Street Fighter HD designer reveals patch frustrations

Publishers have to pay console manufacturers for the trouble, explains Sirlin.

David Sirlin, lead designer on Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, hopes that Capcom will patch its recently released downloadable fighting game, but revealed that cost may prevent such a move.

Speaking to VideoGamer.com in the second part of a mammoth post-mortem interview, due to be published tomorrow, Sirlin described patching as a problem so frustrating that if he were to make a new fighting game he would have "online tests on PCs the entire development process", something developer Backbone "didn't have" with HD Remix.

Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix, released on Xbox LIVE across all territories on November 26, (the game has so far mysteriously not appeared on the EU PlayStation store), contains a completely new rebalanced gameplay mode as well as redrawn HD art. It's so good, that we gave it a 9/10.

However, some fans have reported gameplay bugs, including music cutting out and difficulty obtaining the get Master of All Things Xbox LIVE Achievement, which requires players win an online ranked match with every character.

When asked if he thought Capcom would support the game post release with patches, Sirlin replied: "It was very hard to get Puzzle Fighter patched at all. There's a lot of difficulty in patching console games. First of all you have to pay the console makers for each of these patches and second you have to do QA and bug testing on these patches. If you change one area of the game to fix a problem with it, as far as the publisher knows, they don't know you didn't make some mistake in some different part of the game, so they are pretty much obliged to do testing across the board.

"So all this testing and fees, they're all barriers to patching. I'm not saying anything bad about Capcom there. It doesn't matter who they are. For any console game there's just these barriers to patching. The question is, is the upside big enough to justify it? With Street Fighter I hope the answer is yes. I hope the answer is, definitely, we want to fix as much as we can and have this keep selling for many many many years. I'm of the opinion that they think that. That seems logical to me."

Sirlin went on to explain that the frustration of patching console was not specific to Capcom, but to all publishers and developers.

"This process I've explained, it has nothing to do with Capcom or Backbone or anything," he said. "It's just the nature of the beast, that problem is so frustrating that if I were to do a completely new fighting game, I don't think the way we did HD Remix makes a lot of sense. In HD Remix's case, we knew so much about Super Turbo that there was at least some shot of basing all our knowledge off that, changing a few things and having it come out better. But imagine if you were to make some new game where you don't have 15 years of knowledge about it, and you release it to the wild and it's hard to patch, it would be a disaster. So I think the only way to do it is to have online tests on PCs the entire development process. We didn't have that. We had no way of balance testing it online ahead of time. I think that would be vitally important to make a new fighting game."

Be sure to check back later this week for the second part of our interview with David Sirlin. If you missed the first part, fear not, it's right here.