general question for the devs

batmanscar

how long does it take for a patch for the game to be released ? does it take a long time to fix a certain issue in the engine not relating graphically but to gameplay ?

Fibijean

This is the sort of thing you'll probably want to ask them in their next Q&A. They may stop by and answer a question here, but they also might not, as this section is mostly for questions for the community.

In case they don't stop by, I can give you an answer which is probably in the same ballpark as what they would say based on things they've said in the past as well as my own, admittedly limited, experience with programming and game design.

They release patches every six weeks or so, with new chapters every three months and a major update halfway in between each chapter. Besides the obvious things, like new Tomes and DLC content, I believe what goes into each patch is pretty much a matter of what new changes or mechanics are ready to go live. They're working on a whole bunch of things at any given time, so once something gets to the point of being polished enough to ship, then it goes into the next patch, or possibly the one after that.

As for how long it takes to fix things, I would imagine that depends on the nature of the thing that needs fixing, what broke it and why. Some bugs are easy to locate and fix, some are much more complicated because they may be a combination of issues, not just a simple miscode. And sometimes they might have a really good idea of what's causing a problem right off the bat, so they can get right down to fixing it, and other times they might have no idea until they start testing things. And some bugs aren't possible to fix until something else gets fixed. So it just depends, and it's different for each issue.

Again, most of this is educated guesswork, so don't take it as official information, but based on my understanding that's pretty much how it works.

FireHazard

@batmanscar

It honestly depends on how severe the issue is, if the Devs can get to it at a quick pace, and other small things as well.

Usually if an issue is game breaking than the Devs will have it fixed within a few days or weeks (depending on the severity and difficulty of locating the issue, but it's entirely subjective on how long it takes), if the issue is minor than it usually gets fixed within a hot-fix or patch that's released as an undisclosed date.

For game-play issues it could be different, if the game-play issues revolve around an OP Killer or perk than it usually gets taken care of in a future patch/hot-fix like anything else, since game-play issues that revolve around OP Killers are not really a top priority thing to take care of (I could guess).

If you mean a game-play issue that's severely busted like uh... a game-play issue that makes the game borderline unplayable, than it really does depend on what the Devs do in that situation. It's easy for me to say "It's done within a few hours, days, or weeks" like above, but I honestly don't know in the case of game-breaking issues, it could take a few hours or a few days, it entirely depends on how severe the issue is and how difficult it is to fix it, and this goes for the rest of what I said above.