New PS4 Patch System Finally In Place
Every PS4 owner is aware of the very odd patch system that has been in place so far on Sony‘s next generation gaming platform. Strangely enough, there seems to be no check on the patch data already on the hard drive, which effectively means that with each new patch for any given game you’ll be required to download again every single patch previously released, increasing the download size considerably.
While this may be but a minor annoyance to most, requiring them to wait a bit longer before playing their games whenever a patch is released by the developer, others are affected in a much more serious way. I’m referring to those unfortunate gamers whose Internet Providers mandate monthly bandwidth caps; in this case, some precious gigabytes of their monthly cap is just wasted by their PS4 downloads. This is even more weird considering that PlayStation 3 didn’t suffer from this issue.
However, there might be light at the end of the tunnel, as Sony Online Entertainment announced that they have worked with the PlayStation team in order to improve this method. The new patch system is already live for DC Universe Online, which clearly is one of the games that suffered the most, being in the MMORPG genre; Game Update 37 is the first one to use this.
Sony Online Entertainment warned that PS4 users will still see the full download size, as anyone who hasn’t downloaded any patch at all of DC Universe Online. However, after a few minutes, the PS4 will identify what’s been downloaded and only activate the download for the remaining data - in the case of Update 37, size should be around 1.8GB instead of 8.8GB (the total size of all DCUO patches combined).
Moreover, this won’t work if you still need to catch up with any previous patch - in that case, the patch size will still be the full one, at least for one more time.
Clearly it’s a work in progress, but it seems the step in the right direction that many of you had been waiting for. Let’s hope that other developers will start adopting this system soon, and that useless humongous downloads will soon be a thing of the past. If you play DCUO, please leave your impressions of the new patch system in the comments section!