been done? I can't think of any examples.

Mortal Kombat 9 required people to download "compatibility packs" to play with users that owned DLC characters.

@erhard Did Burnout Paradise do that with the "Big Surf Island" DLC? I have a hazy memory that all the "big surf island" data is downloaded in a free update whether you buy the DLC or not, but I'm not sure why I think that...

PC gaming and its audience didn't exactly congregate towards a purely digital ecosystem overnight nor did they really like it at first. The process took years to settle. Console gaming will probably take far longer considering the limitations with both the market and hardware.

There was a whole DLC fiasco with Mortal Kombat where people were unable to play with each other because you didn't have DLC characters and they did.

Yeah, that's how all of the Burnout Paradise DLC worked. They were all free downloads (required for online play) w/ unlock keys available for purchase to allow you to actually use the content.

I generally liked the way they handled the DLC, but it was a bit inefficient. Every new update would include all of the data from the previous update, in essence meaning you had to redownload all of the previous DLC content every time a new update was released.

@chaser324: I have never seen a 13 GB patch in my life and with people reporting a 40 minutes install for dead rising 3...

I don't see an issue here.

I've been downloading huge games and massive patches for years with a 300kbs connection on steam.

The dichotomy of these two statements really shows how divided people are on this whole online issue.

The size of the patch doesn't necessarily mean that you're adding that much data to your HDD. 10GB of the 13GB could very well be rewrites of existing code, thus you would only be adding 3GB in the end.

How about you get all of the details before you start raging like a lunatic?

Isn't this more about how the game files are organized instead of how big the actual patch is? Or is it really patching that much?

hahaha oh wow. 13 GBs to patch a game?

ahahahahaha

Yep. Now that I've looked into this, it seems like this is something that Capcom messed up with the way they setup their file structure. Even though it's a 13 GB download, it only actually adds ~1-2 GB to the hard drive footprint of the game, so the vast majority of stuff in that 13 GB is content that originally shipped with the game.

Early indications are that this probably includes DLC content that is going to be available soon.

If anything, this just makes me wish that developers were better about releasing patch notes.

The PS4, not sure about the Bone, has a place for them to list all the updates and changes for a game but no one uses it. Battlefield 4 just says "updated performance- yadayada- added China Rising- buy Premium assholes". I think Contrast is the only game that has anything substantial in the patch notes.

Does anyone know how Xbox One (and PS4) deal with downloading updated games from scratch? Would you need to download the entire game and then the patch or is it smart enough to have an "updated" version of the game available as a full download and that's it. Steam does it that way and it's fantastic. No patching games when you first download them.

Would be interesting to see how they handle it.

@mijati:

I'm guessing it changes from game to game. Something with a lot of directories will have a smaller patch file, whereas something that blocks the entire game into one file is going to have a huge patch.

I didn't even realize that my Xbox had downloaded a 13 gig patch and that's pretty cool. No loading screens, no install screens, no annoying popups urging you to install the patches.

Could you please fire up DR3 for a bit and look if anything has changed? Maybe they´ve somehow fixed a bunch of issues with this patch?

The game became 1.5 GB bigger post-patch, indicating very sloppy patching by putting up the whole goddamn game up as a patch. I guess scum like Capcom can do this now after the $10,000 patch fees were waived by Microsoft. This is probably you downloading the (1.5 Gb) DLC in advance, so you can buy content you already spent bandwidth (and energy & time) on by downloading a 100 kb key.

This is only part 1 of 4 of 52 GB worth of mandatory updates, enjoy the all-digital future.

Guys, times are moving forward and this will help it. I can understand the frustration, but you're also basically saying you don't want faster/un-capped speeds. Now that Netflix and Gaming like this are becoming more of a standard, so will the network coverage to make it all work. Seriously in a few years time you'll be downloading these updates in no time at all.

I'm kind of glad I've put my nightmare mode run on the backburner for a while, then. I'm on a 1.5Mbps connection, so this is going to take forever to download. That last patch (the 5 GB one) took me 11 days to download, even with standby downloading enabled. I don't know what all the Xbox One has going on in terms of background bandwidth usage, but it's ridiculous that something my 360 takes only a few hours to download literally requires days on the new hardware.

thanks! :) my xbox downloaded the whole patch when I was sleeping so I don't really give a shit about this and i'm enjoying the all-digital future. enjoy whining on the internet about stuff that doesn't affect you (i'm guessing that you don't have the new xbox and/or dead rising 3).

Bioshock Infinite had a 2 GB update that was required for everyone to download, but all it did was add Chinese as a language yet you can't access it unless you live in that territory.

13 gigs is fuckin' absurd. How broken could Dead Rising 3 possibly be?

Battlefield 4 was practically a smoldering crater when DICE started working on it, and none of those patches were above one GB! (On PS4, anyway.)

And now, having read this thread, the thought of a climate where people are apologizing for sloppy, bloated, amateur hour business like this because it becomes attached to a matter of pride about how fat their pipe is-?

...I'd rather we not wage class war via goddamn patch notes, if we can avoid it.

I guess in the future everybody just whines about games, instead of playing them?! Well, I´m probably not going to install/patch the game again, since I´m already done with it. It was pretty good. But what do I know, I only play games.

13GB you say? Hmm, that's going to be the longest 5 minutes of my life.

I don't care about the file sizes but it's pretty obvious they aren't bothering to optimise for lower size anymore. There's no fucking way something like Knack should be at 35GB+, I expect games are currently going the Max Payne 3 on PC route of just having all non real time cutscenes as 1080P video. (fine with me, because the compression of Deus Ex HR's cutscenes was horrendous)

So no one has ever played a PC game? I get gigs and gigs of updates for The Sims, WoW, and a bunch of other games. It's pretty much the norm now. When games were 400 megabytes, updates were small. Games are massive now, so it makes sense that their patches would be too.

If you call this whining, I'm curious what is complaining to you. Digital games still go through the verification checks, to see if you're the legitimate owner, if you play it on different account but on the same system. Just think what would happen if the verification service is down (hacked, attacked) or just discontinued. I'm glad for you it doesn't affect you but a lot of people with bandwidth caps DO care.

Sloppy patches don't help anyone, there is no way it needs to be that big. Its a valid point.

Was the size of patches limited on old-gen consoles? I'm PC only, so curious to know.

I'd say on PC, it's fairly rare for patches to be this big, but it happens. Most patches are a few hundred megs sometimes much less, as I suspect they intelligently only update very specific files or sections of of a package. I suspect there are situation where the patching requires many files to be modified and it leads to re-downloaded most of the game, even if many files had just a few bits changed.

Dev's should try to make an effort, but ultimately they will do what they need to do to fix the game because that's their responsibility. Bandwidth capabilities are externalities for them.