The technology in video games has advanced in such a way that it has allowed developers to do things that they’ve never been able to do in past generations. One of the biggest ones is giving “patches” to games to fix big errors and glitches. And while that’s good, this has also led to the birth of “Day One Patches”, where a game is not “complete” at launch and requires a big patch or two to be truly playable. Gamers fear this with all upcoming titles, especially ones the size of Anthem.
After all, given that Anthem is meant to be both open-world and massive in scope, it would be a perfect candidate for a Day One Patch. But, according to Producer Mike Darrah in an interview with US Gamer, that wouldn’t be the case:
“Yeah and you know one of the things that I think has been a relatively recent lesson in the live-service space is that before last year I think you saw games coming out that were relatively incomplete. [Games] that then sort of built up and built their fan base over time and grew and got bigger. And I think in the last year you’ve seen a couple of games launch that were in that same kind of space that you would’ve thought, ‘Okay this should be fine’ that then didn’t work out.”
He added, “People came in and they went, ‘there’s not enough here’ and they left. So, I think it’s partially because the competition in the space has gotten harder people are less willing to just kind of hang out and hope that stuff is going to come along. There are other things for them to do. So, I think for me a big lesson has been that… it’s that you need to have enough on the first day so that there’s a reason to stay. And when more is coming then that’s great. That’s amazing. But I’m not just going to hang out and wait for the game to become complete. It has to be complete from day one.”
Anthem releases on February 22nd.
