Man I'm playing Gothic, and having a good time when I decide to go and fry all the meat I'd gathered (about 40) when I ran into this. It's not the first game I've seen this. What's your experience with patches that just make things worse?

In my example, before the "improvement" of Union and switching controls to "Gothic 2" style controls, I could fry up 40 pieces of meat in seconds. The player character bends down, places the meat in the pan, and you just kept hitting the forward button and he would swap out pieces and 40 could be done in seconds. With this "improvement" he bends down, fries a piece of meat, and that's it. You have to wait for him to stand back up, then press again, watch as he bends down and places a piece of meat in the pan, and... rinse and repeat 40 times. This same thing happens when working in the smith. I used to be able to go through, say 20 pieces of raw steel in seconds, rapidly hitting the forward button. Now, the whole animation has to repeat itself.

Whoever thought this was an "improvement" really should look up the definition of the word. And I didn't remember it being this way in Gothic 2 either, but perhaps it was. Can't imagine I would've put up with that for long. I'm not putting up with this, that's for sure. I know this is technically a mod and not a patch, but apparently this is a change the developers made for Gothic 2.

So what's your example?

I am asking specifically about patches because they're generally made by the same folks that made the game and they do patches in order to IMPROVE their game to the overall buying general public. Mods are done by individuals who wish to make changes that they feel are improvements for themselves (and possibly others but they're not marketing to everyone).

Dragon Quest 8 (PS2).

Because of changes to the US release:
* Opening the menu now takes time, as it has to load a new screen.
* Cursor memory is lost in the menu. This can slow things down in situations like, when you're repeatedly casting Whistle (spell that triggers a random encounter).
* When casting Zoom (the DQ version of fast travel), if there's more than one page of places to warp to, there is no visual indication of this fact. This, in particular, can confuse new players.
* Voice acting (added to the US version) can't be turned off. You can turn the volume down to 0, but even then you don't get the traditional DQ message sound, and the music still gets quieter when there would be voice acting. Furthermore, there's a few cases where a bit of voice acting does not respect that setting, which can be immersion breaking if you've been playing with it turned off.

The "60 fps" adjustment to Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2.

Kingdom hearts was originally 30fps and designed with that it mind but because modern gamers think games are "unplayable" if its not 60fps, Square changed the game so it runs at 60fps. This isnt a huge problem for most of the game but some boss attacks become much faster and more difficult to avoid because of the change to 60fps.

Notably;
- in KH1, Sephiroth's meteor attack moves faster because of 60fps (not too bad)
- in KH2, Vexen fight is much harder with the copy to produce Dark Sora being far faster, his giant ice attack is faster
- in BBS (and KH2 I believe), Peter Pan's link/summon becomes broken by being able to stunlock and deal significant damage to the enemy

Maybe its age but I dont find 30fps to be unplayable or 60fps to be necessary to make a game good.

Games certainly feel a lot less pleasant running at 30fps than they do at 60 plus (just try Alice: Madness Returns for the horrors of a game running at 30 that really should have been built at 60+)

Sounds like in Kingdom Hearts they made the stupid decision of linking some of the game mechanics to FPS/render speed, which is the type of thing that game developers should be forced to do the Game of Thrones Walk of Shame for doing. There's no excuse for it.

I'm pretty sure Bethesda's Skyrim and Fallout 4 (which use the same engine) have physics that are affected by FPS. In Fallout 4 if you didn't lock FPS to 60, some physics got whacky. One of the things I noticed right away when I got a new monitor in the middle of a Fallout 4 run that supported 144Hz and I set it to that, all of a sudden I couldn't jump as high. Very noticeable when I wasn't able to reach certain places that I had easily reached previously. At first I was blaming it on my controller lol. But no, it turns out their in game physics are somehow tied to FPS and people who had high end machines that had crazy high FPS said they saw all sorts of weird things happening. There's actually a mod that fixes it on Nexus.

For me, simply going into my Nvidia settings and setting my refresh rate back to 60Hz fixed the issue for me. I could jump again! Yay!

Not a patch exactly, but everything about the "Director's Cut" version of Deus Ex Human Revolution made it much worse. Removing the "gold filter" made it look much less special and just kinda boring, and forcing the lengthy (and rather bland) DLC mini-campaign into the middle of the story proper, along with making the player level up from scratch, absolutely cripples the game's pacing.

Doom 3 BFG Edition adds more ammo and gives you an offset flashlight so you can see and shoot. This basically fundamentally changes how you approach the game, and while it's not the hugest change, it does blunt the horror survival element.

Yes - you're right, Skyrim had that issue. I haven't tried Fallout 4, but I imagine it's the same.

It's such lazy programming.

That's an issue with a lot of developers locking their game's engine to a certain framerate. Developers rarely if ever follow Doom's example in making their code as portable as possible, and therefore when it comes time to do a remaster it takes a lot of work to update the game and inevitably it has some issues.

Often the case with balance changes in RTS and aRPG games. Especially when the balance changes are done because of multiplayer and it completely screws the single player/campaign experience. Like Battle for Middle Earth 1.

As for Skyrim at unlocked frame rates, watch this and laugh yourself to death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFVtXjr-Nno

Nothing can be worse than patches made for no other reason than to censor the game's original content.

SMH...

Yes - that's actually worse. I mean, you can not install a censorship patch, but anyone buying (for example) the Mass Effect Remaster gets a censored version of ME2 by default. Or Skunkape Games changing the Bosco voice actor and removing a number of jokes from the Sam and Max Episodic remasters.

I tend to avoid remasters unless they preserve the script, voices and artistic direction of the original.

Only on GOG. And only if you bought the game and downloaded the installers before the update. After that, you can only revert with Galaxy and only 2 versions back.

Ahhh, yes. The joys of digital distribution. Patches used to be optional, now you'll take them and you'll like it, OR ELSE!!!

That was hilarious. Poor horses though.

I liked the comment "Damn you Stormcloaks!" lol