Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dragon Age playing masses, the 1.01 patch is out, and it’s likely essential. Those who’ve seen my PC Gamer review, and indeed very many others saying the same, will have noticed complaints that the Easy difficulty level at certain points isn’t altogether that easy. And I’ll wager many playing on Normal aren’t exactly finding it a breeze. The patch notes explain that they’ve, “made Easy difficulty easier”, and crucially, “slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty.” I’ve yet to check what difference it actually makes, but hopefully this will address my one major complaint with the game. Steam has already auto-patched, so restart if you’re playing it over there. (And while I’m here, here’s Eurogamer’s review of the 360 version – it seems the PC won this one rather well.)

So, most of the season’s biggest games have landed on our hard drives by now, which means two things will follow in their wake:

1) A torrent of finely-detailed complaints about this, that and the other feature. With maybe the occasional compliment thrown in for good measure.
2) Patches!

There tends to be this weird two-sided coin for PC versions of big games – on the hand they often don’t receive quite as much spit’n'polish as the console versions, which is at least partly because there’s no Microsoft or Sony certification hoops to jump through. On the other, that lack of certification means fixing up minor holes can happen a lot more quickly. Case in point – in the last couple of days, two very recent biggies have already seen their first patches: Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2.
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How’s about this for after-sales support. Gearbox have just patched Halo: Combat Evolved. Yes, the first one. The 1.08 patch for the five year old game removes the need for a CD to be in the drive when you play (a tacit nod to freedom?) and fixes some bugs for online play.

Shack spotted the fix added to their own Fileshack, which will become required for online play from tomorrow. Anyone out there still playing?

Bioshock’s very much back in the news at the moment. And goodness, what a lot of people seem to hate it all of a sudden, if folk in our comments threads are to be believed. You big sillies.

Would being able to play it with new Plasmids help? What about in proper widescreen? Or, and I suspect this will be the clincher, what about with those controversial insta-respawn Vita Chambers turned off? Read the rest of this entry »