Creator of the Twisted Metal and God of War series, David Jaffe, is often very vocal about his opinions; anyone who follows his Twitter account should be well aware of that. During a GDC “micro talk” panel, Jaffe gave a five-minute speech about how developers should use patches.
Jaffe wants to cut down on the time between a gamer putting a disc into the PS3 and actually playing the game. To achieve this, he suggested that there should be a cap on the number of times a developer can patch a game.
Hardware manufacturers, I feel, should only allow one to four updates to the software per game per year. None of them should come within the first one to two months the game is shipping.
He continued by commenting on earlier game development.
When I first started, when the disc was shipped it was our last chance [to get rid of bugs] off the bat. If developers could make it work then, then today they can at least make sure our games don’t have to be updated the first week they hit shelves.
In addition to criticizing current game developers, Jaffe offered some ideas to cut down on waiting time. He suggested that, in the future, gamers could choose an option to load the last save directly from the XMB. Which would mean that gamers would no longer have to sit through title screens, opening cutscenes, or main menus – something that we would definitely welcome. We don’t know if any developers will follow Jaffe’s advice, but now it can be said that Twisted Metal hopefully won’t have a day one patch.
[Via]
