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The Daily Grind: Is there an ideal patch schedule for games?
Guild Wars 2 is very proud of its every-two-week patches, but I find that those frequent patches wind up being so small that they're not really engaging. This is no fault of the developers, really; two weeks is not much time to design anything substantial. It's fast, but is that enough? By contrast, Final Fantasy XIV packed a lot into its first major patch post-launch, which is a good thing, as it was released nearly four months after the relaunch and came when a lot of people were pretty burned out by the options in the game at that time. Having gotten most of the relevant content into farm mode myself, I can say that the next update definitely needs to come along faster than the last one. That put me to thinking: Is there an ideal patch schedule for games? Is there a sweet spot with enough time to develop new content and not enough time for people to get bored with what's there? Should it be all about the content when it's done, or should it be a fast cadence even if things need to be tweaked later? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
New quests coming to Final Fantasy XIV on Thursday
The rapid update schedule for Final Fantasy XIV's post-launch patches continues, with the next one slated for release tomorrow, March 3rd. It should be a welcome piece of news to fans eager to dive into the biggest proimised feature, the addition of new sidequests separate from main story quests and the repeatable levequests. The addition has been previewed in the latest announcement on the official site, giving players a quick overview of what to expect from the new ventures. Various NPCs throughout the major cities will offer sidequests, denoted by the nigh-universal symbol of the questgiver, an exclamation mark. As usual, there are minimum class and rank prerequisites, and the update promises that quest content will be unique in focus, implying that the tasks will not fall under the "kill X" formats of levequests. Local levequests will also undergo adjustments to make the difficulty grade more uniform, addressing a long-standing discrepancy between rewards and difficulty of the task. Players can expect to see the changes in Final Fantasy XIV go live tomorrow, which should be good news for all of the players looking forward to the new content.
