I think it depends on what the patch is for. WoW for example, is a must because almost every patch changes gear, environment, spells, etc. If a spell is nerfed and the person refuses to download the patch, what would happen?

Now the thing that turns me off about WoW patches is that after EVERY patch thousands of the player base have some sort of error. For example, the very last patch fucked up my computer to the point I can't even stay logged on for a few seconds.

I don't care how impatient the playerbase is. If any gaming corporation plans on releasing a patch, test it CONTINOUSLY so we can PREVENT numerous amount of bugs being released.

 

Out of curiosity, what recent game destruction brought this up for you Midknight?

 

That is generally a giant cop out. If it can run windows stable, and it can meet the min. requirements of the game, it should play it stable. Pick the lowest, middle, and highest vid card for ATi and nVidia. Test them. grab lowest and highest creative sound card. test it. test xp and vista.

You've covered 90% of the computers that will be used for gaming. Anything on board on a mobo that is screwed will be patched by the bios/developer of the motherboard.

With uniform drivers for every major card/plug in now, it's inexcusable

Witcher, needing to be patched to 1.11a on day 0 (it's bad hit detection screwed me a few times, I looked through the stuff it's just recently fixed)
Hellgate, giant patch on day 0 supposedly
Gothic 3... ug, not even stable to install.
Silverfall, patch 17 to play it half stable
Bf2142 still releasing patches to fix things that were broke on day 1
Basically I went though and checked most of my installed games, and they had new patches fixing game breaking bugs.

 

From what I've seen, if your computer can't run something because of your hardware, YOU are probably the one that fucked something up. Personally, I built my computer by buying each individual piece, it took me several weeks to get everything running smoothly. Once I did the hardware wasn't a problem at all, any software that CAN run, WILL, on my computer. Despite the normal incompatibility of my components that used to glitch, it runs fine now, so long as I update my drivers on a regular basis.

 

Out of curiosity, how is the witcher? The combat looked pretty bad on the video I saw of it.

On the topic of patching, I have been gaming since 1997, and patches are and will be a constant source of pain for us for quite a few years, maybe even for forever.

On the topic of rushing games, it just depends on how you feel about download patches. A day one patch sounds pretty damn stupid to me, but I can deal with a patch in the first week. Frankly, I'm just damn tired of having good games delayed and delayed and delayed. GTA IV for example, that was supposed to come out around Christmas time, which I would have loved, now it's supposedly coming out in Q1 2008, and it will probably be delayed again.

On the plus side, I played the demo for Crysis, and it is amazing. Really top notch, and no really glaring issues.

 

I enjoy Witcher, but the combat annoyed me after the novelty of the game lost it's new box shiny. It's worth picking up. Hit detection is a bit screwy and there's some bugs, but considering the team that did it is polish, and IDK any polish designers, it's pretty damned sweet.

I'm against critical Day 0 patches. What happens if I want to play a game while I don't have net access?