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Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoAlmost 20 years old, and still relevant: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21
- pmarreck 8y agowow, straight from the dawn of the cable-modem era
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoA reference to Half-Life 2 perhaps? That 120MB mandatory launch day patch was painful on dial-up!
- dlbucci 8y agoHalf-Life 1, you mean? 2 didn't come out until 2004, I think, and this comic's from '98.
- slavik81 8y agoA comic shockingly ahead of its time. While there were an increasing number of games that were borderline unplayable without their Day 1 patch, I think that comic was just extrapolating the trend. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that game boxes came with nothing more than a CD key in them. Back around when that comic was written, Computer Gaming World had a policy of only reviewing the unpatched versions of games. That became increasingly untenable and they eventually had to scrap the policy. The parent probably figured it was Half-Life 2 because the HL2 launch was a disaster. It was one of the first games requiring online activation and the servers were completely overloaded.
- chaoticmass 8y agoGiven the way the URL is formatted it would appear to be from Dec 1998, so not HL2.
- wingerlang 8y agoI bought HL2 (disk) on launch day, had to wait 3 or 4 days to play it. 56k dial up was not fun at the time.
- aidenn0 8y agoI beta tested ultima online around then and it took ~8 hours to download the patches when I installed the day my CD arrived.
- overcast 8y agoRule of thumb with ANY Bethesda game is just wait 6-12 months after release, and MAYBE it won't delete your saved game. No one ever learns with these guys. Cool games, horribly buggy for most of its early life.
- wuliwong 8y agoI had some rough experiences with Fallout 3 but New Vegas and Fallout 4 didn't really give me any trouble. Maybe they are improving?
- learc83 8y agoNew Vegas wasn't made by Bethesda. It was made by Obsidian. Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, and I thought New Vegas was about 10x better than Fallout 3.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoWhile Obsidian "made" it, it used the same engine/code/technology as Fallout 3.
- learc83 8y agoIt did, and Bethesda had time to iron out the kinks in the code that Obsidian used. But Fallout 3 used the 3rd party Gamebryo engine anyway, so the engine wasn't really developed by Bethesda either.
- the_af 8y ago> Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2 To be fair, Fallout 2 (my entry to the series, and a game I still love) is famous for being utterly bug-ridden and full of incomplete/broken quests. Disappearing car, anyone? :P
- smitty1110 8y agoNew Vegas used the same engine as Fallout 3, and it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment. They fixed all the bugs in the engine, and a better development studio handled creating the game. I believe that Fallout 4 used the engine developed for Skyrim, so they had more than 5 years to work out all the bugs.
- 0xCMP 8y agoAnd this is after the first day of the Beta on PC they required players to download the whole game again. I cancelled my pre-order after I figured out I bought the Physical Disk version from Amazon, but I'm not entirely convinced to buy the digital download I meant to get anymore. I really didn't get enough time to play during Beta (often were during times I had appointments or work), and while I would see players like Shroud having tons of fun with friends , only a small number of my friends play on PCs and few of those will get Fallout76. There were a lot of bugs which I hadn't seen, but also I wasn't convinced this game is worth it. On the other hand some of the gameplay I saw from Shroud showed that complaints of quests being boring and enemies being too weak, while they might have been true in the beginner areas, were not problems if you simply went to the right areas of the map.
- CelestialTeapot 8y agoBad news: the physical disc is supposedly just a download code, so you'll be pulling 50+GB regardless. Day 1 patch or no, I don't like the practice of the physical media just being a Steam/Uplay/Bethesda installer with a download code for the game.
- abledon 8y agoThis seems like some sneaky way to push out a couple more sprints of dev time while shipping ‘physical copies’
- teddyfrozevelt 8y agoWhen I got Portal 2 on disc in 2011, putting it in my computer prompted me to download Steam so I could get it there. It's not like this is anything new.
- corodra 8y agoYou mean they took the "BETA" event, found bugs and patched said bugs? On the first day of OFFICIAL release! NO! That's impossible! Why would they do something like that!?!? Everyone knows BETA means 5 years of an incomplete game that you have to pay early on... Seriously, they were pretty honest and upfront about their Beta and did it in the truest sense. "There are bugs in the game! It's total trash!". Yea... that's why you run betas... to find the bugs. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. More than likely there was an issue with their patch tool too, thus it's a whole new download. Haven't bought the game yet, but I see nothing they're doing as "ridiculous".
- ocfx 8y agoThe game is terrible though. Has one of the worst user review scores I've ever seen. The lack of content is terrible, everything is boring. Fallout was one of my favorite franchises and once again, a new one has been ruined. Online only games/MMO's almost never recover fully from really bad launches (look at The Old Republic)
- stetrain 8y agoI think the "Ridiculous" part is the trend of shipping a physical copy of the game with a giant patch of all the stuff that wasn't tested/ready in time for the disc to to go print. If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a redemption code for the digital download version?
- WorldMaker 8y agoIt's funny how much the Xbox One team anticipated this, and tried to move to that model, but got so much flak they gave up. People seem to like their ownership Totems (discs) that they can continue to sell to Pawn Shops (Gamestop) for pennies on the dollar of the original purchase price. It's okay to me that the nice decorative card rack keeps growing, right next to the Totem shelves in most stores. If I'm going to download the whole thing anyway, I might as well not waste shelf space in my home on the Totem.
- bdz 8y agoWonder if they fixed that the gamespeed is tied to the FPS https://streamable.com/xd87p https://streamable.com/xd87p You look down = less to render = more FPS = you run faster.
- discreditable 8y agoThat gamespeed issue in Fallout 4 was super annoying on my newer computer. Dialog animations went too fast and made talking quite jarring.
- chrisper 8y agoIt's not fixed. You can find videos about this on youtube.
- nimbius 8y agoah the bloated fix. As an engine mechanic, it reminds me of the nearly criminal level of disposability in japanese cars. I once had to service an acura with a recall for failed half shaft seals on the drivetrain. no big deal, about an hour of labor and a trip through the carwash but the computer in the service tech office kept telling me the part was on order 2-3 weeks. 2 weeks go by and there is an enormous fragile package on my workbench. It is an entire carbon fiber driveshaft assembly for the vehicle im working on, with a replacement axle shaft. Both are required to be installed, with old parts sent back to the guys at the factory. now my labor is 4-6 hours with an alignment, balance and a test drive because some factory worker decided picking up a final product was simpler than picking out a part from that assembly. I bet the Fallout 76 change is the same. Massive CI, its already being tested at the final assembly level, just reinstall everything and dont worry about it.
- arbitrage 8y agoSo, in all likelihood, it was a management person who knows through experience that not all mechanics are as good as you are, and knows they're just going to get screwed on complaints and installation problems if you expect EVERY repair shop in the states to be able to perform the cheaper, but more complicated, repair. Or, perhaps the recall was issued because the drivetrain was affected in ways you don't understand. > now my labor is 4-6 hours with an alignment, balance and a test drive You get paid to do recall work, what the fuck are you even complaining about?
- jkchu 8y agoI did not read it as a complaint, just a commenting with a similar story of inefficiency in a different industry. I found his story to be interesting. Really no need for you to come across so angry/aggressive.
- dang 8y agoPersonal attacks are a bannable offense here. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this to HN again.
- pleasecalllater 8y agoAnd I'm still working for a patch for Fallout 4 as it just closes when I enter any key in the main menu only if I have internet connection. When I unplug my computer or disable the network card, all works. I can enable it again when a save is loaded. Internet is full of people complaining about that for over a year or two... and still nothing happens, there is even no official workaround information.
- gregmac 8y agoThe original version is apparently 45GB. I have no basis for saying this (I have not ever worked in the game industry), but my guess would be that this "patch" is really just the complete version that happens to be 11GB larger (which is still significant, but much less than implying there's 54GB of additional content). Put another way, let's say the actual delta between original and "patch" version is 20GB (11GB new + some changed stuff). There's two ways to ship this: (1) Create a delta patch file that can be applied on top of the 45GB base version (20GB) (2) Repackage the entire thing into a complete install (54GB) If you do only (1), anyone installing for the first time after the "patch" version is released is downloading an extra 9GB and going through a longer installation process. If you are expecting that only a small percentage of your total install base has downloaded the base game (45GB), it also really doesn't make sense to produce both (1) and (2): You're incurring extra dev and testing time to produce a package that saves you a tiny fraction of your overall bandwidth usage. You also end up with an install base that is partially installed fresh (2) and partially patched (1) which means subsequent updates also have to test both scenarios -- and if you had a bug in applying the patch, you have an even harder time later to try reconcile it for the same reason. If you do only (2), which is what I suspect this is, then anyone downloading after its release just downloads the 54GB version. The small percentage of people with the initial version have to download an extra 30-ish GB, but it saves you (as the developer) a bunch of testing time and risk.
- CydeWeys 8y agoIt's always amazed me how downright inefficient patching is, even though better algorithms have existing for literally decades. The typical implementation is that you have to re-download every single resource that's changed, even if the resource is gigabytes large and only a bit in it has changed. Someone should calculate how many petabytes of Internet transfer capacity are wasted annually solely due to bad algorithms used in performing software updates. It'd be a surprisingly large figure.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoInternet transfer capacity is not wasted unless it goes unused (or data transferred caused other data that was needed urgently to be queued). For example, you could say any links not currently near full utilization are going to waste.
- setquk 8y agoThis sounds like the experience my kids had when they got their XBox One last Christmas. It took literally 2 hours before we could play anything on it. Software is now "ship it quick and fix it later" and that's wrong.
- colechristensen 8y agoYeah fortunately or not, best practice for a gifted game system is to update it before it's given.
- fhood 8y agoHa! You expect that from a console, but I just bought a tv, and it had to fucking update before I could use it. And on top of that it wanted me to create an account. For a TV!
- nkrisc 8y agoHad this same experience with an Xbox One someone gifted me. Immediately soured me on it but I stuck with it. However I also don't use it all that frequently so every time I powered it up to watch a Blu-ray or play a game I had to do a 10-30 minute download and update. After a few times of that I just never turned it on again. Now I'll never use it again because the day I do will be a day of downloading and updating. Screw that. I know you can set it to a mode where it can stay minimally powered on and update itself, but I use it so infrequently why would I waste all that power?
- clircle 8y agoThe 1TB SSD I bought for gaming in my new computer suddenly feels very small.
- kungtotte 8y agoDestiny 2 was released for free a while ago. I gave it a pass because it requires 100+ GB for a full installation. For one game.
- teddyfrozevelt 8y agoIt's still free, and you can redeem it to your Blizzard account just by opening the Blizzard app. https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-pc-free-on-battle-net-through-november-18 https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-...
- kungtotte 8y agoIt's also still 100GB. I have a 500GB drive for my games. I can't justify burning 20% of it for a single game.
- barrow-rider 8y ago54GB is going to crowd your 1TB? Plus how much of that 54 is going to overwrite or replace the existing code?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bluetidepro 8y agoI get that this is singling out Fallout 76, but this is not that uncommon of a practice in the modern era of console gaming. Heck, I think even the new Black Ops 4 PS4 game only came with a small portion of the game on the physical disk, and you had to download the rest. For what it's worth, Playstation does have stuff in their policy that says something along the lines that games that don't have online have to be on the blue ray console physical disk, but since this is an online only game, it's okay for the disk not to have everything. I don't love this policy, but as someone who rarely even buys physical versions of the game anymore, I don't really think it's that big of a deal. The game is online only, it's not that crazy that you have to download stuff on day 1. /shrug EDIT: Plus, a lot of this comes from the publishers breathing down the game devs necks to get the game out ASAP, esp before the holidays. So they put super tight deadlines on the games, and then that requires the devs to work out all the bugs and final code pretty much all the way up until the launch date. It's not like the past where you had to get it right on the first try for the physical copy because there was no way for a user to download a patch.
- lostmsu 8y agoThat reminds me of a recent Visual Studio 2GB patch just to change all branding for VSO to Azure DevOps.
- metamet 8y agoThey should build a patch to update their documentation online, because they change the names of services so often and rarely go through and update docs, so you'll find confusingly outdated instructions and references without links when troubleshooting. I love VS Code, but I'm really happy I'm mostly off of MS for development.
- Sephr 8y agoDoes it support HDR on PC? I haven't been able to figure this out anywhere online.
- Art9681 8y agoI don't think so. I played last night and my TV did not automatically switch to HDR mode and there is nothing in the settings that indicates it can be toggled either. Bummer. The new lighting is really nice though. Huge improvement over FO4.
- rvense 8y agoI remember downloading Xilinx FPGA tools some years ago. You HAD to download 14.1.0 (or whatever) first, at 6GB, and then get the patch from that to 14.1.1 (another 6GB), and then to 14.1.2 (guess how many gigabytes!). They also provided a combined download to go directly from 14.1.0 to 14.1.2... which was 12GB. Solid.
- rikkus 8y agoTurn tape over to side 2 and press play
- Avshalom 8y agojust a reminder: if you read the small print your ISP probably has a monthly bandwidth cap after which they start charging you more. 54GB is probably a significant fraction.
- tcd 8y agoIf you've got an ISP that considers 54gb a lot of data it's time to get a new ISP, a new country or protesting at how absurd the idea of bandwidth caps are.
- quickthrower2 8y agoSome isps slow you down instead, but same caveat.
- ukyrgf 8y agoIf it's Comcast Xfinity, you'll get a text, email, phone call, and JavaScript injected into non-http sites at 70%, 80%, 90%, and beyond.
- sandos 8y agoMy mind is blown by the fact that caps still exists for a stationary connection. I mean, how bad are the networks to require that?
- LinuxBender 8y agoHow does Blizzard/Activision do their patching? In WoW, the game will go from red (patching) to yellow (playable) usually before half of the patch is downloaded and they are just modifying existing files that may be 10+GB. The patches are usually quite small by comparison. (50MB to a frew hundred MB)
- charlesdm 8y agoThey have a data format which essentially acts like a zip file. So they can swap in and out data on the fly I believe.
- valarauca1 8y ago1. Blizzard uses torrents where people downloading the patch also act like P2P seeders (you can control the download/upload speeds). 2. Assets are bundled via the zip like mechanism, and individual "zone maps" are separated by hard loading screens. If you travel from 1 continent to another in WoW you get a had loading screen as assets are unloaded, and reloaded. 3. Which continent you log into is the only one you _need_ data for, so as you log in the client can prioritize certain assets higher then others. 4. Blizzard/Activision have a lot of experience with this. In 2008 blizzard had 10mil + players downloading 4GiB+ patches within 24hours so they've had a while to tune and make adjustments as this is part of their core customer experience. 5. Large publishers don't general optimize for this, because the people who whine about it largely already gave you their money and aren't likely to refund/return (in some avenues it is impossible).
- LinuxBender 8y agoThat makes sense. Thankyou! I can see why non subscription games would not bother with doing this. Maybe they just minimize their cost using CDN's.
- tprnz 8y agoThey don't do it because creating such a system that works well is a very, very hard problem.
- LeoNatan25 8y agoDay 1 patch notes: Replaced entire engine with a new one that is not terrible
- EamonnMR 8y agoUnfortunately, this is not the case.
- linkmotif 8y agoIf you’re a big publisher, what’s the cost for something like this?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoAnd as a corollary - what does the cost look like considering it's being served by Bethesda directly and not by Steam, as would be typical for a AAA game?
- DanielleMolloy 8y agoBreath of the Wild has a huge open world and was, in comparison widely bug-free when it came out. Same goes for most Nintendo games. Also when it comes to pure gameplay they are much more polished than all the GTAs and RDR2s. What are they doing differently? A little insight here, not sure whether this is the full story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-breath-of-the-wild-avoided-a-lot-of-unnecessary-bugs-through-careful-planning/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-br... Did the other recent big open world games (Witcher 3, Horizon) have similar issues when they were released?
- selectodude 8y agoBethesda has never released games that were complete. This is the worst of the lot, but Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 4 were all basically unplayable at launch. Some were unplayable after being fully patched years later and require fan-made patches. At this point, I don't get it.
- Art9681 8y agoI'm not sure why people say this. With the exception of Oblivion, I played all of those games at launch day and did not have any issues in any of them. In fact, I rarely experience bugs at all in my games (Bethesda or otherwise). I'm trying to figure out why. I am either extremely lucky or people are making it seem like these bugs occur a lot more often than they really do. I don't know.
- grawprog 8y agoI've played skyrim on both an up to date patched pc version and a release version on my dad's unnetworked PS3. The difference was ridiculous. My dad never ended up finishing because of game breaking bugs. I couldn't handle playing it for long. It would lag or freeze randomly sometimes you'd have to just hold the power on the ps3 until it rebooted. A bunch of missions had bugs that stopped them from being completed. Tons of clipping errors that would leave you trapped or outside the gamemap. My updated one had a few of these but I could play for more than 20 minutes at a time. Also, I never played the release version of it but apparently my dad gave up on fallout 3 on his ps3 when a hacking glitch gave him unlimited stats and made the game pointless.
- nwmcsween 8y agoThis is ridiculous, companies and developers have to start taking some pride in their software. Games and software packages do not need to be 1/10th the size of a high end SSD.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- peatmoss 8y agoIsn’t most of the size in a modern game artistic assests like textures, dialog, etc.? That said, I don’t understand how bug fixes can be so big, because presumably the aforementioned art files would change substantially in the case of software fixes. Assuming that I’m mot wrong about the proportion of a modern game being art, that lends credence to the idea mentioned elsewhere in this thread that there was straight-up missing content in the original release.
- sigi45 8y agoIt also takes 10% of a normal SSD. But only 4% of a HDD. Your problem is what again?
- mberning 8y agoFallout 4 was a disgrace in terms of quality. This seems to be carrying on the tradition.
- rahkiin 8y agoToday we announced the size of our new game as being around 8GB. Someone responded with ‘that sounds a bit small’.