Welcome to another edition of Beyond Co-Op, the weekly news piece where we look at some of the interesting gaming news around the web that may or may not be related just to co-op gaming. It's a pretty quiet time right now in the gaming industry, with many companies getting ready to unleash a wave of titles at us this fall, so the news is pretty sparse. Let's see what's on tap.
- FEZ Won't be Patched Again, Politics Ensue
- Modders Restore Content to Knights of the Old Republic II
- Darksiders II First Trailer
Fez Won't Be Patched Again, Politics Enuse
Perhaps the biggest story of the past few weeks wasn't even a story at all, but rather a poor business decision that generated some bad PR. FEZ was released and received some pretty good critical acclaim. But it had problems, so developer Polytron patched it. Problem was, patching it also killed some saves for people, so they pulled the patch. They went on to fix the problem again and wanted to re-release the patch - problem was, per Microsoft's XBLA policies, it would cost around $40k to do so. The first patch is free (which was busted) but subsequent ones cost money.
Now the knee jerk reaction here is to blame Microsoft for charging this fee to developers, in the grander scheme of things 40k is not a lot of money when your game sells a few 100k copies. But Polytron claimed the little guy here and said they can't afford it and decided to re-release the patch as is.
Personal interjection time. FEZ took an obscene amount of time to complete and was probably WAY over budget. If you watched Indie Game the Movie it's pretty obvious the studio is not very business savvy and many poor decisions were made along the way. Numerous developers came out to say they negotiated multiple updates into their XBLA contract, so this isn't an all or nothing kind of deal.
For a good read on the whole situation hit up Ben Kuchera's Penny-Arcade Report article.
Modders Restore Content to Knights of the Old Republic II
KOTOR 2 was a grand game that fell short on so many levels, mostly due to publisher pressure to get it out the door. Because of that a lot of content was cut from the game. Surprisingly that content still remained on the disc post release. The content wasn't 100% complete, dialog and voice acting were missing. Graphics, textures, models were place holders, but the basic concepts were in place. Version 1.8 is likely the final build of this pack, which is available to download at MODDB if you wish.
Check out the PC Gamer interview with one of the leads to hear the fascinating tale.
Darksiders II, First Trailer
We're still hoping a future Darksiders game include co-op, like it was originally planned to have, but for now enjoy the trailer for the second game.