6 Video Game "Fixes" (That Actually Broke Everything)
A fix so good that it drops your player-base from thousands to tens.
Video game updates are a worrisome endeavour. They take time, manpower and money from developers which could otherwise be used to create new, profitable content. With smaller studios this becomes a real issue of time-cost versus reward.
If a perk doesn’t describe itself properly in the menu but still works as intended, that can wait until they sort out the issue of an assault rifle making the noise of an SMG.
Yet, when these problems stack up, this choice of cost against reward becomes increasingly apparent.
A common phrase in programming is, fix one bug and two more will appear. For older games or releases with less advanced coding, this is doubly so and can take huge hits on the game's health with every new big patch. Other times, developers just don’t test their builds thoroughly enough, missing an exploit here or adding an extra zero there.
In the end, though, it comes down to the player-base. Whether you’ve got thousands or millions of players, they’ll soon let you know when you fu**ed something up, even if such a bug benefits them. In light of that, these are 6 updates that broke more than they fixed.
6. The Culling – Streamlining
The Culling was a 16 player battle royale which did its best to go up against the likes of PUBG and Fornite. Many have done the same and with this space now boiling down to huge triple-A developers such as Treyarch, it’s no wonder that independent studio Xaviant felt the struggle.
Initially in early access, The Culling charmed players with its inclusion of crafting and trap-making, on top of the overall loop of randomised items in a free-for-all setting. However, as the numbers dwindled, Xaviant did everything they could to patch in fixes for the game that would unintentionally lower the already low player count.
Finally, they released an update that was too much for fans, streamlining the experience so that randomness, the main drawing point of battle royale games, had been swapped for player choice. In theory this sounds fine, you don’t have to worry about that drop being a garbage special weapon or fiddle around with boring, badly designed perks.
In practice, this was not the case. Random drops were swapped for weapon stores. Lesser perks were completely changed or removed.
On top of this, the devs took up a big obsession with cosmetics, rather than tending to core gameplay mechanics and making sure that the endgame portion of the game was as exciting as possible.