Dead or Alive 4 Patch Released

One of the banes of console game developers is the immense pressure that is on them to produce titles that are free of major issues, bugs and glitches before launch. In usually rare cases, as many game console owners know, some games do have disturbing issues within them. (Case in point: Tomb Raider-Angel of Darkness) The reasons for these games going to market before they are ready are primarily based upon meeting tight deadlines. There are setbacks in production, and there is simply not enough time to develop the game properly or fix all the problems. In the PC world, this isn™t as much of an issue because of the ubiquitous patch. Games which aren™t totally ready to ship are shipped anyway because the bugs can always be addressed by releasing a patch. Oftentimes, several patches are released during the early course of a game™s life before it is basically stable. The console world has never had the ability to get fixes because the games are hard-coded onto the disk. This was true, until now. Microsoft has announced that it has released the first ever console patch for a game. Dead or Alive 4, will receive a mandatory patch for the Xbox 360 game. The patch is not an upgrade, but is primarily a bug fix. Some gamers were reporting, last October, that whole game saves were disappearing without warning. This is good and bad news for 360 owners. Those who have a hard drive on their 360s will be able to directly download the patch to their drive from Xbox Live. Those who purchased the core system, which did not come with a hard drive, will have to save the patch on their memory card and run DOA4 from this card every time they play the game. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. If Microsoft has entered the realm of releasing patches for their next-gen games, it may open the door for developers to become a little more lax in their duties in releasing games that are as issue-free as possible”they can always release a patch. With Sony and Nintendo getting ready to release their next-gen consoles, will they also consider this avenue of fixing games that have already been released, by issuing patches? At this point, no one knows but console gamers who once took solace in the fact that released games were as complete as possible at launch, may start to wonder, now that patches have arrived for game machines as well.