Far Cry 4 - Day-One PC Updates Revealed

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Software development is not that simple. As you add more processes to manage releases, you make it harder (or at times even impossible) to "squeeze" in a fix. This is due to the fact that you have different teams doing different things situated in different locations. As a result, release management becomes a nightmare and a way to overcome limitations in the process is to release day one fixes. The reason for this is that patches or emergency fixes generally have a different development process than a release candidate (the term "patch" or "emergency" is what allows a team to circumvent normal development practices). So rather look at day one fixes as a way for development shops to workaround strict development processes. NB. Day-one fixes/patches is not the same as day-one DLC, which I believe is utter rubbish!
Not really, Imo the only thing they're doing this so people wont pirate is as much. Its a ubisoft thing.
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The game had a planned Christmas release date, everything works back from there. Unless a game is REALLY REALLY screwed, a release candidate must be produced x weeks before then to allow testing etc. As long as there are no 'stop ship' issues, the release candidate will become the first GA version and the game will be released on the planned date. Fixing 'minor' issues can then commence. This is a fact of life with software development, especially games nowadays.
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Now that I added the FarCry Franchise pack to my Steam library, I can wait for a sale on FC4. That being said. I would rather have Day 1 patches then have to wait for a while after the release for those same fixes to become available. Why complain about Day 1 patches? It means that the Devs are still working on it even after it has been sent to the publishers. I would rather that then have them take a break and wait to find out what bugs people complain about on release day. You also have to take into account that modern games have a lot more complicated code than games of the past.
are u crazy??? its like going into a car showroom buying new car and salesman saying you can drive it away now but its got 3 wheels so ride be a bit bumpy but dont worry the 4th wheel be here in 3 weeks, you need quality standards as they have in other industries i would personally like governments to intervene and impose fines on game developers who release shoddy games
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are u crazy??? its like going into a car showroom buying new car and salesman saying you can drive it away now but its got 3 wheels so ride be a bit bumpy but dont worry the 4th wheel be here in 3 weeks, you need quality standards as they have in other industries i would personally like governments to intervene and impose fines on game developers who release shoddy games
nah i'd say it more like buying say an washing machine and the sales man says "you can take it now but it wont clean your clothes as well as we told you it would, but never mind I have your money so you can wait till its fixed. you simply would not accept the product and demand a refund or not buy it in first place lol .. but games nah you can have what we give you now and put up with bugs until we find a fix for it, now that's totally fine because people still buy them in this condition. i'd say that's a better comparison lol 🙂 I guess the day washing machines come with wifi and usb ports will be the day to worry as you just know there will be a firmware update in the internet post .. lol i would also class that as beta testing my washing machine 🙂
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Why not just stop pre-order games and stop download them if they are not fully functional. Then we will force the game companies to make games that are worth spending time on. The only thing a company understands is money, so as long as people give them money your voice will never be heard. I for one have stop pre-ordering games and will never buy a game on the release date until some reviewer have confirmed that it is without bugs that ruin the games experience.
Duh because if you don't pre-order the games you don't get the exclusive TF2 hats. /sarcasm
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Ok, so the developers are all keen to release the game, in all it buggy glory, and it ends up coming out with a 10TB day one update that is mandatory before playing the game. I can understand that it's a competitive industry and that updates are difficult to work in and blah blah blah. What I wonder is how difficult it would be to release an updated version of the game a month or so later? Or maybe just another disc that only contains the updates to be sold with the game so that retailers don't have to worry about old stock. I would totally wait a month just to get a version of the game that I can play without having to string out my slow South African internet connection for a month.
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Software development is not that simple. As you add more processes to manage releases, you make it harder (or at times even impossible) to "squeeze" in a fix. This is due to the fact that you have different teams doing different things situated in different locations. As a result, release management becomes a nightmare and a way to overcome limitations in the process is to release day one fixes. The reason for this is that patches or emergency fixes generally have a different development process than a release candidate (the term "patch" or "emergency" is what allows a team to circumvent normal development practices). So rather look at day one fixes as a way for development shops to workaround strict development processes. NB. Day-one fixes/patches is not the same as day-one DLC, which I believe is utter rubbish!
No simply put, the reason? CONSOLE DEVELOPMENT! They make these games to work on console then they port it to PC! Instead of making it PC THEN port it to console... Getting old hat now all the excuse people like you keep making, and yet some still don't even see that! There is far much development based on how much money can they make with as little effort as possible! And still sell a rushed project to idiots, who by the way STILL buy this crap! Only people to blame are the ones STILL buying, you don't buy they will listen...
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Every game is buggy on release though.. If people stop buying all PC games they will have nothing to play and all the fear mongering "PC gaming is dying" will start again.
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Day One PC updates.. this is becoming a trend already, wtf are people doing lol? Can't they release these things in an orderly and timely fashion, with proper updates/releases? ..
Becoming? Long since become.. When a game is released working on day 1, I am shocked and pleasantly surprised. Not just with Ubi.. this is industry wide. I can't remember the last time a game came out that didn't have some issue on release that required a patch, sli profile, driver to be installed at some point after the initial release to get working properly and or, better.
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No simply put, the reason? CONSOLE DEVELOPMENT! They make these games to work on console then they port it to PC! Instead of making it PC THEN port it to console... Getting old hat now all the excuse people like you keep making, and yet some still don't even see that! There is far much development based on how much money can they make with as little effort as possible! And still sell a rushed project to idiots, who by the way STILL buy this crap! Only people to blame are the ones STILL buying, you don't buy they will listen...
People like me...? I'm a Software Developer, so no I'm not making excuses, I'm simply trying to explain the reason behind a day-one fix. Butt-hurt much?
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Every game is buggy on release though.. If people stop buying all PC games they will have nothing to play and all the fear mongering "PC gaming is dying" will start again.
What I ment to say was don't buy at full price wait until they come down to a price that makes it benefit you not their pockets. If PC people stood up and told them no we ain't going to buy your games do you really think they will pack up and focus on consoles? No chance, it's too much money, and considering PC is "SUPPOSED to out sell console games" you talk like you NEED to keep buying and just tell them off for a bad product but here you are AGAIN buying yet another bad product from the same people? It's proven through out history you make a stand you get what you want, today it's "Oh I better not anger the games industry for fear of them not selling me their badly made games". I haven't bought a full priced game since Skyrim (because of Oblivion), I can't justify buying console games badly ported it's killing me, Skyrim was actually the reason I started to fully hate console ported games. Been PC gaming since I got my 486 DX100 with Full Throttle, STNG A Final Unity, Robocop 3 but enough is enough... Another problem is PC gaming HAS been dying, yet year in year out Nvidia/AMD release a new card for the sake of what? Console games? And bad ones at that! Just to push 4K or multi monitor set ups? I've said it time and again you can't polish a turd!
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People like me...? I'm a Software Developer, so no I'm not making excuses, I'm simply trying to explain the reason behind a day-one fix. Butt-hurt much?
Butt hurt? From what? That people like you try to delude us with poor excuses about why games today are so badly made? LOL! You're kidding yourself aren't you?
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People like me...? I'm a Software Developer, so no I'm not making excuses, I'm simply trying to explain the reason behind a day-one fix. Butt-hurt much?
So....why don't software Devs use established tools like UE4 etc which compile to all platforms instead of this caca?
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Another problem is PC gaming HAS been dying, yet year in year out Nvidia/AMD release a new card for the sake of what? Console games? And bad ones at that! Just to push 4K or multi monitor set ups? I've said it time and again you can't polish a turd!
..What?
For the last couple of years, the revenue from console video game sales has stagnated at around $23 billion per year. PC game sales, on the other hand, have grown from $13 billion to $18 billion over the past two years. DFC, a market research firm, expects console game sales to stagnate or shrink slightly, while the PC sector will continue to grow. By 2014, DFC predicts that PC game revenue will outsell console game revenue.
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Nvidia-Game-Sales-Data-640x357.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Nvidia-PC-Game-Sales-Data-640x356.jpg Please stop it with your baseless bashing garbage posts please:).
So....why don't software Devs use established tools like UE4 etc which compile to all platforms instead of this caca?
You think being on UE or CT makes you safe from optimisation and platform discrepancies? Also those engines have a ****ton of middleware built into them you might not even want, plus you become dependant on support from those companies. Larger companies want their own tech, because it's better to manage and can be built specifically for what they need. Take off those rose tinted glasses.
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So....why don't software Devs use established tools like UE4 etc which compile to all platforms instead of this caca?
It costs a lot of money to get a license for UE 4. That or you pay royalties to Epic. Also it would require Ubisoft to completely re-train their teams.
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So, i'm confused with all these people complaining about day one patches. Sure, would we all LOVE to have bug free games? obviously. But Have most of you tried to build a game? no? and if so, is a bug free game possible? No. Trying to make sure the bugs are to a minimum is what as a developer you want to do. And if your publisher is saying, release these game by this time, that's what you must do. As to the annoyance of day 1 patches, would you rather they stop working on the game once it has gone "gold" and not continue to try and iron out any bugs they either knew about, or have found since going "gold"? You have two options, get a buggy game, as all games with the complexity that games are these days will always have bugs, and not have developers work on it until after the game has release, or, hope that the developers continue to work on the game and give a day 1 patch....
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So, i'm confused with all these people complaining about day one patches. Sure, would we all LOVE to have bug free games? obviously. But Have most of you tried to build a game? no? and if so, is a bug free game possible? No. Trying to make sure the bugs are to a minimum is what as a developer you want to do. And if your publisher is saying, release these game by this time, that's what you must do. As to the annoyance of day 1 patches, would you rather they stop working on the game once it has gone "gold" and not continue to try and iron out any bugs they either knew about, or have found since going "gold"? You have two options, get a buggy game, as all games with the complexity that games are these days will always have bugs, and not have developers work on it until after the game has release, or, hope that the developers continue to work on the game and give a day 1 patch....
This, I love how developers are being called evil when they are just following deadlines and trying their best to make something for us to enjoy and can be proud for making it. Most people in this thread seem to be under the impression games are sent to distribution a day before they arrive in stores.
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Reading the changelog reveals what are in fact the show-stoppers for me...and those are, "takedown" and "crafting". This strongly suggests FC4 will function just like FC3 with a dumbed-down user interface and Simon Says controls complete with screen prompts and heavily scripted missions. Most likely it will include boss levels that play like a coin-op arcade (i.e., Dragon's Lair) and a plethora of extra-curricular, carnival like side-show activities as well. I wouldn't be surprised if the player is tasked with finding and killing a golden-haired Yeti and skinning it to craft the largest wallet in the game. I'm sure many will revel in the perceived all so important graphics to the exclusion of everything else. But to be sure, there are many people who enjoy a cleverly thought out game that includes story depth, game interaction, control and in-game features that do not go overboard to the point of destroying the suspension of disbelief. This is the current reality of the Far Cry franchise.
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You think being on UE or CT makes you safe from optimisation and platform discrepancies? Also those engines have a ****ton of middleware built into them you might not even want, plus you become dependant on support from those companies. Larger companies want their own tech, because it's better to manage and can be built specifically for what they need. Take off those rose tinted glasses.
I wear my sunglasses at night. Regarding game engines out there, you do realise you can just use the rendering pipeline and workflow without using the game engine? Besides, I said *like* UE4, I wasn't being too specific about it. Look at the BS Ubishaft has gone through over the last few days and this year in general terms, not too mention their history with people complaining about Uplay. On the one side we got millions lost off their share price and the ENTIRE gaming industry laughing their asses off, not too mention all the gamers out there. On the other we got a tinge more training for staff, and less development cost for your game because you don't have to build an entire game engine to run something. Anyone care to guess how much it costs to develop a game engine? Only one I can recall ATMIT is the Ego engine CodeMasters built. I think the cost was $40 mill in 2006-8, so like two years of development maybe more for the first release? Two years of developing a game engine costing $40m+ which doesn't work properly, versus UE4 (or whatever you want) which works, runs, compiles to ALL PLATFORMS and is available to anyone with an internet connection. Sorry, can't side with you, I just can't. Ubipants screwed up and you know it.
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Day One PC updates.. this is becoming a trend already, wtf are people doing lol? Can't they release these things in an orderly and timely fashion, with proper updates/releases? ..
It is a trend that started with consoles. Since the consoles (X360, PS3) where online really took off, devs got lazy and just started issuing day one patches in order to get the games out in time for their quarterly financials. Remember the game devs probably are not to blame for this, neither are the publishers as they all have shareholders and shareholders only care about one thing... making money. They don't care about what the product actually is or does they just want to make money. This is also why a lot of dev teams and publishers who don't have shareholders actually do care about their work and their games and release finished products (early access ignored obviously).