Far Cry 4 - Day-One PC Updates Revealed

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#4960682
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I know this will be a pretty far out radical idea... but hear me out. Why not finish the game, before releasing it? *it's a joke* OR IS IT?
#4960722
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Let the beta test begin.
#4960760
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Stop pre-order and buying games on release date. 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.
#4960834
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Where are the demos from the start of the century? Hm ..? How about downloading a pirate copy and if you really like it, then buy at a Steam sale a few years later + patches.
i totaly agree with you about the lack of demo... btw AC Unite start to be in "not so legal" version on the net and some even correct bug and optimisation missed in the original, and even now that the official patch still not aviable... Come on UBIsoft, don't tell me that pirate are better than your so expensive studio? .... yes? lol Sadly i feel like FC4 will be as buged as ACU.
#4960839
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I have a feeling Hilbert will do some FC4 benchmarks and that we will see them soon.
#4960846
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I'm not going to defend developers. I hate this as much as the next person. But the way I understand it its developers trying to shorten the gap between release and games going gold. What I have a problem with is these steam games where you buy the discs because you don't want to download the game, yet after install you still need to download half the game. Arkham Origins i had to download 10GB out of 18GB. Do you know how long that takes on a 2Mbps line that gets throttled?
Yeah, they don't care. If developers had their way, all games would be download only and the portal to download the game would be time-limited, with additional charges should you (god forbid) want to play the game longer than 1 hour per day. Nothing, and I mean nothing, annoys developers more than Internet Service Providers because they have the power to charge people for something which costs nothing. There is NO CHARGE for the internet. They fact we have to pay someone for it is a joke. It's invented. Devs know it and they hate it, so to piss everyone off they release a game on a BD and then get you to download 40GB of useless, poorly optimized rubbish which doesn't do anything useful. Back in the days of 3.5in diskettes, if a game had lots of disks it was a selling point - now, if the game has 1,000,000 TB download, it must be frickin' good. /quadruple facepalm with feet and hands.
#4960917
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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.
#4960921
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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.
#4961025
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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.
#4961055
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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?
#4961073
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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.
#4961142
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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....
#4961156
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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.
#4961167
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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.
#4961173
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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).
#4961174
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I think, that day one patches are some new sort of protection.
#4961234
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You can't side with me, or anyone who's actually worked in any similar industry, because those glasses are blurring your vision. If you just want to use the rendering pipeline of UE4 it means you need to remove features that are built into the engine, it doesn't come in modules, all the middleware is built in. Also again, just because something compiles to a platform doesn't mean jack ****, you will still have to deal hardware and optmisation discrepencies. Mostly no company that fully licenses these engines just leaves them as is, they always get giant chunks of modified code based on things they need for the game, tech that's missing or that doesn't function like they want by default. Now you've just bought an expensive license, retrained your staff (which is very expensive, not just money wise but also time wise(which is also a form of moneywise)), have that staff extensively modify the engine and whenever there is an issue you need to wait for Epic (in this case) to lend you some support; you have no true engine guru's inhouse. All this is why companies build their own tech, in the long run it is cheaper and you have all control over it.
Sorry, but that sounds like a lot of games developers trying to put their stamp on something when it is not needed. How on earth can it be cheaper to train a toolset which already exists versus one which does not exist? You still have to build the thing, which will cost you tens of millions of dollars for AAA+. It ain't cost and it ain't time and it ain't money. It's ego.
#4961508
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Uhm no, this is a really ignorant stance to take. It's not about putting a stamp on something, it's about building something you need. And it's cheaper because it will literally take just as much time and money to invest into your staff becoming absolute experts at the engine and modifying it for your needs. Or do you think it would've been cheaper for let's say, EA, to just ditch frostbite and license UE? No ofcourse not, they have their own tech now and have slowly been phasing out all 3rd party engines. Frostbite now has 20 games released on it, all nice and inhouse, with all the support in house, with all the engine guru's in house. EA is now, and has been for a long time, in a position where they can just update the tech as they see fit. Ubisoft is the same, using their anvil engine since 2007, heck the only reason splinter cell is still on UE is because it's now running so much custom code it's actually pretty much a different engine now (LEAD). They've been modifying UE2.5 since 2004. Also the day when developers are just running on 3rd party engines is the day when every game will look and feel the same, There is a reason why UE and CE games are so easily recognisable. Also you are seriously underestimating how ridiculously annoying it gets when you need to contact another company to get support on your engine; this might be fine for a smaller dev, but it's a ridiculous time waster for anything bigger.
So it's nothing to do with time or money or cost, it's ego. Frostbite looks no better than any other engine and BF4 is a joke of rend ring bugs - so much so that after a year of release those bugs are still there. Not to mention the load times on an SSD seperate drive are stupidly long. And now we have Ubismite releasing ACU with the monstrosity of foul ups on release. Yeah I think it's ego.
#4961638
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Christ Almighty people, there is only one thing that corporations understand - just one - money. As long as you keep on buying broken games on release day, they have no incentive to improve whatsoever. Don't blame the devs for being lazy or inept - sure, there are some who should have a court mandated ban on ever getting near a game - but most slave away under ridiculous deadlines enforced by publishers. Stop buying broken games for God's sake. There is no mythical force at play here - it's just you, your money and your insatiable illogical need to have every new thing right this instant.

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