DAITENKEN

Ougy Online

  • he/they

AKA obee58, irthomleniter
almost not a college student | obnoxiously white | ∞
early 20s but sure doesn't feel like it

music game all-rounder
DJMAX RESPECT V S10 Diamond I
NOISZ STΔRLIVHT Conqueror 12 (pre-3.123 tho)

current fuel: sweets and treats


PhormTheGenie
@PhormTheGenie

For whatever reason, back when Cyberpunk 2077 released, I downloaded the game via standalone installer. It's cumbersome, and difficult to maintain. Something like over twenty ~1 GB files, some of which corrupted on download and needed to be redownloaded. And without being connected to a service like Steam, this route of installation also meant that patching was solely my responsibility. It was a pretty miserable way to do things, and very inefficient compared to letting a service manage it for me. Every patch, every hotfix, every minor change was another installer that I had to seek out, download, and apply. I'd not even get notifications for new versions - I had to go looking.


So I did. I downloaded the installer files for every version from 1.0 forward. Every patch. Every hotfix. It currently takes up around 309 GB just for installer files. That's without having yet downloaded the newly released version 2.0 - Which, by the way, has no patch. Just a stand alone installer for version 2.0 at something like 38 GB.

So why would I do that? Honestly, Cyberpunk isn't even a game I consider all that great. It's not as awful as some panned it to be (gameplay wise), and I found it enjoyable in certain regards. But it's nothing phenomenal, and they certainly misunderstood the genre from a storytelling perspective. So why collect all these files?

Because now those files are completely unavailable online. Period.

If you go reading the forums for the game, there's a ton of folks talking about how version 2.0 completely messed things up for them. Broken save files. New bugs. Worse performance. And people are asking for a way to go back to the last stable version - And the answer is too bad, you can't. As far as the developer is concerned, that version no longer exists. Since version 2.0 changes a hell of a lot about the game, effectively a drastically different game just evaporated off the official website.

Forever.

It's pretty shitty.

When I was first downloading the game, I suspected something like this would happen. I surmised that there would be a reason to want to go back, or preserve outdated versions, and that access to them would be pulled.

It's not because I'm clairvoyant. It's because this. Just. Keeps. Happening.

Old versions of Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, etc? You sure can't get those anymore. Ditto for older versions of many popular online games - but those are dead and gone for good.

I don't know why I'm bringing this up. It just feels like it's a pretty shitty state of affairs. Why do we have to be the archivists? Mostly because no one else will.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @PhormTheGenie's post:

I remember when game companies would maintain a pretty extensive list of patches and patch installers. It's a pain, but as you've noted: the transition to essentially every game as a live service means this stuff just isn't treated as important any more. And it should be.

When it comes to neglect of history and the long tail, games are the worst by far. I wish the medium got the support that film preservation and restoration got.

It was always nice, to have everything that you could need regardless of version. I suppose we traded that for the automatic patching of services like Steam, but as we move forward, it becomes apparent that sometimes the older versions are necessary to have around.

I agree with you about history and the long tail, too. I kind of want to write up a post about one of my favorite online-only games that is, absolutely and unquestionably, Completely Impossible to play in the modern day. And why? Because some company decided it would be so.

The thing is, Steam has built-in support for letting players install an older version of the game, developers just need to enable it!

For example with Rimworld, I can go back to every major patch back to alpha13, which I am pretty sure was the first version to release on Steam

it infuriates me that "anything older than the absolute newest version will not exist anymore, by force of law" is now the current trend. iOS in particular has been a real sore point, and the devices have a mandatory call-back-home to force all devices to never accept a downgrade. Nobody wants to admit when (not if) they screwed up the latest version, and when it comes around to who's pointing fingers, it's the companies blaming the users for wanting the wrong version.

I hate it here.

(p.s., I'm borrowing the text of your post for a css crime, hope that's alright. it just, clicked in my head that this is kind of part of the premise of The Talos Principle and I like that game lol)

Apple really poisoned the water here by creating the app support expectation on iOS.

Combine all of:

  • Apple needlessly ending support for older devices
  • Apple ending support for building apps in older iOS versions in Xcode
  • Apple requiring that you use a recent version of Xcode to submit apps
  • Apple not letting you run multiple versions of the app (trains)

And you get a shitty experience and I hate it. I'd love to see Apple let developers run parallel builds like steam does.