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No Patch for Dead Rising Fans

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the patch-it-so-that-its-fun dept.

1up is reporting that Capcom has put the kibosh on a patch for Dead Rising, frustrating fans who have complained about the games's almost unreadable text on Standard Definition screens. From the article: "So, the question is, will there ever be a patch? Unfortunately, that's a no. 'Due to the amount of text and the size of the patch necessary to change the text, a patch isn't possible for this issue,' said the company. 'We had asked the team if it was even possible but ... due to the scope of what a patch would need to cover, it wasn't possible.' As it stands, no patch is coming for Dead Rising players -- but maybe they'll change their mind if you yell loud enough."

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Reminds me of a bug in... by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...Rayman DS. Much of the game is in shades of dark brown on black. Completely unplayable. It's as if it was never play tested on a real DS, just on an emulator with a super bright display. Of course they couldn't release a patch for a card - but at least a fix eventually appeared in the form of the DS Lite. People really need to test the final product on consumer grade hardware because these are unbelievably obvious bugs.

    --
    Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
  2. In a nutshell... by MMaestro · · Score: 4, Informative
    Someone explain to me how changing out a font or two constitutes a large patch without there first being some ridiculous method of storing said text in the first place?

    Short version : Video games don't use wordwrap.

    Long version : Its a hold-over from the 8-bit and 16-bit days, back when text would sometimes take up more memory than the game itself. You commonly hear this problem during fan translations of SNES games. When translated into English, the text would run out of the text box and, in the worst case, off the screen where it was completely unreadable.

  3. Re:Long story short.. by badboy_tw2002 · · Score: 2, Informative

    As someone who's experienced many of the joys of doing UI on a console, I can say that if its a problem with the font being too small then the issue is probably a big one. If they were smart and had nice UI widgets which wrapped text, put up scrolls and stuff then it would just be a matter of swapping out font files and checking to make sure you didn't crash. If they weren't, well, then you have a problem. Anywhere text is printed you have to go in and recheck in every single language (for a AAA title this could be 11-12 languages). Now, QA time is relatively cheap, but then you have to pay someone to go in and fix these things.

    My guess is they have a bad, kludgy UI system that makes tweaking things difficult. You'd be surprised what UI code looks like in a console game. The pain to fix would take a signifigant amount of manpower vs. what they'd expect to gain. Surprising given the buzz I've heard about it and the fact that such a crippling bug would make a lot of people think twice about picking it up, but then programmers are used to these things. Trust this: somewhere there's a frustrated young UI programmer reading this slashdot story and pulling his hair out going "I told them! I told them!" He's probably responded AC with the "real story" from home so as not to get in trouble :)