After so much anticipation, it was a rotten start for the brilliant Castle Crashers, riddled as it still is with online connectivity issues and corrupted save data. One of those issues, the online co-op, has been fully acknowledged by The Behemoth, who are working with Microsoft to release a patch for the game soon.
“When we went through testing, Microsoft approved all our network code and we had no problems at all. There are those things in real-world scenarios that we couldn’t account for,” claimed art director Dan Paladin. Lead programmer Tom Fulp stated that “nothing came up” for them when playing the game for six-hour stints.
“Yeah, there are certain network settings where, if you’re in a very specific network environment, it won’t work with another person’s connection and that’s what’s happening,” explained Paladin. “But that’s something we’re already addressing by working with Microsoft to get a patch out as fast as possible.”
Fair enough, but after last year’s Call of Duty 4 Christmas debacle, you’d think Microsoft would be more prepared for this stuff. Xbox Live Gold memberships net the company a considerable amount of money — maybe some of that can be spent on assuring a quality service for all games, instead of having yet another console title rely on the patch culture.
Published: Sep 1, 2008 05:37 am