Regarding "Updates" for Brawl...(and why they won't be implemented IMO)

[garbage]

A lot of people have been tossing around the idea of the occasional "update" for Brawl, meaning little tweaks to fix overpowered characters and glitches. That would be great. But who here plays an online game for the PC? I'm willing to bet that game has a few patches. To fix some issues with the game. Not a million patches, but maybe 4-8, or even up to 10. If you want to play your friend online, you have to be playing on the same patch as them. Now, if Nintendo released a "patch" for Brawl, let's say every 2 to 3 weeks, it would be pretty difficult to get the millions of Brawl players all on one patch. Or even all on 2 or 3 patches. And a lot of people don't play Brawl religiously, so if they stop for a few months and notice 8 patches to download, thing could get pretty complicated. So I wouldn't hope for frequent patches, or updates, if I were you. Yet.

 

[2.72]

I was under the impression that patches were technically difficult on consoles, anyway. I don't think that the game is installed in the same way that a PC game is. You put in a disc and play whatever is on that disc.

Presumably, you cannot rewrite a game disc, and hence patches are not possible.

If I'm wrong about this, someone correct me.

 

[Youko]

Patches would generally be employed with something that has a solid harddrive, which the Wii does not have. And besides, the reason for this delay of Brawl's release is so the game can be as perfect as possible, thus making patches not that necessary...

 

[RyokoYaksa]

It is possible to "patch" console games in the form of a RAM-altering hotfix. This is exactly what devices like Action Replay do for their respective consoles already.

As long as you're simply modifying existing content, patches are very small and do not need to be sequentially downloaded. You can go straight to 1.8 instead of having to DL 1.1, 1.2, etc. The Wii does have the space to do this, but not whole new stages and characters, as that would be an overload of the 512 MB of memory available.

You are concerned that people playing via Wifi will not have the most current patch. Um... why? If they're going through the Wifi option then they'll be prompted to DL the latest patch by default before being able to play, just like an MMO. No worries here.

And yes, I would like patches for Brawl.

 

[Shiny Ivysaur]

Patches are a good idea. Implementation could be hard, but who knows? Maybe brawl will ship with a small USB stick to use as a patch hard drive thing.

 

[RyokoYaksa]

Patches can be done from the Wii's internal flash memory.

Storage mediums are not an issue.

 

[Kirby_M@ster]

Patches are good. Whenever I thought of it I always just assumed it would be happening, despite no real confirmation. It's just normal, and there's no real downside; you want to play online; you download a tiny patch first.

I figure it should be like STEAM (<3) where you just have the short download before you play whenever something is released.

 

[Chaosblade77]

It's possible but unlikely. I wouldn't complain if they did it, but I am also not hoping for it.

I also assume the Wii will have external harddrive support at some point.

 

[Chimchar!!!]

I gotta say to the OP, pretty much all your points are null. There wouldn't be an issue with getting everyone on the same patch (just make the d/l required first time you go onto wifi and it's up), patches would work fine on a console (it's been done many times before). The thing about Brawl is this also: There are gonna be people who play online, and people who don't. The people who do will get the patches, and the ones who don't won't. No big deal. They just have to make the patches mandatory if you ARE going to be playing online.

 

[Percon]

Yeah... I'm hoping that patches get implemented somehow for superior character balancing.

Though I'm not looking forward to the removal of some eventual glitches. Who didn't like Link's super jump? (got removed in 1.1 onward).

 

[Sonic_osi]

Patches will not happen regularly because it's a free online service, and its hard to patch wii compared to a easy platform like pc.

The amount of time and pay it takes to hire ppl for patches is a lot. Most games will only patch things like crashes and online connection issues because one minor tweak to the base gameplay can take months to fix. This wouldn't be much of an issue if it only took a few artist and QA, but programing and production ppl will force to money needed on gameplay issues pretty high in most cases. Not to mention how busy nintendo is on future titles, I doubt they have the resources to use on a free online game.


Edit: only patches I could see being put in are fixes to connection and maybe adding a rank system or match setup change. one large balancing update could happen.... but that would be a huge download on the wii, so it's not likely either.

 

[Xanderous]

OP doesn't know what he's talking about.

 

[SirPenguin]

While patches can be done, it's pretty unrealistic to assume so. If I remember correctly, there has yet to be a single Nintendo game (Or game on the Wii for that matter) to take advantage of such things.

 

[Break]

Phantasy Star Online for the Gamecube had patches. I think they were just written to the Guild Card File on the memory card, not sure though since it's been a while.

 

[Turtlefox]

This might be a little off topic, but SOCOM3 for ps2 was free, but there were several patches that were required to install if one was going to play online, and if you can save a patch in a little 8mb memory card, then I don't see why they can't use the Wii's internal memory. Also, sorry I couldn't find an example with any nintendo games, but GC had no online play so

 

[TheZizz]

Patches that fix bugs and add content are most likely out of the question. However, if the Brawl team had the motivation to do so I would bet that they could devise a system in which the array of values for speed, power, etc. of characters and moves are easily updated with tiny balance patches.

 

[saratos]

If you are on their servers.. you can patch it, right?

 

[iLink]

Patches that fix bugs and add content are most likely out of the question. However, if the Brawl team had the motivation to do so I would bet that they could devise a system in which the array of values for speed, power, etc. of characters and moves are easily updated with tiny balance patches.

Pitches that fix bugs would be one of the main reasons for using them I don't believe this is unrealistic, they could be relatively small just making slight balance changes and a few glitch fixes.

Also I don't think it would be a problem with people not having the right patch, it could prompt you to download it as soon as you engage in any online activity

 

[Fanewgie]

As awesome as content patches would be, and how much of another level it would take Brawl to, I really don't see it happening.

I played World of Warcraft from release up until.. April, I think is when I quit. Wanna know how much space I got back when I uninstalled the game? Over 20 gigs.

We know Nintendo has no intentions of releasing some kind of hard drive for the Wii, because of Activision's bout to bring downloadable content to the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3.

Unfortunately I think this will fall alongside voice chat, unless one of the reasons they delayed Brawl was to give Nintendo time to fine-tune such accessories.

 

[Tyrael64]

I'm pretty sure that patches, if implemented, will be done in the early morning (like 3AM) via the Wiiconnect24 service that keeps the Wii online and downloading even when it's powered "off".

 

[RyokoYaksa]

As awesome as content patches would be, and how much of another level it would take Brawl to, I really don't see it happening.

I played World of Warcraft from release up until.. April, I think is when I quit. Wanna know how much space I got back when I uninstalled the game? Over 20 gigs.

We know Nintendo has no intentions of releasing some kind of hard drive for the Wii, because of Activision's bout to bring downloadable content to the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3.

*Puts big, giant arrow to former posts from self in this thread to prevent having to repeat himself*

 

[Kirby_M@ster]

As awesome as content patches would be, and how much of another level it would take Brawl to, I really don't see it happening.

I played World of Warcraft from release up until.. April, I think is when I quit. Wanna know how much space I got back when I uninstalled the game? Over 20 gigs.

We know Nintendo has no intentions of releasing some kind of hard drive for the Wii, because of Activision's bout to bring downloadable content to the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3.

Unfortunately I think this will fall alongside voice chat, unless one of the reasons they delayed Brawl was to give Nintendo time to fine-tune such accessories.

That entire post was almost... completely irrelevent.

Where did World of Warcraft come into this?

 

[Tyrael64]

I think he's saying that if they have patches on Brawl, they will take up lots of space on the Wii's memory, which isn't much since Nintendo doesn't want to release a hard drive.

 

[Deagle]

Patches are good. Whenever I thought of it I always just assumed it would be happening, despite no real confirmation. It's just normal, and there's no real downside; you want to play online; you download a tiny patch first.

I figure it should be like STEAM (<3) where you just have the short download before you play whenever something is released.

STEAM?..... <3 :D

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Spoiler

Team fortress 2

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[psyniac_123]

Not really seeing the point. Sakurai is probably using this extra time to clean up everything so we won't NEED a patch.

 

[Youko]

Everything has pretty much been answered by RyokoYaksa, thanks.