Constant Patching

[de_lon'smusky]

I appreciate the work and effort that goes into trying to please all the complaints in here, truly. But I play it primarily on my SteamDeck (which does run surprisingly well considering the small APU). Point is, every time there is a small patch download like 300MB, it basically re-installs the entire game. This takes a long time, especially when it's on a MicroSD card and sometimes the game won't load for over an hour. I know, get a faster MicroSD or install to the NVMe, but I've put other favorite games on the NVMe and don't have enough room. Is there a way to keep the game from basically re-installing ever single time there is a few hundred meg patch?

That being said, I've already finished the game with two different endings and have started a third new-game so I still appreciate the work you guys do. This would be my only complaint. Thanks again.

[cyanic]

Yeah, this game is a patching nightmare. My card's free space came under the size of two whole copies of the game, and when Steam finalizes the update it just completely stops half-way with the ETA tending infinite and preventing any other game from updating. After a reboot, Steam indicates game files are missing and ends up redownloading several gigabytes of data. This happens again and now half the game's data is missing. I know this is more of a Steam issue with not gracefully handling out of space situations, but it's also completely within the power of The Invincible's devs to mitigate by merely splitting your data across a number of pack files. The game's not so open world that you gain any advantages from all the files being in one pack. Split it by chapter or something, and stop wasting our disk write cycles.

[de_lon'smusky]

I just don't want to ruin my 512GB microSD over a single game, and not be able to play anything while it updates. Might need to go to a USB-C spinning disk if it keeps up.

[Mr. Fusion]

6 updates in roughly 4 months is hardly "constant patching".

It appears that, for whatever reason, UE4 games prefer to use large package files, I've typically seen 4-6 GB per file. There probably would be a way to split and organize the content in them into smaller files that could potentially reduce the need of having to recreate such large files when they need to be patched, but given how developers of UE4 games prefer not to do so, there must be some technical limitation, drawback, or just excessive amount of extra work with that approach.

Games on Steam (and elsewhere) are meant for proper PCs. Handhelds will struggle with them due to their various bottlenecks, that's the tradeoff you accepted when decided to buy and use one. And while developers may decide to do the courtesy of taking some of those bottlenecks into account, it's additonal work that is not necessary for the primary platform, desktop PCs.

[de_lon'smusky]

Hey I agree -- it is a bottleneck on my part. Just none of my other games require ~38 GB to be written to the drive every other day. I play on PC, too. And it basically does the same thing. But I really do enjoy the game as you can tell by my PFP, background, and times I finished the story. Just was curious about the game requiring constant nearly re-installs every patch. Sorry if it came off negatively, I still love the game just didn't know if there was a way to amend this issue on my end is all.

[de_lon'smusky]

BTW, if you play on any Linux platform (SteamDeck or Linux PC) it updates way more frequently than "6 updates in 4 months." Even small, a couple meg patches require almost a full re-install. So maybe I should just install a Windows VM and see how that works.

[Mr. Fusion]

Something else is going on there then if you had more than the 6 official updates that were released. In that case, it's something specific to the Deck or SteamOS that causes additional file rewrites without the game itself having received an update. There is no indication of a native Linux build that would get separate updates, so what you get on Deck is the same Windows version everybody else gets, and that was only updated the six times the developers have actually announced an update.

[de_lon'smusky]

It might be the Proton versions I've installed or Experimental Proton causing it to re-write almost the entire game. So yeah, I suppose it could be my fault or a Proton issue. I'll stop complaining because clearly enjoyed the game, if you can't tell by my PFP and background lol.

[cyanic]

Originally posted by Mr. Fusion:

Games on Steam (and elsewhere) are meant for proper PCs. Handhelds will struggle with them due to their various bottlenecks, that's the tradeoff you accepted when decided to buy and use one. And while developers may decide to do the courtesy of taking some of those bottlenecks into account, it's additonal work that is not necessary for the primary platform, desktop PCs.

I disagree about this point, not about what the primary platform is, but just about making things reasonable. I wouldn't want the game to be rewrite 30GB of data (or more realistically, both writing and taking up an additional 30GB of space due to update staging) every time it needs to update on my PC either, regardless of how fast it is, because it's just wasteful. Just because the resources are there doesn't mean you should use it without abandon if there's a better way. It's like how modern browsers feel free to eat RAM just because most people have plenty of RAM.