In very rare cases, developers would quietly push a minor bug fix on consumers during a game’s second or third printing. A Super Nintendo or PlayStation 2 game had to work as described or else suffer the consequences of bad reviews published in magazines which, unlike blogs, could not be updated, and negative word-of-mouth.
The lack of an internet connection meant that, like other works of art, a game was a static piece of product that users either liked or didn’t. Before the online gaming craze that began in earnest with Sega’s Dreamcast and broke into the mainstream with the Xbox 360, games had to be released to customers in rock solid condition. Why spend precious time squashing bugs and balancing combat for the Gold Master that will ship on discs when you can just force players to do a 50GB Day One patch? That could shave a month off of development! Time is money!
#Fallout new vegas pipboy glitch Patch
Patient gaming, as a phenomena, came around the same time as video game companies embraced the downloadable patch as their solution to all their quality assurance (QA) problems. As I endlessly fell and had to physically restart my Xbox, I felt intense jealousy for “patient” gamers. When I phased through the ground of Night City during a recent marathon of Cyberpunk 2077, I remembered that there is a group of gamers who will never play anything but a perfected, stable version of this game.