I’m currently obsessed with the changes Wizards of the Coast is making to Dungeons & Dragons. In case you don’t know, a new edition of the game is coming out this year, in September, which means the whole thing – all the rules and character classes – is getting updated. In the last few weeks, Wizards has revealed how. In other words, patch notes have been released. The biggest set I’ve ever seen.
This excites me, and it made me realize something else: patch notes have always been exciting. I’d even go so far as to say they’re one of the most exciting things about gaming. And I know how that sounds! I know bulleted lists aren’t exactly sexy. And if they are to you, then let’s talk. But no – it goes deeper than that. Hear me out.
Patch notes are widely accepted, but in console terms they’re not that old. Games used to come on a disk or cartridge, we’d put it in our machine, and that was it. Period. No further development. The game stayed as it would be forever. But with the power of the Internet came the ability to release updates – small ones at first and then larger ones – and this in turn allowed developers to continue to develop games and make changes to them.
This has been the case on PC for a while. Wherever 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) and all subsequent MMOs did too. Those games are my touchstones, so I’m sure there were others I missed. But the game that really made me feel the magic of patch notes was Dark Age of Camelot in 2001.
I felt the magic because I had the ideal conditions for it. I had invested hundreds and probably thousands of hours in the game, which meant I knew it very well. If something changed in the game’s balance or the game’s world, I would understand it and the impact. It was also important to me to stay competitive in a game about battling other players, so any changes to my character class were important to me. And I was kind of bored. On some level, I wanted a change. Cue patch notes.
Patch notes were always exciting. There, in black and white, was the future of the game. Which classes would rise in power and which would fall in importance. Were there new things? How did they work? All the clues you needed to make assumptions were there. What did they mean for you? That was the question on everyone’s mind, no matter what angle you looked at the patch notes from. You could almost feel the mental energy directed at them – and that was without anyone even loading the game. Just theory. And then arguments.
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My brain is doing something similar now with Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve put hundreds of hours into the characters in that game, so the changes that have been made mean a lot to me because I have no plans to stop playing. It was similar with Overwatch when “Jeff from the Overwatch team” revealed reworks to the characters in the game. Are my characters OK? Do I want to try something new? How does it all work? Mental math. Imagination. It’s going full steam ahead. To me, it’s as much a part of the game as the game itself.
It’s not just about balance changes. They’re the most important because they’re the most personal, as they’re to the characters we play. But patch notes also introduce significant changes to the worlds we know very well. I remember when Blizzard first introduced instanced PvP to World of Warcraft, and that was a big deal. Likewise, I remember when Blizzard introduced new raids or new events to World of Warcraft, and that was a big deal too. These days, you can push the boundaries further into single-player games. Look at what Larian did with Baldur’s Gate 3. It changed the ending of the game and extended it to give some popular characters more airtime. BioWare also retrospectively changed the ending of Mass Effect 3. These are really significant things.
Think of board games, which I suppose are similar to the games of old in that they come in the box. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re static. The fun eventually wears off. They stay alive when they change. I bet you changed the games you played as kids for the same reason. I know I did – we kept changing the rules so there were 44 free spins as we walked down the streets. It’s the same thing.
I know there’s a less pleasant side to it, too, namely buggy game launches, day-one patches, and, I assume, crunch – before or after games come out. None of that is good. But the opportunity to extend the life of the games we care about, to take them apart and rethink them, excites me – just as it excites me to see the makers of Dungeons & Dragons rethinking their 50-year-old game now. These are the things we like to think about, our escapes. And the conduit for all of that?
Sticky notes.