I’m currently obsessed with the changes Wizards of the Coast is making to Dungeons & Dragons. If you don’t already know, there’s a new edition of the game coming this year, in September, which means the whole thing – all the rules and character classes – will be updated. In recent weeks, Wizards has revealed how. In other words, patch notes – patch notes have been shared. The largest set I have ever seen.
This excites me, and it also made me realize something else: patch notes have always been exciting. I’d even go so far as to say that this is one of the most exciting things about gaming. And I know what this sounds like! I know bulleted lists aren’t sexy things. And if they’re for you, let’s talk. But no, it goes deeper than that. Listen to me.
Patch notes are widely accepted, but in console terms they are not that old. Games used to come on a disc or a cartridge, and we’d pop them into our machine and that was it. Point. No more development. The game was as it would be forever. But with the Internet came the ability to release updates – first small ones and then larger ones – and this in turn allowed developers to continue developing games and making changes to them.
This has been happening on PC for some time. Everywhere there was an online game there were updates. Ultima Online (1997) had patch notes, I’m pretty sure Quake (1996) and Quake 2 (1997) had updates, and of course EverQuest (1999) all subsequent MMOs did too. These games are my touchstones, so I’m sure I’ve missed more. But the one that really made me feel the patch note magic was Dark Age of Camelot in 2001.
I felt the magic because I met the ideal requirements for it. I had invested hundreds and probably thousands of hours into the game, which meant I knew it very well. If something were to change in the balance of the game, or in the world of the game, I would understand it and the consequences. I also felt it was important to stay competitive in a game where you had to fight other players, so any change to my character class was important. And I was a little bored. On some level I wanted change. Cue patch notes.
Patch notes were always exciting. There the future of the game would be stated in black and white. Which classes would rise in terms of power, and which classes would go down. Were there new things? How did they work? All the clues you needed to form assumptions were there. What did they mean to you? That was the question on everyone’s mind, no matter which angle they looked at the patch notes. You could almost feel the mental energy being focused on them – and this without anyone even loading the game. Only theory. And then arguments.
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My brain is now doing something similar with Dungeons & Dragons. I invested hundreds of hours into the characters in that game, so the changes made mean a lot to me as I have no intention of stopping playing. The same was also true for Overwatch, when the ‘Jeff of Overwatch’ team would reveal revisions to characters in the game. Are my characters okay? Do I want to try something new? How does it all work? Mental arithmetic. Imagination. It goes into overdrive. To me it’s as much a part of the game as the game itself.
It’s not just about balance changes. They are the most important because they are the most personal and belong to the characters we play. But patch notes introduce significant changes to the worlds we also know very well. I remember when Blizzard first introduced instanced PvP in World of Warcraft, and it was a huge deal. Likewise, I remember when Blizzard introduced new raids in World of Warcraft, or new events, and those were big deals too. Nowadays you can expand the boundaries further into single-player games. Check out what Larian did in Baldur’s Gate 3. It changed the game’s ending and extended it to give some beloved characters more airtime. BioWare also changed the ending of Mass Effect 3 afterwards. Those are really important things.
Think about board games, which I suppose are analogous to the way games used to be, in the way they play out the moment they’re put in the box. They are a lot of fun, but they are static. The pleasure eventually disappears. Where they live is subject to change. I bet you changed the games you played as kids for the same reason. I know I did – we were constantly changing the rules to forty-four save-all as we ran through the streets. It is the same.
I know there’s another less welcome side to this, which is game launches with bugs and day one patches and, I expect, crunch – before or after games come out. None of them are good things. But the ability we now have to extend the lives of the games we care about, take them apart and reimagine them excites me – just as it excites me to see how the creators of Dungeons & Dragons now rethinking their 50 year old game. These are the things we like to think about, our escapes. And the channel for all this?
Patch Notes.