Patcher Perfect: A History of Updates in Video Games
Originally published September 2017A year ago, I played armchair marketing strategist/armchair speculator for the game, No Man's Sky, and why it received so much backlash when it was first released. There was a multitude of reasons that the game experienced such hatred and ire from a large population of pissed-off players. Many felt that the promises made by the developers at Hello Games went unfulfilled at launch. People were expecting No Man's Sky to be the ultimate exploration game with no need to play anything else that would ever come out because it was going to be so huge that there would be no end to the fun. It was somewhat unrealistic to expect so much from a single game, but the developers certainly didn't do enough to dampen expectations. Now that a year has passed since the game first launched, the developers have patched it multiple times and the current game is very different from what it originally was. Having still not played it, but still full of opinions and thoughts like a typical person on the internet, I'd like to play armchair analyst once again.
No Man's Sky is not the main subject I want to discuss, though. It is just one of the most recent and polarizing examples for the discussion. What I want to talk about is one of the big factors that led to NMS's downfall. It has to do with the fact that No Man's Sky, was not really a finished game when it was released.
The nature of a game's "finished" state has changed so much in the past few years with how patches and updates to a released game can significantly change a user's experience. The very idea of a "release date" is vastly different in today's world than what it was only 10 years ago when it comes to video games. A game is never finished anymore, it just becomes available in "early access," and then it is patched and updated until the developers don't feel like it anymore. Post-release updates make reviews of a game somewhat moot within a few weeks, and early access almost eliminates the point of a release date. It's something that's so new, had No Man's Sky been "released" a few years later in the state it is now, or had it been clearly been recognized as an "early access" title, people might have been more accepting of its failures.
Image: Hello Games
While I may have opened up the discussion with No Man's Sky—I mentioned it mainly to post links to previous articles in this intro section—I'd like to focus on the way in which video games have been released up to the latest generation and how it's changed with the help of the internet. That's right, we got another multi-part video game rambling feature!
What is a Release Date?
It's a silly question, right? Even if you didn't know anything about video games, you know what a release date is for any sort of product. Typically, it's the day something becomes publicly available to consumers. A movie is "in theaters, August 8th." A book is available "for sale on Amazon September 15th." Hounds of Innsmouth's new album may not be released till next year ever. These are release dates, some more vague and unlikely than others. Video games and their inherent improvements from digital updates and patches have done a lot to shake up the definition of the term. However, they were just like every other product for a while.
Going all the way back to the 1980s, with the Atari 2600 as the home console of preference and arcades bustling with activity, games came out when they came out. They didn't necessarily come out when they were done, which is why there was a video game crash that came shortly after Atari's reign, but they had release dates in which they would be made available to the public. A developer would work on a game for however many months or years and when they finally thought it was ready for the general consumer, it was released. Naturally, as the market grew and evolved, the development process of video games changed. Publishers became a thing and the developers weren't calling the shots when a game was released. It was the decision of the publisher as to when a game needed to come out, which meant it was the developer's job to finish the game on schedule.
"Finished" is a term that has since lost its meaning in the latest generation of games. Much like how George Lucas viewed his films, games are never finished anymore, merely revisited and updated. However, for over 30 years, games were like any other entertainment medium. When an album came out, or a movie was released, or a video game became available for purchase, it was assumed by the general public that it was complete; no more work was necessary in building the product. As in other entertainment mediums, there were the occasional instances in which the same product would see an update with some minor changes, like a director's cut. For the most part, once a game was out, that was it.
Still, the idea of a release date has been somewhat loose with video games from the early days of development. Games would often have multiple release dates based on the region and the system in which the game would be released. Often, a gem would come out in its native country (mostly Japan), and then it would be revisited by the developers for when the game would be released overseas. Sometimes this revisit would be used to fix bugs. Sometimes it would be used to port a game over to a different entertainment platform, and in the process, maybe some new content or mechanics would be added. Sometimes the game may have needed to be translated to suit a different audience and the gameplay would be changed to match the expected market of the region.
For example, there's the original Metal Gear that was originally on the MSX2 Japanese computer but was then translated and ported over to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). This translation and port to the NES was seen as wildly inferior to the original, making them almost completely different games. There's also Toki Doki Panic, which was released in Japan in 1987 but would be re-skinned and re-released in the US as Super Mario Bros. 2 the following year. Then there's the Final Fantasy nonsense with how II, III, and V weren't released in the US until much later, so to keep the numbering consistent for American sales in the ‘90s, IV was changed to II and VI was changed to III. Confusing right?
Still, these examples aren't what we think of when we talk about updates in the modern sense. Updates today are more gradual and with minimal impact, while the updates of the past would be more drastic. In cases like Metal Gear, you could argue that the difference between the two releases is so large that they're not even remotely the same game anymore. The core mechanics are there, but the level design, presentation, and storyline have been altered to fit it onto a less powerful console. In this regard, you could argue Metal Gear was more of a redesign than an update, though they may still have used some of the original code. As for Super Mario Bros. 2, watching the gameplay of that and Toki Doki Panic leaves no question in anyone's mind that they're the same games with a different paint job. And the Final Fantasies that made it to the US were little more than translated and renamed versions of the same games.
Image: Konami
Whatever the change or the reason, once the final version was out, that would be it. Most of the time, developers wouldn't revisit a game that was already out and available; they'd move on to the next project or start working on the sequel. Mega Man, for instance, was a franchise that barely changed all the way up to the 6th game. It had small little tweaks with each sequel to add some new mechanics, but the presentation and the core gameplay of Mega Man didn't change for years. If Mega Man were released in today's market, it would start with the first game and the sequels could all be DLC add-ons to the same game, simply because of how much they resembled each other.
Image: Capcom | Not a big leap in presentation
Excluding PC games, up until the days of the PlayStation 2, there was rarely ever a reason for a game to be revisited by its developers once it was considered complete and released in all of its intended regions and hardware. There were, however, exceptions to the rule.
Come back next week to see which exceptions I'm talking about and which game developer took the process of updating a little too far.
Do you know of any other examples of game updates of old that I left out? Any corrections to the information I mentioned? Tell me what you know in the comments!
Read my No Man's Sky Rambling series here:
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