God of War is a very good game that has been getting an unprecedented number of title updates. The PS4 exclusive launched on April 20 and in its first 11 days of release has been updated eight times.
This has been happening a lot.
The most recent patch, which upgraded the game to version 1.17, was released on Friday, ending a streak of updates that had begun with the game’s day one patch, which was numbered 1.10.
Details have been scarce about what these updates do. The “update history” screen on the PS4 lists 1.17 as offering “various bug fixes and improvements”. The same has been the case for updates 1.16, 1.15, 1.14, 1.13, 1.12 and 1.11.
When 1.12 hit, a Sony Twitter account tipped people off that that update included an option to increase the game’s text size. Otherwise, it’s been hard to decipher what any of the updates do.
Sony listed some of the things the game’s launch-day 1.10 patch did (as well as some of the things pre-launch patches like 1.01 did). But the daily updates since then have all been described in the vaguest of terms.
All of the post-release updates have been small. The 1.17 patch is 33.89MB and would download over most modern internet connections in a few seconds. Applying the update requires a quick reboot of the game, which is a minor inconvenience to those of us who leave their PS4s in suspend mode between sessions but is otherwise not a big hassle.
It’s nevertheless unusual for any big new game to patch at this near-daily rate. The February 2017 PS4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn had about a patch a week for its first few weeks of its existence. The May 2016 exclusive Uncharted 4 also did about a patch a week early on, though also had several “live updates” sprinkled in that tweaked parameters in the game’s multiplayer mode. Like Horizon, God of War is single-player-only.
We asked Sony about it but hadn’t gotten official word about what’s going on at time of writing.
Comments
7 responses to “God Of War Sure Has Been Getting A Lot Of Patches”
It’s good that Sony allows patch iteration of that speed these days.
It used to be the case that developers would have to wait weeks to get a patch through which meant issues took a lot longer to fix.
Agreed. Shows a good product support and delivery pipeline.
It used to cost publishers USD $10,000 or $25,000 (can’t remember which, pretty sure 10K) to post a patch through their certification process. Sony and MS wiped the huge fees because they could see the detriment it was causing.
They still have to wait. Santa Monica is a first-party dev, hence no waiting. Same with HZD.
“Regular” devs still have to wait, and still have to pay.
You don’t want to be daily patching something though. That isn’t ideal. Releasing something live should actually be a big deal.
See, if they are daily patching this implies that there are a number of bugs they feel are important to immediately address. But those bugs exist despite whatever longer term testing and approval process they had when approaching the release date. Now they are releasing changes daily, which surely means a truncated testing process.
What they are doing here is increasing *risk*. Wise developers know that every change, no matter how small, is rolling the dice. The more small fixes happen with less testing, the higher the chance one of them contains a bomb.
Also to some extent this is beta testing. They get quick feedback from the community. I would hazard a guess that the company is daily patching and rolling the dice on that increased risk to make up for a deadline problem. They delivered, but possibly with weeks of bugfixing remaining.
Man i loved this game. Getting withdrawals now 🙁
Checking the update history and only seeing various bug fixes and improvements annoys me. I like to know what was actually fixed so I know whether it’s something I need to worry about installing or not.