Kingdom Come: Deliverance from Warhorse Studios and publisher Deep Silver finally releases this week and it comes with a day-one patch. This isn't terribly surprising as day-one patches are becoming a common practice, especially in an era of consoles and PCs nearly always connected to the internet. What is surprising however, is the size of game's patch, weighing somewhere in the ballpark of 23GB.
Hold your pitchforks, douse your torches! I know that sounds like a lot, what with games usually having patches closer to a few hundred MB at launch, but developer Warhorse have a good reason. The announcement of such a large patch unsurprisingly caused a bit of a ruckus and so over on Resetera Martin Kilma, Executive Producer at Warhorse, tried to clear up some things:
“The production realities of game development mean that a ‘release’ version has to be finalized some time before the actual release date. We could have used this time to get some rest, or we could use it to create some additional content and sell it to you as DLC, but we went back to the version-to-be-released and worked on it. The results are obvious: quests are more balanced, RPG progression is smoother, the game runs faster and every facet of the game got more polish. The drawback of course is that most of the data in the old build was replaced and has to be downloaded as a patch. At a hefty size, it’s going to take some time to download and it’s a shame. Still, we strongly believe that after four years wait it will pay off to wait a little bit longer while the Day 1 patch is downloading. Trust me, it will deliver the awesome experience YOU deserve!”
Moreover, Will Powers, from publisher Deep Silver, also weighed in on the issue:
So, let me stop the rumor mill dead in its tracks before everyone continues jumping to conclusions. The way that I've been told that the engine works, is it takes the entire game and separates the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives. If during a patch you so much as alter a 1KB text file within any of these 2GB archives, then you need to reupload the ENTIRE 2GB portion. That beings said, this is a major patch that improves overarching mechanics throughout the game, so it touches almost all of these 2GB archives in the entire game build. Essentially you are having to redownload the game to replace the existing files. It shouldn't stack them and inflate on your harddrive, but rather replace the previously downloaded build files.
So yes, there's a 20+GB patch to download, but it shouldn't pile on top of the likely already sizeable download file, should you decide to down the game directly.
Still, this has been an interesting look into the game certification process. I also notice there's a bit of a difference between the resetera post up now and the quote on Kotaku's article, which specifically says the "'release version has to be finalized some three months before the actual release date...."
This could mean that Kotaku pulled the original quote before the dev who posted it had a chance to correct their "mistake", or it could mean that Kotaku has some inside knowledge they're inadvertently sharing. Either way, its nice to think that these developers had three months before official release to fill and the decided to fix up bits and pieces throughout the entire game. I'd love to have a similar degree of transparency from other developers.