10 Baffling Changes Video Games Made AFTER Release
4. Patching In Sound & Subtitles - The Quiet Man
Patching a game to clarify the player's understanding should seem like a net-positive, right?
But The Quiet Man is no ordinary game - an action-adventure title in which players control a deaf protagonist, resulting in most of the game unfolding with minimal sound and un-subtitled dialogue.
In theory there was a great game here - by placing players in the shoes of a deaf character and forcing them to experience the world as he does, they'd have to rely on other senses and intuit visual cues to make sense of the crime thriller story.
But the spectacularly bungled story execution left most players and critics simply scratching their heads at the utter incomprehensibility of it all.
A week after release, developer Human Head Studios dropped an "Answered" patch which restored sound and subtitles to the experience, allowing players to finally figure out what the hell was going on.
Except, there wasn't exactly a sizable queue of players willing to replay this dreadfully dull three-hour experience to get answers to a story they weren't even remotely invested in.
And more to the point, it rather undercut the game's "deaf protagonist" gimmick to suddenly give us a sensory upgrade after-the-fact.
Given that The Quiet Man was a critical and commercial dud right out of the gate, the developers were probably better off just leaving it be.
At least without sound and subtitles, it'd live on as a truly inscrutable curio, whereas a patch which unlocked all the answers made it decidedly less interesting - and still equally awful.