With today’s update, the story of Icarus comes to mind. The first update in April was <10GB and this one is close. Many things are addressed and fixed, but other things are left broken or new issues are cropping up.
In many tech fields, it is incredibly common to do small upgrades/patches more frequently for very good reasons; this allows for time to test the single new variables that have been added (a good thing to consider when dealing with multiple OSes, hardware configurations, etc.), pushing the patch and addressing anything that slipped through the cracks. Obviously, when you push forth an update that is so large and encompassing, you’re going to miss some technical issues.
With that said, if incremental updates throughout the month were implemented instead of one massive monthly update, results would likely be better on the user-end. This still allows for new features to be added, bugs to be squashed, etc. but lets users see progress being made more quickly. These giant monthly patches are leaving too much space between bug fixes, increasing player frustration, and it only gets worse when new problems crop up.
PS4 users cannot even start the game now, so they’re just going to be furious. Especially when they see that dev time was spent on things such as putting ticks into houses. PC users saw a patch knocking Windows 7 off altogether, yet saw dev time being utilized on adding heartbeat noises. Now, imagine if they saw a single patch coming through a week after a previous that was, for example, “fixed robots clipping though walls and bunker missions actually work now. Next week we will add insert feature here.” Frustration would decrease exponentially and these smaller patches obviously are significantly easier to test and push.
Please, for the sake of your customers and fans, consider the benefit of more properly prioritizing your upgrading/patching schedule. Allow your devs to have a weekly focus instead of drinking from a digital firehose. I would really like to play this game again and in it’s current state that is a risk of seeing more frustration than enjoyment. Thanks for all the previous entertainment and (hopefully) future hours as well.
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Yes, other devs have more frequent updates and are better at addressing many features at once, but the GZ dev team is very small compared to those, and you also have to consider that they have to release those patches on three different platforms, which means a) the dev team is split on three platforms, b) the QA team has three times as much to test before they can say the update is good and c) each update needs approval from sony and microsoft before it can be pushed on their platform, if they don’t agree, you have to fix it and resubmit it.
All those factors considered, it’s impossible to push updates each week. I’m honestly fine with fleshed out updates each month. There’s just not much we or they can do here.
I’m probably going of topic a bit, But I would love the ability to play offline on ps4 but I can’t, i Don’t know if they have fixed in this 1.05 patch, But as of 1.04, you can’t.
When you load the game online it recognises you as a player by your user name, But if your offline the game doesn’t recognise you as a user at all.
I’ve checked on the ps4 and compared where it saves online and offline and it’s the same, offline you don’t see the symbol top right, But if you check when it last saved it matches up to when it should, So it saves, But when you close the game down offline and then reload the game offline, The save file is still there but it doesn’t recognise the save file or you as a user, So you basically have to restart, which is pointless, Every game I ever played offline always recognises me as a ps user, But this one doesn’t.
Anyway 
In ANY typical information tech industry, you have 3 tiers; Dev, QA and Production. With that in mind, dev makes patches, updates, upgrades, etc. QA obviously promotes new code to their separate servers and tests the crap out of it. Once it passes QA, it is promoted to prod. With this comparison, consider PSN/XBL/Steam production.
Any time development produces code, they have the obvious concern of their variables negatively effecting the existing production-tier functions, thus the QA tier. One of the easiest ways of avoiding any kind of kickback and constant reworking is to do it piece by piece. Small updates obviously help with this. This isn’t an “other devs, their size and money” comparison, its a “stick with the proven methods” comparison. Throwing everything at the wall and hoping it all sticks could be considered careless and amateur. This team is none of those things.
Yes, they have to test on all three systems. However, testing a few new variables on all three OSes at a time before promotion and implementation is clearly going to assist them with quality control. You can mention “QA process” until your face is blue, but that department is clearly lacking when droves of people can’t even start the application with it crashing.
Sony’s certification process is a same-day (from what I’ve read) and clearly is lacking or the current patch crashes wouldn’t be taking place, so that should be off the table as a variable. MS is ALWAYS going to be an issue because they’re control freaks. Steam is very dev friendly. If you want to talk about cost of promoting code for updates, then consider that Steam is free, Sony is in some instances and MS will basically charge you for using air in front of their products. However, this is also the price of doing business. Fix it right the first time and this cost is negligible at worst.
At the end of the day, the process needs to be cleaned up to keep the software alive. Plenty get it right, and plenty get it wrong. Being okay with the “fleshed out updates” is only okay when the flesh isn’t necrotic.
Until this ship is righted, I’m eagerly awaiting @TherotcoD traveling to the moon via heinous explosions. DO IT.
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il Be Back ’ just dragging the Frezzer into Mancave, 
Science time, 
