A fellow indie developer posted a blog post defending patches over on his blog Rampant Coyote.  He does a pretty good job of stating that patches are a good thing.

All of the people that complain about developers releasing patches for their games really need to realize one thing.  Patches are a tool and like most tools they aren't inherently good or bad.  It depends on how you use them.

The reason that a lot of people don't like patches is because some companies have shipped buggy crap too early in the past and used patches to fix the mess.  This is a bad practice for the long term.  In the short term, you will ship on time, hit your marketing window, and might make a lot of initial sales.  However, in the long run I think this attitude will eventually catch up to you.

There are plenty of responsible, good ways to use patches though.  Some companies test well, release stable products, but still choose to release patches.  Why?  Because you can smooth out some of the rough edges that you didn't know you had, you can fix the small bugs that only hundreds or thousands of players can find, but more importantly you can see exactly how your actual gamers are playing the game and adjust the game to fit exactly what they want.  You can add more content, you can make moding the game easier, you can balance the gameplay to suit your specific audience better, and there are many other things that you can do to support your community.

Unfortunately, we've seen too many companies abuse patches so they have gotten a bad rap.

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I hope everyone has had a good holiday and I hope everyone has a great 2008!

It's been a little quiet here for the last week, because I actually took some time off for a change.  Apparently I should work less, since a lot of good things happened last week: a new interview, another good review, Depths of Peril got GameTunnel's RPG of the year award, and it got runner up in GameTunnel's game of the year.

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Here's my interesting perspective about Duke Nukem Forever.

Once long, long ago (1996) in a place far away (Garland, TX) some people that were working on the Duke Nukem series and I believe had started working on Duke Nukem Forever, quit 3D Realms and started Hipnotic Interactive.  A couple years later these guys had shipped a Quake expansion and had changed their name to Ritual Entertainment.

During these 2 years I was working at Nortel and working at a game startup working on an RPG.  The startup wasn't going to work out and I was bored at Nortel, so I decided to get into the game industry full time and there was this cool company called Ritual nearby.  So I started working at Ritual in late 1998.

In the next 6 years that I worked at Ritual we shipped Sin, Heavy Metal: FAKK 2, Blair Witch 3, Elite Force II, Counter-Strike XBox/Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Delta Force: Black Hawk Down.  We also helped out on numerous games like Alice and 25 to Life and had a few game cancelled on us.

At this point in time I really want to work on an RPG, so I leave Ritual (2004) and setup Soldak Entertainment and start working on Depths of Peril.  Three very, long years later we finally ship Depths of Peril.

A few months after that Duke Nukem Forever releases a new trailer.

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RPGWatch http://www.rpgwatch.com/ has a cool Indie RPG of the year poll.  Do us all a favor and go vote.  Hopefully you will vote for Depths of Peril, but if not at least vote.

I say cool because indie games don't get much press attention, so a poll specifically about indie RPGs is cool in my opinion.

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