TITLE: Updating, or why Goodfellow poked me in the eye with a cane AUTHOR: Jim9137 DATE: 6/21/2005 08:45:00 ip. ----- BODY:

Righto then, let's tackle the updating bit. LET'S KICK OUT THE JAMS! I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna KICK THEM OUT, YEAH!-... What are you staring at? --- Games need updating. Everyone knows this. Everyone does this, in fact, it's so easy with Steam that you won't probably even notice it most of the time. But this hasn't been the case always, but it's relatively old news. I remember an article dated in '98, several in fact, completely dedicated to teach readers to update. They in fact, copied the instructions posed in it to every magazine from then on, just because they got tired of "How do I update Fallout 2?" letters. It was the time when Team Fortress was still on Quake, with mods being relatively new concept. Updating, as we all know, fixes game bugs, game killing aspects such as overpowered weapons, game AI, and occasionally bring new content. Not the way it was meant to be first. Back at the '98, this article complained how the updates make the game developers lazy, careless and bring consumers unfinished product. Fallout 2 1.0 was unplayable, unfinishable to a game killing bug. And sadly, after you updated it you lost your saves. Then it proceeded on to explain that updates, instead of constantly fixing problems that should have been fixed in Q&A/Beta phase ages ago, should bring new content, new weapons, new enemies, new chapters (anyone get a deja vú feeling here?), new levels to tackle. They should expand the game experience, not make it possible, something that the players can download if they have means to do so. Not everyone had internet access back these days, I certainly didn't. Anything larger than few megabytes was hard to get, and internet was expensive in general. Which is why Fallout 2 shot itself to the leg, disabling some of it's consumers for playing it. This same magazine offered CD with the essential game patches as a subscriber's gift. Zoom a little forward, everyone knows how to update these days. Autoupdaters are becoming standard, Half-Life has established it's position as King of FPS'es, and Counter-Strike has made the mod community go boom as well as the multiplayer one. Also, Jim9137 takes his baby steps on the scary IRC world but that's bit of side of the point. Updating these days is common, essential even. It's still rather new concept, but people are learning. I can remember how I complained on IRC how long updating Counter-Strike took with my ISDN, which was whopping 64k/128k fast. 100 megs, it took weeks. Not to mention the map packs, which were essential if you wanted to play on any reasonable server. Game updating was done mainly on "If absolutely required" basis. The talk about game updates bringing new content instead of new bugfixes, the talk about game updates making game developers lazy, suddenly diminished. Few grumbling noises could be heard all over the world, but mainly at the slowness of Internet. This was time when finding an update was certain type of skill. This was the time when WON was the only way to play Half-Life online. Team Fortress immigrated over HL as Team Fortress Classic. Multiplayer gaming is forming to what it is now, clanbased activity across the world without the need of LAN and close friends. MMORPG's take over from MUDs. Consoles challenge PC's as the biggest gaming venue, but they are very strictly offline. Their biggest marketing trick is how you don't need to update their games. You don't need to, well, you can't either. And we hop to the current age. Half-Life 2 has hit the shores, and it most likely will be the new king of FPS'es for a year or two, although challengers are on a line. Valve's greatest invention, and the greatest source of frustration for gamers alike, Steam has hit the shores and completely replaced WON. It promises to update the game without the player knowing, it promises to make a true online experience possible. For me that online experience was waiting that the Steam Client finally agreed to update itself after a bad update. Yes. We have bad updates these days, the ones that instead of doing anything sane, breaks the game. Makes it unplayable. New content is quite common, even on single-player games, but most of the time it's something relatively small. Updates, everyone does it, even your neighbour's cat will update it's food cup's BIOS soon, just wait for it. The "new" cash making idea of making games chapter based, which you buy one by one, is on the news on regular basis. The newest generation of consoles is promising to be the thing, the one you want to share your 10mb/10mb cable connection with. They promise that you can download totally new content, new weapons, new enemies, new chapters (anyone get a deja vú feeling here?), new levels to tackle. So, PC gaming's updating has actually evolved. But are the consoles making the same mistakes as PC did, or will they do it like it should have been done in the first place? Updating isn't that big of a problem these days... But as the updates go larger, I've seen ones which are way over few hundred megs, so will the player's patience. Games aren't anymore like books, which you can just install and play at will. But then again, if it's not the updates it's the installing and struggling to match your PC's power to the required. It's a wild time we are living in folks, even purely from updating point of view, gaming is living on the edge of a revolution. We only need someone to truly push us over that edge. But if no one does, we'll fall away from that edge and we have lost another chance, and I suppose next one will come after the virtual reality kicks in. Ah well, we'll see.

----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Anonyymi EMAIL: URL: DATE: 17:26 you should note that fallout 2 was not totally the programmers fault- they were raped by inane laws and an idiotic marketing team ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR:  Jim9137 EMAIL: URL: DATE: 12:55 Yeeup, probably so. I don't recall the exact details, but Fallout 2 is perfect example of a game that was shipped unfinished. And, unpatched. ;) ----- --------