Early last month Polytron released an update for Fez their unique platformer the only issue was it had the possibility of corrupting your save, as this was discovered the game patch was quickly pulled and Polytron went to work on fixing that issue or so we presumed. It looks like today Polytron has announced that the patch will be released again but remain the same as the previous one, meaning you do still have a chance of losing your game. Check out the full press release inside.
We’re bringing the first FEZ patch online.
It’s the same patch.We’re not going to patch the patch.
Why not? Because microsoft would charge us tens of thousands of dollars to re-certify the game.
And because as it turns out, the save file delete bug only happens to less than a percent of players. It’s a shitty numbers game to be playing for sure, but as a small independent, paying so much money for patches makes NO SENSE AT ALL. especially when you consider the alternative. Had FEZ been released on steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away too!
We believe the save file corruption issue mostly happened to players who had completed, or almost completed the game. If you hadn’t already seen most of what FEZ had to offer, your save file is probably safe. It doesn’t happen if you start a new game.
We believe the current patch is safe for an overwhelming majority of players.
The patch fixes almost everything that’s been wrong with the game since launch. The framerate issues, the loading, the skips, the death loops, everything! All that stuff is fixed! And right now, nobody can get to it since the patch was pulled. For 99% of people, it makes FEZ a better game.
To the less-than-1% who are getting screwed, we sincerely apologize. We know this hurts you the most, because you’re the ones who put the most times into the game. And this breaks our hearts. We hope you dont think back on your time spent in FEZ as a total waste.
Microsoft gave us a choice: either pay a ton of money to re-certify the game and issue a new patch (which for all we know could introduce new issues, for which we’d need yet another costly patch), or simply put the patch back online. They looked into it, and the issue happens so rarely that they still consider the patch to be “good enough”.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end, paying such a large sum of money to jump through so many hoops just doesn’t make any sense. We already owe microsoft a LOT of money for the privilege of being on their platform. People often mistakenly believe that we got paid by Microsoft for being exclusive to their platform. Nothing could be further from the truth. WE pay THEM.
So we’re going to go ahead and put Title Update back online, and for a vast majority of people it’s going to make FEZ a better game.
Thank you for your understanding and continuing support.
Sincerely,
The Polytron Team
So there you have it, the game will be updated with all the fixes and the one rare glitch of you losing your save so do you think the risk is worth the reward? Let LeftStickDown know by leaving your comments and thoughts below.
Source: PolytronCorporation
I still get random freezes and crashes on Fallout 3. Still have permanent glitched saved files, and to this day if it weren’t for my cloud save files I would be restarting all the time. I know many people who play the fallout franchise and have similar issues as myself. Skyrim and Dead Island have very similar issues as well. Those games have millions of happy players, and from what I can tell the odds seem pretty good that at one point or another the game will ‘crap out’ and the results are random, corrupted game or not.
Those are commercial games, FEZ is still very much an indie production, or did they miss the memo? Why do we expect more of them then better selling games?
It’s sucks but thinking realistically and by comparison, 1% is less then the amount of acceptable ‘foreign matter’ allowed in most foods we eat in North America.
The average person who plays FEZ accepts odds higher than their save file corrupting every day for things that cost more and have worse results. Complaining over this should be at the bottom of their list.