Patches and updates. At one time, these were impossible for developers to do in game making. Why? Because once a game launched, that was it. You had to hope and pray that everything you did was enough and that you didn’t make a fatal error. Just as stressful, you sent the wrong golden disc with the final version of your game? You could’ve lost your whole company because of the fallout. But now, thanks to technological advances, patch notes and updates are standard for game developers, for better and for worse. As Nintendo Switch Sports can attest, just because you get a patch doesn’t mean it’ll work properly.
Version 1.2.1 for the game was downloaded this week and was supposed to be a simple patch and update. As Nintendo stated in the patch notes earlier in the week, the update was meant to stop cheaters in online play. They went so far as to say that they would suspend online play for those caught cheating, and the update would help with that. An excellent idea that many gamers would appreciate had it worked.
Instead, the patch made it so players sometimes would get error messages, and the game would crash when they were trying to play a match. What’s more, this happened in both the online and offline modes, showing the severity of the issue. Nintendo at first paused online play for all so that they could figure out the problem, but now, they’ve wholly pulled the update from the game so that no one will have these issues. Nintendo is no doubt rushing right now to get everything to “status quo” level so players won’t have to deal with this anymore, so expect an updated patch sooner rather than later.
Also, don’t be too hard on Nintendo for this blunder. Programming patches is sometimes tricky because of how much you have to consider with every fix you implement. If you do even one thing wrong, you make everything worse. Plenty of games from multiple developers and publishers have had this issue in the past, so please give Nintendo time to fix it instead of railing against them. It wouldn’t do anyone any good to do that.
On the bright side, Nintendo Switch Sports remains a surprise hit for Nintendo. Despite having a long development period that featured many questionable decisions, they made a title everyone liked and many bought. It’s already sold millions of units and likely has sold even more. In addition, there will be free updates in the future that add new modes of play, like golf, and more will come after that.
The game will be up and running soon enough, so please be patient as Nintendo fixes the problem.
Source: Nintendo Everything
