@nals: I'm super confused by the small outcry from some people about Day 1 Patches or working on a game after gold, especially when in this last year or so we had Witcher 3 which had both a day 1 patch, constant patches afterwords to make it run better for all, FREE content DLC of varying quality, then great expansions. All of that work started as soon as the original game went gold and disks started getting stamped...
Oh well, one more day of reading people's stupid responses to this game that I am going to enjoy to no end. Then SPACE.
There's nothing wrong with Day 1 patches or working on the game after it goes gold; I mean, I'd prefer if they actually had the time necessary to deliver the product they want to you experience on day one, while also able to send the whole thing through cert, but it doesn't matter as you have to download it to play on launch anyway. You'll never see the game pre-patch (unless you get a leaked copy, for shame), so there's no issue there.
The problem arises when the day one patch doesn't fix enough of the game, and it's still broken on launch. I'm not saying that's the case here, but certain games should never have been released in the state that they were, patch or no (I'm looking at you, Arkham Knight PC, although no amount of patching was ever going to fix that mess).
The best example of walking this line that I have is Paradox Interactive; their games usually come out undercooked, but the patches are significant, and all paid DLC is usually accompanied by major overhauls that are given out for free. It divides the community between new people ("This game is broken/unfinished!") and old veterans ("They'll get there, just give them time.") every single release.
Honestly, I don't buy it. These changes sound too dramatic for six weeks (implied; at most) of development. At least, I feel that whatever capacity these changes exist in won't be enough to significantly change the way the game feels. Design-wise, it seems like that timeframe wouldn't be enough for proper QA; asset-wise, well, for it to matter, I don't think they'd be able to implement enough in six weeks.
I could be absolutely wrong. It's also possible they sent out a gimped build when they went gold (I'd have no idea why they'd do that, though), or that they've been working crazy hours. Either way, I think it's safer to remain skeptical (of course, you could say that about any game pre-release). These guys weren't afraid of making Molyneux-esque promises before this build of the game went out, without the audacity to redact or extrapolate upon them (which, honestly, is great for marketing a game; not so great for actually tempering your audience). They are also, by self-admission, a tiny indie studio, which ties back in to my first point. Again, this isn't the end-all-be-all of my doubts, but it definitely feeds them.
Also, this sucks:
- Exploits – infinite warp cell exploit and rare goods trading exploit among other removed. People using these cheats were ruining the game for themselves, but people are weird and can’t stop themselves ¯\_(シ)_/¯
No. If there's an imbalance in your game, it's not up to you to decide if I'm "ruining" it for myself. And if I do find the game to be ruined utilizing a method laced within the design of your game, the onus is on you, not me.
A lot of the changes that Hello Games make will be attributed to tweaking the usage of whatever procedural formula they have; things like frequency of life, sky color, planet biomes, terrain generation, and so on are actually (or billed to be) small mathematical changes that shouldn't take many man-hours to implement. Some of the crazier stuff (things requiring art assets like buildings or rooms in them like bars) was probably in the works but either yanked out to make the deadline or had the assets ready to go but was never allowed to be generated by the engine as something didn't quite mesh yet.
If they had added building construction or some massive new feature like that which wasn't present at ALL, I'd be skeptical too, but all of the above seems within the realm of possibility to me, assuming they aren't lying about how a lot of this is implemented (and assuming I'm not totally off base with the tech they are using, which is very possible, I admit.)
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