With MMORPGs, patch­ing is a nec­es­sary evil. After all, when you have to con­sider the sheet amount of pos­si­ble device com­bi­na­tions on com­put­ers prob­lems are inevitable. Of course, there’s also major con­tent updates that come through patches, as fans can attest to for the more suc­cess­ful MMORPGs out there.

Still, wait­ing for these down­loads sucks. It espe­cially sucks for those get­ting in on the game late or those who have to rein­stall for what­ever rea­son (both of which have hap­pened to me numer­ous times).  After installing from a disc for a decent amount of time, patch­ing for hours sim­ply isn’t fun. If any­thing, it kills some of the buzz you might have had from the excite­ment of get­ting to play a new game.

Yet we deal with it. Some games are worse than oth­ers. Age of Conan has had almost a ridicu­lous amount of patches, includ­ing one major one that was made avail­able the day the game released. That was enjoyable.

So how could this be bet­ter han­dled? The only real answer is through tiered down­load­ing. This would allow play­ers to down­load or install a com­par­a­tively smaller client, which would then down­load addi­tional pieces of the game in a pre-determined order. This way, the client will down­load files based upon when they would be accessed.

Essen­tially this means that you would down­load the char­ac­ter selection/creation por­tion of the game first along with the open­ing areas of the game. You could then start play­ing the game while the remain­der of it down­loads in the back­ground. If you hap­pen to enter an area that isn’t yet down­loaded (or fin­ished down­load­ing) you would be greeted with a screen inform­ing you the area is being installed and will fin­ish soon.

To my knowl­edge, the only game of note that has han­dled this prop­erly is Guild Wars. While the game isn’t a MMORPG in the strictest sense of the word due to its reliance on instances, it’s cer­tainly sim­i­lar enough in gen­eral con­struc­tion to be com­pa­ra­ble. It’s unclear to me why this method hasn’t been copy­cat­ted by other titles since it worked extremely well and allowed play­ers to at least enjoy them­selves for the much longer full installation.

Luck­ily, Tur­bine seems to under­stand the ben­e­fits of this idea and is cur­rently apply­ing it to The Lord of the Rings Online: Shad­ows of Angmar. They are cur­rently beta test­ing a piece of soft­ware known as the Tur­bine Down­load Man­ager (or TDM). It is being used to down­load (or patch) their test client, known as Roh­eryn. TDM han­dles teired down­load­ing and much to my sur­prise, it pre­sented me with the play but­ton very quickly into the down­load process.

It’s unclear cur­rently if they plan on using this sys­tem when their lat­est patch goes to the remain­ing nor­mal servers. How­ever, I have to imag­ine they’ll be using this sys­tem by the time their expan­sion pack, the Mines of Moria, releases to retail.

This would be an incred­i­bly smart move. I imag­ine the expan­sion will increase some of the buzz around the title in and of itself, but if Tur­bine is able to show gamers that the usu­ally obnox­ious patch­ing phase won’t be quite as awful as they expect it could def­i­nitely cre­ate some pos­i­tive word of mouth.

I just hope more com­pa­nies adopt this sys­tem as time moves for­ward.

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