one of the common lamentations of physical games these days is that "you're not even getting the full game because every game has a day 1 patch" and while that's absolutely true, my brain is broken and i think that's kind of kickass. granted i didn't think this way until i worked a qa job and saw EXACTLY how different the version on physical media can be compared to the day 1 patch version so i get why nobody else thinks this way, but it's fascinating to me somewhat similarly to the way prototype games are. it kinda scratches a little bit of the same brain itch.
like there's thousands of essentially unfinished builds of video games out there now, missing features and balance changes, having huge bugs that just barely squeak past being something that console cert would reject (or in a lot of cases, were rejected but got waived through by the manufacturer for the "gold" build under the promise it'll get fixed in the day one patch). the one that sticks out the most to me that i worked on was trine 4. the build that got through cert was sooooooo unpolished and busted compared to the day one patch. the fact that this is basically the case for every game released since the ps4 came out is, again, fascinating.
i realize this is an absolutely unrealistic desire but i would fuckin love if people started like, actively documenting the differences between the physical version builds and the day one patch the same way they document unused stuff on tcrf. yeah it'd take a non-feasible amount of people that have 1) an incredible amount of time 2) an incredible amount of passion for whatever game they're looking at 3) an incredible amount of knowledge of said game to be able to pick out what's different but fuck man it's hard not to feel like it's an untapped goldmine of recent game development history
