
Fallout 76 Day One Patch Is Larger Than the Game Itself - xhrpost
https://hothardware.com/news/fallout-76-day-one-patch-largerthe-game-itself-54gb
======
gregmac
The original version is apparently 45GB. I have no basis for saying this (I
have not ever worked in the game industry), but my guess would be that this
"patch" is really just the complete version that happens to be 11GB larger
(which is still significant, but much less than implying there's 54GB of
_additional_ content).

Put another way, let's say the actual delta between original and "patch"
version is 20GB (11GB new + some changed stuff). There's two ways to ship
this:

(1) Create a delta patch file that can be applied on top of the 45GB base
version (20GB)

(2) Repackage the entire thing into a complete install (54GB)

If you do only (1), anyone installing for the first time after the "patch"
version is released is downloading an extra 9GB and going through a longer
installation process.

If you are expecting that only a small percentage of your total install base
has downloaded the base game (45GB), it also really doesn't make sense to
produce both (1) and (2): You're incurring extra dev and testing time to
produce a package that saves you a tiny fraction of your overall bandwidth
usage. You also end up with an install base that is partially installed fresh
(2) and partially patched (1) which means subsequent updates also have to test
_both_ scenarios -- and if you had a bug in applying the patch, you have an
even harder time later to try reconcile it for the same reason.

If you do only (2), which is what I suspect this is, then anyone downloading
_after_ its release just downloads the 54GB version. The small percentage of
people with the initial version have to download an extra 30-ish GB, but it
saves you (as the developer) a bunch of testing time and risk.

~~~
CydeWeys
It's always amazed me how downright inefficient patching is, even though
better algorithms have existing for literally decades. The typical
implementation is that you have to re-download every single resource that's
changed, even if the resource is gigabytes large and only a bit in it has
changed.

Someone should calculate how many petabytes of Internet transfer capacity are
wasted annually solely due to bad algorithms used in performing software
updates. It'd be a surprisingly large figure.

~~~
pcwalton
One important issue is that if the patch program goes wrong, you can easily
end up with customers having broken installations that you _can 't fix_. The
patching software is how you distribute updates, so it _has_ to work. So
there's strong incentive to deploy simple techniques with fewer failure modes
as opposed to optimizing away every last byte of network traffic.

Firefox has historically shied away from complicated patch algorithms for this
reason among others. (To be fair, of course, we're also dealing with several
orders of magnitude less data than AAA games are...)

~~~
reaperducer
_you can easily end up with customers having broken installations that you can
't fix_

I sometimes wonder if games were distributed on cartridge again if they would
be more thoroughly tested before being released.

Plus, they'd load a brazillion times faster.

~~~
tracker1
TBH, I think that cartridges in this case could be replaced by USB thumb drive
keys... effectively a 128GB USB drive with a hardware key, and maybe even an
embedded OS. Updates download and apply into the Key. Take it with you, run on
any common x86 system, it could be great.

------
overcast
Rule of thumb with ANY Bethesda game is just wait 6-12 months after release,
and MAYBE it won't delete your saved game. No one ever learns with these guys.
Cool games, horribly buggy for most of its early life.

~~~
theandrewbailey
They patch some bugs[0], but they don't patch the shallow characters and
mediocre writing.

I played Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 side by side. By the end of Fallout 4, I
realized that I had been mostly playing the same game for 10 years (all of
Todd Howard's games since TES4[1]). I almost stopped playing near the end.
Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played. Todd Howard has lots of
work to do if I'm going to get another one of his games.

I'm watching Cyberpunk 2077 intently.

[0] They leave the "entertaining" ones in. It's usually up to modders to fix
what they can.
[https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-S...](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-
Sometimes-Doesnt-Fix-Entertaining-Bugs)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard#Works)

~~~
dmos62
What did you think of Fallout 3 and New Vegas in terms of writting? It's been
a long time, but I found them very entertaining. Different league than Fallout
4. I'm surprised it's the same creator.

Then again, there was a large gap between trying Fallout 3/NV and Fallout 4,
so maybe my perception changed.

~~~
theandrewbailey
> Different league than Fallout 4. I'm surprised it's the same creator.

Not quite. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas.

Fallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. The main
quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a
pathetic boss fight. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as
one dimensional with only one purpose in life. There are some cool side
stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist
simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part.

New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. Who's good or bad is
murky. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. Take
for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor.
There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you
significantly participate in them. The main story branches off into about 4
very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4.

Back in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas[0]. I
remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet!

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XsACXSVhWY)

------
DanielleMolloy
Breath of the Wild has a huge open world and was, in comparison widely bug-
free when it came out. Same goes for most Nintendo games. Also when it comes
to _pure gameplay_ they are much more polished than all the GTAs and RDR2s.
What are they doing differently?

A little insight here, not sure whether this is the full story:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-
br...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2017/03/13/zelda-breath-of-
the-wild-avoided-a-lot-of-unnecessary-bugs-through-careful-planning/)

Did the other recent big open world games (Witcher 3, Horizon) have similar
issues when they were released?

~~~
EpicEng
In what ways do you feel BotW was more polished than RDR2? Genuinely asking.
My only real gripe with RDR2 is the sluggish controls (by design in a Rockstar
game) and the lack of fast travel late game.

RDR2 definitely has more going on than BotW. BotW is large, but mostly empty.

~~~
DanielleMolloy
I believe we are on the same page and think you have just missed my "when it
comes to gameplay" here. The overall gameplay (of which controls and control
flow are a huge element) of Rockstar Games titles always had a lot to wish
for. Been wondering for some time how a AAA company got away with it for so
long, it rarely ever gets mentioned in reviews.

~~~
EpicEng
On that note, if Bethesda releases yet another TES with that God awful first
person battle system I am going to... well I suppose I just won't buy it.

------
bluetidepro
I get that this is singling out Fallout 76, but this is not that uncommon of a
practice in the modern era of console gaming. Heck, I think even the new Black
Ops 4 PS4 game only came with a small portion of the game on the physical
disk, and you had to download the rest.

For what it's worth, Playstation does have stuff in their policy that says
something along the lines that games that don't have online have to be on the
blue ray console physical disk, but since this is an online only game, it's
okay for the disk not to have everything.

I don't love this policy, but as someone who rarely even buys physical
versions of the game anymore, I don't really think it's that big of a deal.
The game is online only, it's not that crazy that you have to download stuff
on day 1. /shrug

EDIT: Plus, a lot of this comes from the publishers breathing down the game
devs necks to get the game out ASAP, esp before the holidays. So they put
super tight deadlines on the games, and then that requires the devs to work
out all the bugs and final code pretty much all the way up until the launch
date. It's not like the past where you had to get it right on the first try
for the physical copy because there was no way for a user to download a patch.

~~~
lostmsu
That reminds me of a recent Visual Studio 2GB patch just to change all
branding for VSO to Azure DevOps.

~~~
metamet
They should build a patch to update their documentation online, because they
change the names of services so often and rarely go through and update docs,
so you'll find confusingly outdated instructions and references without links
when troubleshooting.

I love VS Code, but I'm really happy I'm mostly off of MS for development.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Almost 20 years old, and still relevant: [https://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
A reference to Half-Life 2 perhaps? That 120MB mandatory launch day patch was
painful on dial-up!

~~~
dlbucci
Half-Life 1, you mean? 2 didn't come out until 2004, I think, and this comic's
from '98.

~~~
slavik81
A comic shockingly ahead of its time. While there were an increasing number of
games that were borderline unplayable without their Day 1 patch, I think that
comic was just extrapolating the trend. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that
game boxes came with nothing more than a CD key in them.

Back around when that comic was written, Computer Gaming World had a policy of
only reviewing the unpatched versions of games. That became increasingly
untenable and they eventually had to scrap the policy.

The parent probably figured it was Half-Life 2 because the HL2 launch was a
disaster. It was one of the first games requiring online activation and the
servers were completely overloaded.

------
nimbius
ah the bloated fix. As an engine mechanic, it reminds me of the nearly
criminal level of disposability in japanese cars.

I once had to service an acura with a recall for failed half shaft seals on
the drivetrain. no big deal, about an hour of labor and a trip through the
carwash but the computer in the service tech office kept telling me the part
was on order 2-3 weeks.

2 weeks go by and there is an enormous fragile package on my workbench. It is
an entire carbon fiber driveshaft assembly for the vehicle im working on, with
a replacement axle shaft. Both are required to be installed, with old parts
sent back to the guys at the factory. now my labor is 4-6 hours with an
alignment, balance and a test drive because some factory worker decided
picking up a final product was simpler than picking out a part from that
assembly.

I bet the Fallout 76 change is the same. Massive CI, its already being tested
at the final assembly level, just reinstall everything and dont worry about
it.

~~~
EpicEng
>now my labor is 4-6 hours with an alignment, balance and a test drive because
some factory worker decided picking up a final product was simpler than
picking out a part from that assembly.

Sounds like money in your pocket.

~~~
shard972
There is more to life than money in your pocket.

~~~
EpicEng
Sure... but while you're at work and being paid by the hour what does that
matter?

------
bdz
Wonder if they fixed that the gamespeed is tied to the FPS
[https://streamable.com/xd87p](https://streamable.com/xd87p) You look down =
less to render = more FPS = you run faster.

~~~
chrisper
It's not fixed. You can find videos about this on youtube.

~~~
bdz
Guess that's the price for using Gamebryo in 2018...

~~~
tjbarkley
They're using Gamebryo for TESVI...

------
rvense
I remember downloading Xilinx FPGA tools some years ago. You HAD to download
14.1.0 (or whatever) first, at 6GB, and then get the patch from that to 14.1.1
(another 6GB), and then to 14.1.2 (guess how many gigabytes!). They also
provided a combined download to go directly from 14.1.0 to 14.1.2... which was
12GB. Solid.

------
setquk
This sounds like the experience my kids had when they got their XBox One last
Christmas. It took literally 2 hours before we could play anything on it.

Software is now "ship it quick and fix it later" and that's wrong.

~~~
fhood
Ha! You expect that from a console, but I just bought a tv, and it had to
fucking _update_ before I could use it. And on top of that it wanted me to
create an account. For a TV!

~~~
dwighttk
burn it with fire

~~~
setquk
Totally agree. I don't actually have a Smart TV now. I've got a dumbass TV and
it's actually fast and reliable for once!

------
pleasecalllater
And I'm still working for a patch for Fallout 4 as it just closes when I enter
any key in the main menu only if I have internet connection. When I unplug my
computer or disable the network card, all works. I can enable it again when a
save is loaded. Internet is full of people complaining about that for over a
year or two... and still nothing happens, there is even no official workaround
information.

------
LinuxBender
How does Blizzard/Activision do their patching? In WoW, the game will go from
red (patching) to yellow (playable) usually before half of the patch is
downloaded and they are just modifying existing files that may be 10+GB. The
patches are usually quite small by comparison. (50MB to a frew hundred MB)

~~~
valarauca1
1\. Blizzard uses torrents where people downloading the patch also act like
P2P seeders (you can control the download/upload speeds).

2\. Assets are bundled via the zip like mechanism, and individual "zone maps"
are separated by hard loading screens. If you travel from 1 continent to
another in WoW you get a had loading screen as assets are unloaded, and
reloaded.

3\. Which continent you log into is the only one you _need_ data for, so as
you log in the client can prioritize certain assets higher then others.

4\. Blizzard/Activision have a lot of experience with this. In 2008 blizzard
had 10mil + players downloading 4GiB+ patches within 24hours so they've had a
while to tune and make adjustments as this is part of their core customer
experience.

5\. Large publishers don't general optimize for this, because the people who
whine about it largely already gave you their money and aren't likely to
refund/return (in some avenues it is impossible).

~~~
LinuxBender
That makes sense. Thankyou! I can see why non subscription games would not
bother with doing this. Maybe they just minimize their cost using CDN's.

~~~
tprnz
They don't do it because creating such a system that works well is a very,
very hard problem.

------
clircle
The 1TB SSD I bought for gaming in my new computer suddenly feels very small.

~~~
kungtotte
Destiny 2 was released for free a while ago.

I gave it a pass because it requires 100+ GB for a full installation.

For one game.

~~~
teddyfrozevelt
It's still free, and you can redeem it to your Blizzard account just by
opening the Blizzard app.

[https://news.blizzard.com/en-
us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-...](https://news.blizzard.com/en-
us/blizzard/22649418/destiny-2-pc-free-on-battle-net-through-november-18)

~~~
kungtotte
It's also still 100GB.

I have a 500GB drive for my games. I can't justify burning 20% of it for a
single game.

------
nwmcsween
This is ridiculous, companies and developers have to start taking some pride
in their software. Games and software packages do not need to be 1/10th the
size of a high end SSD.

~~~
peatmoss
Isn’t most of the size in a modern game artistic assests like textures,
dialog, etc.?

That said, I don’t understand how bug fixes can be so big, because presumably
the aforementioned art files would change substantially in the case of
software fixes.

Assuming that I’m mot wrong about the proportion of a modern game being art,
that lends credence to the idea mentioned elsewhere in this thread that there
was straight-up missing content in the original release.

~~~
zamalek
The way that Gamebryo content files work means that as you change more bits,
there is an increasing chance that you will need to download the whole content
file.

~~~
wtetzner
Didn't Bethesda stop using Gamebryo a long time ago?

~~~
zamalek
Nope, just a fork and rename

------
0xCMP
And this is after the first day of the Beta on PC they required players to
download the whole game again. I cancelled my pre-order after I figured out I
bought the Physical Disk version from Amazon, but I'm not entirely convinced
to buy the digital download I meant to get anymore.

I really didn't get enough time to play during Beta (often were during times I
had appointments or work), and while I would see players like Shroud having
tons of fun with friends , only a small number of my friends play on PCs and
few of those will get Fallout76. There were a lot of bugs which I hadn't seen,
but also I wasn't convinced this game is worth it.

On the other hand some of the gameplay I saw from Shroud showed that
complaints of quests being boring and enemies being too weak, while they might
have been true in the beginner areas, were not problems if you simply went to
the right areas of the map.

~~~
CelestialTeapot
Bad news: the physical disc is supposedly just a download code, so you'll be
pulling 50+GB regardless.

Day 1 patch or no, I don't like the practice of the physical media just being
a Steam/Uplay/Bethesda installer with a download code for the game.

~~~
abledon
This seems like some sneaky way to push out a couple more sprints of dev time
while shipping ‘physical copies’

~~~
teddyfrozevelt
When I got Portal 2 on disc in 2011, putting it in my computer prompted me to
download Steam so I could get it there. It's not like this is anything new.

------
rahkiin
Today we announced the size of our new game as being around 8GB. Someone
responded with ‘that sounds a bit small’.

------
rikkus
Turn tape over to side 2 and press play

------
linkmotif
If you’re a big publisher, what’s the cost for something like this?

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
And as a corollary - what does the cost look like considering it's being
served by Bethesda directly and not by Steam, as would be typical for a AAA
game?

------
Avshalom
just a reminder: if you read the small print your ISP probably has a monthly
bandwidth cap after which they start charging you more. 54GB is probably a
significant fraction.

~~~
ukyrgf
If it's Comcast Xfinity, you'll get a text, email, phone call, and JavaScript
injected into non-http sites at 70%, 80%, 90%, and beyond.

------
corodra
You mean they took the "BETA" event, found bugs and patched said bugs? On the
first day of OFFICIAL release! NO! That's impossible! Why would they do
something like that!?!? Everyone knows BETA means 5 years of an incomplete
game that you have to pay early on...

Seriously, they were pretty honest and upfront about their Beta and did it in
the truest sense. "There are bugs in the game! It's total trash!". Yea...
that's why you run betas... to find the bugs. I feel like I'm taking crazy
pills.

More than likely there was an issue with their patch tool too, thus it's a
whole new download. Haven't bought the game yet, but I see nothing they're
doing as "ridiculous".

~~~
stetrain
I think the "Ridiculous" part is the trend of shipping a physical copy of the
game with a giant patch of all the stuff that wasn't tested/ready in time for
the disc to to go print.

If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one
patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a
redemption code for the digital download version?

~~~
cowpewter
If you have multiple people in a household, each with their own
Live/PSN/whatever account, you can buy one physical disc and it unlocks the
game for everyone in the household. If you buy the digital version, it's
locked to only whichever account bought it.

That's why I still prefer physical versions of games. Both me and my wife have
our own separate accounts on the services.

~~~
stordoff
PSN/Xbox Live unlocks it for the _console_ (as well as the user). I have 4
accounts on my PS4, and they can all access content purchased by the other
accounts.

~~~
cowpewter
Hmm, something is not right with our setup then, because I have absolutely
been blocked from playing games my wife has bought on her account on our PS4.

~~~
luminiferous
You have to set your particular console as your PSN account's "primary"
console. When a console is set as your primary console, any other accounts on
that console can use software that you have bought using your PSN account.
However, I think only one account can have a particular console set as their
"primary" console at a time, so if your PS4 is your account's primary console,
then it cannot be your wife's account's primary console, meaning if she buys
software, your account cannot access it.

[https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/act...](https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/activation.html)

------
Sephr
Does it support HDR on PC? I haven't been able to figure this out anywhere
online.

~~~
Art9681
I don't think so. I played last night and my TV did not automatically switch
to HDR mode and there is nothing in the settings that indicates it can be
toggled either. Bummer. The new lighting is really nice though. Huge
improvement over FO4.

------
LeoNatan25
Day 1 patch notes:

    
    
        Replaced entire engine with a new one that is not terrible

~~~
EamonnMR
Unfortunately, this is not the case.

------
mberning
Fallout 4 was a disgrace in terms of quality. This seems to be carrying on the
tradition.

