Monolith's upcoming MOBA game Guardians of Middle-Earth will be getting cloud-based updates instead of having to wait to pass certification from Sony and Microsoft.
Updates are, of course, par for the course when it comes to MOBA games as they're rolled out to accomodate for combat balance, item formations and more.
In an interview with VG247, producer Bob Roberts revealed that not only will the game rely on cloud-based storage for updates, but this will be in a small download every time players launch the game. Now, before you complain, it will be a "very small and quick update" that should — as stated above — won't have to pass certification to be implemented.
Every week those guys would rank all the guardians in buckets like, ‘These guys are all the top-tier, these guys are middle-tier, and those guys are in the bottom-tier that no one ever wants to play.’ By the time we’re shipping, everybody has evened out. There’s no one in the bottom tier any more.
But just in case, we did also build a system for having a lot of our balance database saved in cloud storage, that you’re going to download every time you launch the game. It’s a very small, quick update that doesn’t have to go through certification, so we can update it every day, every week – however often we need to if we see critical balance issues.
Ruth Tomandl, senior producer at Monolith, adds, "There are other developers that have done it, and I know that other XBLA games have done it. But I know there are also other game where, players have run into issues or glitches that could not be fixed by patching in data, so we were careful so that anything involving numbers or any sort of guardian strength could be tweaked using that patch."
For those not familiar with Sony and Microsoft's certification process, studios must first submit the update to Sony and Microsoft to see if it won't break the system and if it will work accordingly. After this time-consuming and expensive process (it's been reported an update costs $40,000 for the PSN and XBLA), it's then scheduled to roll out for consumers. So, in essence, studios are at the mercy of console-makers when it comes to updating their games.
Do you want more games to do this or would constantly having to download something be of a hassle? Nevertheless, it's nice to know that studios now have alternatives when it comes to patching their games without having to undergo certification, no?
