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GOTY Category 6: The One Patch Away Award (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-23 17:42:08
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

We all have a game that we feel is on the cusp of greatness. That game that just needs a handful of tweaks to a system. Or maybe it just has a bunch of performance issues that hold it back. Now, around these parts I do what I can to not play armchair game developer, but sometimes you just can't help it. So let's indulge a bit: what's that game that you really want to love but just can't because it has a couple of things holding it back? Also let me know what you'd want to change as we vote for (full, clunky category name incoming) The Game That’s Just One Patch or Feature Away From Greatness!

As normal, please try to include the game name at the top for easy counting on our end, and if you have anything you want to say about the game in question, do so! I'll read a few from each category as we discuss!

Comments

SPELDGE FELGUS

For me it was cyberpunk 2077. Specifically because i had a bug where i couldn’t progress after meeting takemura in the diner.

Nathan Holden

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet There’s lots to love here, at least for Pokémon fans, but I stopped playing a few hours in because I can’t get over the severe performance issues and unresolved bugs.

Jordan Hass

Rumbleverse, it's interesting, but I just can't get fully interested in the wrestling themed battle royale until they fix a few things here and there.

Alasdair Duncan

Cyberpunk 2077. There's still too much broken shit in it even after all this time. I finally completed it this weekend, most of the game breaking bugs I had nearer launch are gone but there's so many niggly things still there. My V swapped voice from female to male during a dialogue sequence only to return back once the scene was done. More recently, I couldn't leave a mission area because the elevator button wouldn't appear.

Horns

Halo infinite will be a great experience once the co-op patch comes out. I'm sure.

John Nolan

Gran Turismo 7. Great driving game on the surface that was hampered by issues with online play, game modes, and in-game currency.

Galamir

This really, it just had too many bugs and ran like garbage. Then I saw someone fire it up on an emulator and run it butter smooth and I could never go back to the switch.

David Redekop

Warhammer 40k Darktide is an excellent L4D coop shooter that suffers far too much from optimization issues and crashes. If Fatshark can iron out the bugs, it has the potential to be one of the best of those types of games.

Josh Harper

Disney Dreamlight Valley, really liked what I played of its early access this fall, but I saw enough small issues/missing content that I'm waiting for 1.0 and hoping to really love it then.

Neon Pop

Session skate sim - console release has very few maps compared to PC with no updates on what will be added.

R. Ballien

Tunic: I do love Tunic, actually, but it just asks for too much in the end, leaving me with feelings of frustration and laboriousness rather than the awesome feeling of discovery that characterized the brilliant bulk of the game.

Ometeotl

Bayonetta 3 for sure. I haven't gone back and played it since the recentish patch that seems to have fixed a few of the issues I had with it, but I finished the game at launch and it was a totally cool game but not at all as good as I expect from the series.

Joseph Tavano

Cult of the Lamb. On release, the slowdown and glitches were almost unbearable.

Parallax Abstraction

There are many options right now (which is sad in and of itself), but I'm going to say Cyberpunk 2077 as well. I bought the game at launch and ground out about half of it before the issue became too much. When the v1.7 patch comes out that's supposed to overhaul the police system, I think that's when I'll start a fresh playthrough.

The Phantomnaut

Even with the patch that didn’t come until last week, it’s THE KING OF FIGHTERS XV for me still. The previous significant major patch in May did help in improving a variety of characters and reasonably nerf Terry Bogard, who was insanely good, others replaced his spot. They, including one character Krohnen, felt too powerful with the tools that were given. Up until recently, players dealt with the character balance for 8 months including during Evo time. We will see if the most recent balance provides team variety in time but it looks like Iori continues to be SNK’s poster boy with his improvements so he might be a consistent team member. Me and others are still apparently having issues with matchmaking since launch as well. I encounter mostly high ping players outside my region even during peak times. SNK are planning a crossplay update for all platforms as a way to centralize playerbase. I just wonder if it will matter if the matchmaking doesn’t get fixed.

Matthew Hoerig

Marvel’s Midnight Suns. I do already love the game, but can’t deny it has some technical issues around crashing and in-game glitches. I was fortunate the the worst I ever saw was an enemy falling through the map and being unreachable, meaning I had to start an encounter over. Things like that should be addressed. I’d also like to see at least some clarification if not an overhaul of the ability enhancement system. When a card/ability is Upgraded, it has one very specific change that is made to it. It’s the same change anytime you upgrade a card of that name. When Enhancing a card, it seems like the game rolls two potential modifiers from a pool of X and you choose one to apply. If you enhance that card again, it rolls one additional option. From there, any time you Enhance a card of that name, you only have those three options to choose from. I’d like to have this confirmed, or even better let me continue to spend resources to try to roll more appropriate enhancements.

Landwash5

Calisto Protocol

Zach

Gonna second Midnight Suns. I loved the combat but it ran rough on my pretty decent PC. Slowdown, long ass load times and occasional glitches made it hard for me to play this game in long sessions like I would for other turn based strategy games I loved.

Colton Royle

Immortality - The game has a weird framerate which is caused by the way the FMV was filmed. Anything under like 90 frames per second looks choppy. In my mind, if it is trying to replicate films, this is so unacceptable. I've got beef with other aspects of it too. Using parts of the image rather than keywords to move from one clip to another makes a player just wander through the clips randomly. Sounds cool, until you cross the 50% threshold and need to start hunting for clips. Then it's just tedious. There are other aspects of the game that make me shocked that EDGE gave this a 10. But to me I would feel much better if those two things had been considered.

Duncan Parker Newton-Gaines

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. There are a lot of things it does that could have made it the best mainline Pokemon game in 20 years, but between losing quality of life features present in Sword and Shield and the nagging performance issues, it is instead the most disappointing mainline game in 20 years.

Merc-a-dude

Pokemon Scarlet and Violet was not only one patch away, but honestly one platform iteration away from greatness. The gameplay has been freshened up to a significant degree, lending itself to some interesting changes in how you progress through the game, while raid battles and improvements to the end game pokemon grind meant that multi-player could've actually been truly exciting. A damn shame the game runs like dog shit and the cavalcade of bugs and performance issues are just prominent enough to keep from recommending to anyone outside the Fandom.

FameDouglas

Somerville I've been following this game ever since I first found the first animation tests on Youtube 7 years ago. Then suddenly the game made an appearance at a press conference at E3 and then all of a sudden it was a Game Pass game. The stars were aligned. I launched the game and it was one of the most frustrating games I've ever played. First of all, the controls were all over the place. It's more or less a 2D platformer in the style of Inside, but in this game you can walk down the z-axis as well which just leads to a whole lot of confusion as there's barely anything to do there. It also leads you to get your character stuck in the environment because you can't tell if your character is in front or behind an object. The environmental puzzles are sometimes extremely hard to decipher. You can't really tell what you can interact with. And even though it's a very simple game (again, kinda like Inside and Limbo) they somehow manage to make these incredibly simple puzzles incredibly difficult to solve. The problem is, I don't hate the game. I really, really like what it's doing. I love the style, the sound, the music, and the atmosphere and so on. But it is immensely frustrating to play. In fact, it is so frustrating I stopped playing 3 hours into the game and decided to wait for a patch. Now, I believe it has been patched already, but I feel like the moment has come and gone and I really can't be bothered to start playing it again. Such a shame.

Minky

Halo Infinite springs to mind, but I think just a single patch might be putting it too lightly...

Joe Lees

Project Zomboid. The forthcoming patch to add NPCs is going to be amazing.

Wes Koop

Proton-GE - feels like it's always just patch away from your favourite game working on the steam deck. And more time than any this year, setting the compatibility settings to Proton-GE has made my games run, or run better.

Ryan Clarke

Destiny, and most live and annual games, are the eternal choices for this question, because the entire value proposition for each release is "we fixed all of the stuff and made it 100x better!" In that spirit, here are some live games I've lapsed on that could do with a housekeeping and renovation patch, because I'd actually like to play them some more. 1: The Division 2 could use some sort of survival/endless mode, mostly on the grounds that the moving and shooting part of that game is fantastic, the AI logic is challenging and compelling, but I have zero interest in the authored quest content, or the MMO grinding (I already have Destiny). Something along the lines of DMZ mode would get me to reinstall that thing, provided I never had to level up my gearscore ever again. In essence, I want the gameplay of Division 2, sans any of the rest of Division 2, so those might just be whole different game, rather than a patch. 2: Madden: I like card games, I like football, and I like how generous Madden's Ultimate Team is relative to FIFA (Needing 54 players to fill out a team as opposed to FIFA's 11 probably helps the devs cheat a bit with the number of free cards they give out). But the part of Madden where you have to play football is awful. It's great television, but as a game, football is so stilted and stop-start that it's hard to get into a flow like FIFA, where you're constantly in motion. So I want them to take the stop-start out of the competitive game. Make playcalling an automated thing, even add cards that let you spec for certain playcalling styles, let you audible into plays at the line if you don't like the play the AI has picked for you, but just keep the damn game moving. Playcalling is annoying-I just want to run or throw and get on with it.

Ian Zamojc

This is probably cheating, but I'm going to nominate Peglin. The Peggle-inspired roguelite is still in active development and seems to ebb and flow between too easy or too difficult between major feature releases. Let's just say I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to Jeff to try on stream yet for fear of another DomeKeeper repeat where a single run goes too well.

Craig Parker

Vampire Survivors, which maybe sounds strange, but I had a persistent issue after plugging like 20 hours into the game where I'd get to 25 minutes or so and the game would hard crash and I lost all progress. It may have been an issue only I had, it may have been fixed now, but I had to put it down after that. Maybe I'll see if it works again now. The new pokemon game would've gone here but I loved it despite its bugs and I never once had it crash on me.

Kuno Woudt

Need for Speed: Unbound I hated the progression in this game, but fine, they're trying something else, that's OK. However, even after you finish the game there is no way to just roam the open world and see all the events, so you can finish any events/races which you haven't done yet. I love the visual style of this game, the story didn't bother me, and the soundtrack is pretty good -- but I had a lot more fun playing NFS: Heat.

Sifted Sand Records

Bonelab The base game is there, and Boneworks was great! Yet the sequel faulters in so many areas the original didn't. If there was a patch that just added proper Vive support, maybe fix the physics, and it's good.

Kacho

Returnal! The mechanics are so good, the art and music are an extremely cohesive package, and most of the game is excellent. They just need an actual boss in Stage 5 and a true final boss in the second playthrough. A Shmup-inspired game like that should have a complete boss lineup and a TFB.

ArbitraryWater

Darktide Okay, maybe it's more than one patch away from being fantastic, but that game's problems are structural and not mechanical. It *plays* great. The basic back-and-forth between melee and ranged combat is incredibly sharp. It's just everything around it, like they're trying to make a live service seasonal sort of deal without actually doing the groundwork first. What makes it more infuriating is that Vermintide II is not only a better game in its current state, but was more feature complete at launch almost six years ago. I do think Darktide will eventually "Get there" but at this point if I'm gonna do a co-op horde survival game I'd probably go back to Vermintide II or Deep Rock first.

coribald

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, maybe the only game I've started, loved, but put down almost immediately to wait for a patch (or two) (...or three), because I wanted to be able to enjoy it as much as possible.

Zain Abba

High On Life The game world is interesting, but they need to make the “guns” feel better. If you’re gonna regenerate the same enemies over and over again, at least make them fun to kill.

Rene Tetrault

Cult of the Lamb. Awesome game but a few too many bugs. To be fair they may be fixed by now

Tyler Scheatzle

Ready or not. Just a touch snappier and the tiniest speed adjustment to make it faster. I think it would bring more people in and be a bigger hit. Also better controller support would be much appreciated.

A1steaksa

Battlefield: The Newest One They have bungled this game in almost every single way a studio can, so far. They are competing only with Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn and 343i at this point. Having said that, they just keep coming back with another update. They added a really surprisingly robust character movement system perhaps on par with the way you can run around in helicopters in MWII. I rode on top of a friendly tank shooting infantry while it shot vehicles. Me and whoever that was had a grand time and it felt like Battlefield, you know? They need to fix their gunplay and they need to come up with a better system for spawning on those enormous, empty wastelands they call maps but if they DO manage that I genuinely think it has a chance to be a fun game on par with 3 and 4

RiseFM

Lived midnight suns, but my goodness performance on PC was ROUGH considering how the game actually looks. Really enjoyed the game but it needs some stability and performance love.

Ryan Stafford

Maybe not quite a patch, but Shovel Knight Dig feels like its content light and another boss knight or two away

Mike Notridge

Callisto Protocol, I enjoyed my run through it on Series X but 3 crashes spoiled it somewhat, the raised black-levels on my OLED and weird RT compared to PS5 was a bummer also.

Tonytheswordsman

Risk of Rain 2 is a fun game but I do feel like it just needs a little tweaking to get it perfect !

Steve Francis

ADACA - A 'patch' to finish the campaign, add achievements, and maybe add a little bit of guidance for the patrol mode would be a great cherry on top

shack

Potionomics - all of the systems in this game are good, and the gameplay loop is fun and addictive, where it suffers for me is the structure of the game. There's no way to do anything outside the main story arc of the game, and if you fail (and then eventually when you win) your game is over and you must start again from scratch-- including re-unlocking game mechanics and characters, essentially making it a (frustrating) rougelite. But because you're collecting cards and building a deck, as well as developing potion recipes, it just begs for a more open sandbox/endless mode. I stopped playing this game because I wanted to be able to play it more-- just let me play practice rounds with different decks, let me keep running my potion shop after I finish the storyline!!! As it stands now, it's a fun game that is held back by its own super rigid linear story structure.

DaddyWarbucks

Plate Up! is actually really fun and addictive, but the lack of progression kinda sucks. Would be nice if large restaurants were a part of actual progression and not something you had to use seeds to play

Cheyenne

Halo Infinite. I mostly think it needs a huge map pack that includes several maps from the earlier halo games and I'd come back for at least a while.

Joseph

Ghost of Tsushima: Directors Cut. The game is beautiful in presentation and well polished. I had some amazing moments where I felt immersed in the world. The game felt like it went through too many play tests until it was so accessible, it just held your hand. I kept hoping the game would let go and allow the world to feel more grounded. The combat is fun but traversal was simplified to almost being mindless.

Rose

Pokémon scarlet and violet if one patch can fix it’s performance issues. Game is amazing if it ran good.

Andy Robichaud

Returnal. when it was released, it just a little brighter maps and areas, slightly more intuitive and responsive controls, and a little more forgiving in terms of checkpointing.

Handamonium

Cult of the Lamb was beautiful, but I was not sold on it until after I played for a while. Despite really enjoying it, CotL needed the upcoming DLC sooner to be a 2022 contender. It has replayability but not enough progression in the end game; they went all in on visually customizing your cult instead. They added an update recently which improved combat but didn't actually add stuff to do.

normal cool adult male

I would say Gotham Knights, but there's no category for "The 12 Patches Away" game. All-in-all I really wanted to like this game, but I genuinely hate it and nearly all of my nearly 30 hours were spent wishing that it would get better. I do feel there is a good game in there somewhere (pretty far away), I liked all of the boss battles (until I invariably did a 180 and they began to infuriate me) and I think all the characters are interesting, but it would need a ton of work for me to not despise its existence.