Patching that itch

As you may or may not know, I recently finished the fantastic XBLA game 'Splosion Man. Well, I finished the single-player mode, anyway. I had every intention of grabbing a buddy and jumping into co-op, but with no one nearby who wanted to play with me, I turned instead to Xbox Live. My good friend Brian seemed eager to join in the fun, but before he handed over his MS points, I stopped him, having remembered something important:

It was from a recent episode of the Joystiq Podcast, and was brought up when Ludwig Kietzmann was talking about 'Splosion Man. Apparently, the online co-op mode has a few issues, and I don't just mean small glitches, but rather game-stopping bugs that make it impossible for players to properly co-ordinate with each other. A little research shows that he isn't the only one suffering from these problems, so it looks like we're in need of a patch.

Thankfully, I stopped Brian before he purchased the game, but we weren't always this lucky: A couple of years ago, the two of us were looking for something to play so we turned to the XBLA. I'd tried a demo of the recently-released Assault Heroes, and told him that it would be awesome with two people. We each handed over our 800 MSP (that's ten bucks, for all you non-360 gamers), and started playing. Except that actually we didn't. We tried, but could never get the game to start once we'd connected to each other.

It turned out that Assault Heroes had some serious issues with it's online play, and no-one could get it to work. Our afternoon was effectively ruined, but we hoped the problem would soon be patched so we could try again later in the week. Unfortunately, it wasn't patched later that week, nor even later that month. It was many months before the game received it's necessary update, by which point we had long ceased caring. Sure, we played it once or twice, but weren't nearly as enthused as we were half a year ago when we bought it.

So are these two games isolated incidents among a sea of 100%-working releases? Sadly, no. Last year's XBLA title Castle Crashers also shipped with broken online play, as did the recently-released PSN game Fat Princess. Thankfully, it didn't take Titan Studios long to patch Fat Princess (it went up today, actually), but the same can't be said of Castle Crashers, which took developer The Behemoth four whole months to fix.

So, my question is: What the Hell?! I know these are just downloadable games, but I paid good money with the understanding that I'd be able to play online. And I mean play online today, not six months from now when the developers finally get around to fixing all the issues. While full-priced retail games also ship with occasional problems, any game-stopping bugs would most likely be sorted out as soon as possible. Could you imagine what would happen if Halo 3 had shipped with broken online play and there no news of an upcoming patch? I'll tell you what would happen: Irate fans would storm the studio and hold the designers at gunpoint until they sorted out their mistake (believe me - Halo fanboys are crazy).

I know that online play is the hardest thing to test during development, but it's not like we're talking about an MMO with thousands of players all trying to connect at once, or even dozens of players trying to connect at once; we're talking me and my friend over a simple peer-to-peer network. So tell me, is this really a difficult thing to try out before the games make their way to the XBLA or PSN? Am I supposed to believe that the entire QA department missed these incredibly obvious bugs in all their time looking for such things?

And even if such bugs did slip past the entire programming staff, shouldn't a patch be top priority for the studio? People who buy their games early on are the most important customers, yet it seems that once they've handed over their money the companies don't care anymore. The way that Titan Studios handled Fat Princess seems to be the exception, but it shouldn't be; all developers should want their games to work as advertised. And if it turns out that the online play is unfixable, well, I think compensation is in order; not a full refund, but at least partial credit.

Since online gaming is only going to get bigger as the years go by, we have to know that developers are willing to stand behind their products and fix any issues as soon as possible. If not, they may find that people start spending their entertainment dollars on something a little more reliable, and then we're all in trouble!