8 ms·

>"Some of you might also be wondering what these words mean in light of us saying we achieved gold master some time ago. Passing certification, or 'going gold',

>"Some of you might also be wondering what these words mean in light of us saying we achieved gold master some time ago. Passing certification, or 'going gold', means the game is ready, can be completed, and has all content in it. But it doesn't mean we stop working on it and raising the quality bar." No... that's actually exactly what it means. Going gold means the branch is cut, it's in the can, and discs are being printed. Just admit that you exaggerated for press coverage and get over it. No one really cares about another month delay, but lying about going gold is just bizarre.

NikolaeVarius 6y ago
Gold has meant nothing since Day 0 patches became a thing.
BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
They might actually be printing discs, though. Nowadays, multi-gigabyte day-one patches are commonplace, so all the disk is for is shipping art assets cheaply (and supporting legacy retail sales). So as long as the art assets are 95% done, that’s good enough to “go gold” and start printing.
- djitz 6y ago
  Nothing says “We don’t give a shit; you gave us your money” quite like having to wait a couple of hours for an update immediately after installing a game.
  - bloody-crow 6y ago
    This is a weird logic I don't understand. People who don't give a shit don't crunch after the game has gone gold to make last minute improvements and fix more bugs. People who care do.
    - djitz 6y ago
      This has nothing to do with the programmers hustling to get the game done and everything to do with their superiors.
      - bloody-crow 6y ago
        As if the superiors punched out and went home and told the engineers to keep going and fix more bugs. Software estimates are hard and superiors don't magically have more insight into when the game will actually be finished. It's all a gamble and sometimes you have to postpone the release or ship a buggy product.
sbarre 6y ago
I'm always fascinated by people who insist on applying their own interpretation of something to other people's lives/businesses/processes. Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new. I don't understand the fixation of catching people in an alleged lie.. What's the difference whether they genuinely underestimated the time required to do something _they've never done before_ (testing on so many platforms) or whether they actually, completely unreasonably, decided to lie to everyone about having gone gold? Not to mention that if they hadn't actually gone gold, there are tons of outside parties who would probably have realized it pretty quickly (given the production work that happens), and we'd all have found out anyways.
- merb 6y ago
  > Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new. no it is nothing new. is it better than it was in the past? probably not. I mean if I buy a fucking disk and need to redownload the whole content of the disk from the internet anyway, that sucks really hard, for a lot of people. especially for archiving purposes. how can it be that the game is like 40gb and needs a 40gb patch? what did you do past release? rewrite the game?
  - jpab 6y ago
    With asset build pipelines that do lots of preprocessing, compress everything, and pack things with a layout that tries to minimise disk seek time while playing, it's conceivable that relatively small changes in the source data can result in touching large amounts of the final compressed assets. But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur. Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.
  - selykg 6y ago
    these 40gb patches happen because they had to put assets in multiple times in such a way as to cause less seeking time on the internal hard drive. They're too slow this gen to be able to do this all without problems. So games would put various re-used assets in multiple places in the game's file bundles so that when you're in section A of the game it can access that file with all the other files of section A. And likewise it puts a duplicate in section B so that when you're in section B it doesn't have to seek to section A's files to find it, which would be slower. It sucks and caused some bloat in current gen games due to the duplication. Hopefully with these fast next gen SSDs that disappears.
aeturnum 6y ago
Gold just means you have a MVP that will pass certification on all platforms. It's content complete and it would, in theory, be fine to play all the way through without a patch. It allows manufacturing and distribution to begin. There are frequently many tweaks one should do to that product that companies will work on after reaching that point.
carlosrg 6y ago
They explicitly mention the delay is about the Day 0 patch, though, literally the sentence after the one you posted.
mdoms 6y ago
Is it illegal to keep working on a game after gold or...?
selykg 6y ago
This has changed so much over time. Par for the course these days is shipping a buggy mess as a GM. Then a massive as hell Day 1 patch to fix it all. I forget the exact details but there was a game this current gen that had a 40gb day one patch. I felt so bad for those that bought a disc version just to have to download a massive patch after installing the game.

NikolaeVarius 6y ago

Gold has meant nothing since Day 0 patches became a thing.

BurritoAlPastor 6y ago

They might actually be printing discs, though. Nowadays, multi-gigabyte day-one patches are commonplace, so all the disk is for is shipping art assets cheaply (and supporting legacy retail sales). So as long as the art assets are 95% done, that’s good enough to “go gold” and start printing.

djitz 6y ago
Nothing says “We don’t give a shit; you gave us your money” quite like having to wait a couple of hours for an update immediately after installing a game.
- bloody-crow 6y ago
  This is a weird logic I don't understand. People who don't give a shit don't crunch after the game has gone gold to make last minute improvements and fix more bugs. People who care do.
  - djitz 6y ago
    This has nothing to do with the programmers hustling to get the game done and everything to do with their superiors.
    - bloody-crow 6y ago
      As if the superiors punched out and went home and told the engineers to keep going and fix more bugs. Software estimates are hard and superiors don't magically have more insight into when the game will actually be finished. It's all a gamble and sometimes you have to postpone the release or ship a buggy product.

sbarre 6y ago

I'm always fascinated by people who insist on applying their own interpretation of something to other people's lives/businesses/processes. Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new. I don't understand the fixation of catching people in an alleged lie.. What's the difference whether they genuinely underestimated the time required to do something _they've never done before_ (testing on so many platforms) or whether they actually, completely unreasonably, decided to lie to everyone about having gone gold? Not to mention that if they hadn't actually gone gold, there are tons of outside parties who would probably have realized it pretty quickly (given the production work that happens), and we'd all have found out anyways.

merb 6y ago
> Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new. no it is nothing new. is it better than it was in the past? probably not. I mean if I buy a fucking disk and need to redownload the whole content of the disk from the internet anyway, that sucks really hard, for a lot of people. especially for archiving purposes. how can it be that the game is like 40gb and needs a 40gb patch? what did you do past release? rewrite the game?
- jpab 6y ago
  With asset build pipelines that do lots of preprocessing, compress everything, and pack things with a layout that tries to minimise disk seek time while playing, it's conceivable that relatively small changes in the source data can result in touching large amounts of the final compressed assets. But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur. Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.
- selykg 6y ago
  these 40gb patches happen because they had to put assets in multiple times in such a way as to cause less seeking time on the internal hard drive. They're too slow this gen to be able to do this all without problems. So games would put various re-used assets in multiple places in the game's file bundles so that when you're in section A of the game it can access that file with all the other files of section A. And likewise it puts a duplicate in section B so that when you're in section B it doesn't have to seek to section A's files to find it, which would be slower. It sucks and caused some bloat in current gen games due to the duplication. Hopefully with these fast next gen SSDs that disappears.

aeturnum 6y ago

Gold just means you have a MVP that will pass certification on all platforms. It's content complete and it would, in theory, be fine to play all the way through without a patch. It allows manufacturing and distribution to begin. There are frequently many tweaks one should do to that product that companies will work on after reaching that point.

carlosrg 6y ago

They explicitly mention the delay is about the Day 0 patch, though, literally the sentence after the one you posted.

mdoms 6y ago

Is it illegal to keep working on a game after gold or...?

selykg 6y ago

This has changed so much over time. Par for the course these days is shipping a buggy mess as a GM. Then a massive as hell Day 1 patch to fix it all. I forget the exact details but there was a game this current gen that had a 40gb day one patch. I felt so bad for those that bought a disc version just to have to download a massive patch after installing the game.