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I was just thinking about this today, I know CoD2 was patched, but I havn't got that so I don't know how it panned out, but how the heck does this work?
I know that Oblivion will be receiving a patch, but it seems to me to be a horrific kludge. Consoles don't install games like a PC does, on the PC all the assets and code are stored compressed on a CD/DVD, during the installation process they are transferred and decompressed to your PCs hard drive, and are then pulled from there into RAM to allow play, on a console, the assets are effectively pre-installed on the DVD in an uncompressed form, and streamed straight from the disk into the RAM, obviously a hard drive can be used as swapfile to speed things up.
Here's the thing though, on a PC the installation is dynamic, if bugs need to be fixed or enhancements made you can simply alter/replace the existing files with little difficulty, but on a console the installation is static, you can't alter/replace the files.
So, to patch a game on a console, you have to download and store the altered files separately, and then replace the originals dynamically as they are streamed off the DVD.
That really sucks, firstly because there is simply no way that that process can work without hurting performance, and secondly because over time the modified files stored on the Hard-Drive are going to build up and possibly become an issue.
There are only two alternatives that I can see, one, release code-perfect games (or at least close enough that any problems are minor and forgettable), this will not happen, two, release updated Media with the corrected files, I can see this happening easily enough, where basically after the game has been patched they make a new master which is used for subsequent Media production, though obviously people who bought the game with the original bugged version are SoL.
This is something that genuinely concerns me about how the "next-gen" console market will develop, it was clear that this was going to be a problem from very early on, and MS did say that live was not to be considered a safety net for shitty QA, but I think we all knew that wasn't going to fly, I mean, MS needed EA and Bethesda to put COD2 and Oblivion on the X360 way more than EA or Bethesda needed to be on it, so they were always going to bend over.
Hopefully stuff that is more reliant on the Xbox360 market (gears of war for instance) would be motivated to have higer QA standards, but I'm not sure I'm willing to tolerate this kind of screwing around on consoles, the whole point of a console is that you push a button and it just works, if they degenerate into the same patchathons that haunt PC games I'll be mightily peeved.
Just saying.
I know that Oblivion will be receiving a patch, but it seems to me to be a horrific kludge. Consoles don't install games like a PC does, on the PC all the assets and code are stored compressed on a CD/DVD, during the installation process they are transferred and decompressed to your PCs hard drive, and are then pulled from there into RAM to allow play, on a console, the assets are effectively pre-installed on the DVD in an uncompressed form, and streamed straight from the disk into the RAM, obviously a hard drive can be used as swapfile to speed things up.
Here's the thing though, on a PC the installation is dynamic, if bugs need to be fixed or enhancements made you can simply alter/replace the existing files with little difficulty, but on a console the installation is static, you can't alter/replace the files.
So, to patch a game on a console, you have to download and store the altered files separately, and then replace the originals dynamically as they are streamed off the DVD.
That really sucks, firstly because there is simply no way that that process can work without hurting performance, and secondly because over time the modified files stored on the Hard-Drive are going to build up and possibly become an issue.
There are only two alternatives that I can see, one, release code-perfect games (or at least close enough that any problems are minor and forgettable), this will not happen, two, release updated Media with the corrected files, I can see this happening easily enough, where basically after the game has been patched they make a new master which is used for subsequent Media production, though obviously people who bought the game with the original bugged version are SoL.
This is something that genuinely concerns me about how the "next-gen" console market will develop, it was clear that this was going to be a problem from very early on, and MS did say that live was not to be considered a safety net for shitty QA, but I think we all knew that wasn't going to fly, I mean, MS needed EA and Bethesda to put COD2 and Oblivion on the X360 way more than EA or Bethesda needed to be on it, so they were always going to bend over.
Hopefully stuff that is more reliant on the Xbox360 market (gears of war for instance) would be motivated to have higer QA standards, but I'm not sure I'm willing to tolerate this kind of screwing around on consoles, the whole point of a console is that you push a button and it just works, if they degenerate into the same patchathons that haunt PC games I'll be mightily peeved.
Just saying.
QFT!