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Originally Posted by JAYMO76 |
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 This is an open question to members of the community as well as the EA/Tiburon developers. I am interested in the philosophy behind game patches. I realise there will be a patch for sliders this year and that got me to thinking. What should game patches be for? There seem to be two divergent philosophies.
1. Fix the game and any outstanding issues not addressed in the development cycle.
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2. Add content, options, and fixes that could not be squeezed into the tight development cycle.
MY TAKE ON THE QUESTION:
From a simplistic standpoint I tend to go with option one. But, the overachiever in me says that the gaming model should change to reflect the technology available. Games should have more than a three month window. I would love to see additions made via the patch that would keep the game new and fresh. Most importantly though, the game would continue to develop after the completion of the development cycle.
Now, let's face facts... option two is probably not bottom line friendly... but just imagine how vastly games would improve. I love NCAA FOOTBALL and it's frustrating to see my fave series (NCAA) and my fave game (06) stray so far from what has made3 it great. Whatever steps can be done to improve the game need to be made... Let's go back to the old cliche from field of dreams: "If you build it he(they) will come." Give us our game back and we will ALL flock back to NCAA FOOTBALL.
P.S. i'm not looking for any personal attacks... I just want to see an open, friendly discussion on philosophy. That's my take... what's yours? |
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What we do is identify areas that we would like to improve (and can improve as patch content is limited) once we final the game and start working on them. A lot of this is gameplay tweaks that are shared between Madden and NCAA, but Madden still has a month to go. Then we identify patchable features/content we would like to do and start work on these.
Hopefully nothing comes back broken at this point, like a bug we missed. If we do identify a must fix bug, we have to drop the new features/content and work on the fix instead. Any work being done on additional features will be resumed and if no more patches are planned, they will be included in the next iteration of the game.