AAA Patching for a $70 game: beginners guide

[Rastlaff]

EA & Respawn, could you you PLEASE take this post into consideration once and for all and use separate patch packages (as well as ensure backward compatibility from the executable) to allow people to remove your patches which are not working properly and degrading the game more than fixing it! It's not an option nowadays, it's a requirement.





Patches for games nowadays are as unacceptable as the games themselves and even AAA developers seem to be not reading basic recommendations and not using basic UE tools to do things properly.

UE devs are saying Steam is crap on patching, Steam is saying devs are not reading - both are right, but instead of pointing fingers both MUST do something about it already!

A fresh patch arrived yesterday and it took 2 hours in the evening and 2 more hours in the morning to apply on a modern PC with fast M2 drives! And yes, there was more than enough free space!

Let's look at Steam recommendations for devs:
-Ensure asset changes are localized within the pack file as much as possible
-Avoid shuffling asset ordering with a pack file
-limit pack file size
-group assets by level / realm / feature into their own pack files, and consider adding new pack files for updates instead of modifying existing ones
-do not include any original filenames or file / build timestamps for each asset

Patch is 3Gb in size. For a game that already takes up ~120Gb of disk space it's nothing, so just use platform-agnostic separate _P package which UE supports by default and be done with it! There is no reason to repack the whole game!

But no, that 3Gb patch ended up changing 5 separate packages almost 30Gb in total.

And here we come to Steam: even if I do have Steam and the game installed on my fastest M2s with enough free space, Steam decides to use my basic slowest HDD just because it has the biggest space available. And there is no option to tell Steam directly which disk it should use for temporary files when patching.

Are those people serious? Supposedly being professionals and being paid for those things? Rising pricing on games by $10 and still not being able to do simple things properly?
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PS Also about the game: PC feedback is incoming. The game isn't bad at its core, BUT the PC release is a drama. Files are not optimized for PC at all. INIs are a joke - checked. Movement speed which is comfortable on console controllers is absolutely not for PC controls: you are forced to constantly run (they should have bound move speeds to mouse wheel instead of making it switch the laser saber modes - hope they won't "resolve" the issue by adding the stupid walk key, will be the cherry on the cake if they do).

[Flowmad]

*Just a little comment to bump this back on top

[Njall]

...what the hell. Yesterday's patch requires me to download like 50 additional Gbs. Which, atm, takes me 5+ hours and I can't do at once. However, if I stop it after downloading the first, say, 30 Gb, when I restart it steam tries to download all of the 50Gbs again...
Seriously?

[Loci]

Originally posted by Njall:

...what the hell. Yesterday's patch requires me to download like 50 additional Gbs. Which, atm, takes me 5+ hours and I can't do at once. However, if I stop it after downloading the first, say, 30 Gb, when I restart it steam tries to download all of the 50Gbs again...
Seriously?

no noob...*sigh*...

[Rastlaff]

Originally posted by Flowmad:

*Just a little comment to bump this back on top

Thanks, tried to go straight to the point ... it's becoming beyond unacceptable

[Revanov]

I got fast internet, what I do with all my UE4 games is whenever theres a patch, I uninstall and redownload the game, I found it usually much faster this way.

[wasteland_ghost]

Like the OP said, it's not a UE4 problem specifically. It's a problem of devs being too lazy to think a bit and organize their patching properly. At any rate, it's not a problem of customers - and definitely not at this price.

[MetalHev]

Originally posted by wasteland_ghost:

It's a problem of devs being too lazy to think a bit and organize their patching properly.

They didn't bother even releasing a playable game, imagine how low "patching QoL" must've been on the priority list.

[Rastlaff]

Hope they were taking into account what was said in that post about the new patch ...

[ko]

Game dev skill levels are at an all time low - maybe they crunched all skilled engineers out of the industry and into jobs with better pay/work conditions. I don't remember it being this bad. So much tech-trash released recently.

[Drake Ravenwolf]

Well said, but of course this would require devs open to doing better and here we have devs that attack the players and say it is our hardware that is the problem instead of taking responsibility for their own failings

[Rastlaff]

Don't worry, the best part of it is coming to NEXUS mods very soon if the patch is not working properly ...

[DogWater]

Originally posted by Drake Ravenwolf:

Well said, but of course this would require devs open to doing better and here we have devs that attack the players and say it is our hardware that is the problem instead of taking responsibility for their own failings

To be fair to the guys doing actual work at Respawn, the atrocious post you're referring to was written up by some PR incompetents at EA and vetted by some even more incompetent PR people. No technical staff in their right mind (or PR who have the slightest clue) would've ever dreamed up something so stupid.

[Drake Ravenwolf]

Originally posted by DogWater:

Originally posted by Drake Ravenwolf:

Well said, but of course this would require devs open to doing better and here we have devs that attack the players and say it is our hardware that is the problem instead of taking responsibility for their own failings

To be fair to the guys doing actual work at Respawn, the atrocious post you're referring to was written up by some PR incompetents at EA and vetted by some even more incompetent PR people. No technical staff in their right mind (or PR who have the slightest clue) would've ever dreamed up something so stupid.

Too many players gave them a pass for that... watery diarrhea of a post

[Rastlaff]

Originally posted by DogWater:

Originally posted by Drake Ravenwolf:

Well said, but of course this would require devs open to doing better and here we have devs that attack the players and say it is our hardware that is the problem instead of taking responsibility for their own failings

To be fair to the guys doing actual work at Respawn, the atrocious post you're referring to was written up by some PR incompetents at EA and vetted by some even more incompetent PR people. No technical staff in their right mind (or PR who have the slightest clue) would've ever dreamed up something so stupid.

Respawn was obviously putting a lot of love into that game: I tested it, played it, even with Ray Tracing turned on (and not "RTX™" !!!) ONE thing I do know being born at the times of Oric Atmos / ZX81 in front of me... They did not have time to finish it properly, optimizations and so on.

The real question is: will people from Respawn profit on Jedi Survivor income or it will only be those greedy managers who will repeat the same for the next title already in the works? Should we punish good Respawn developers which are probably already working on Jedi 3 and this time are allowed to use UE5?

[wasteland_ghost]

Star Wars: A New Threat Patch, Episode 2, The Empire Steam and co strike again with dead servers and amazing speeds and effectiveness. Will hopefully be able to play tomorrow at a current rate.