A couple of weeks back I received an email from Kieron Gillen, kindly passing on a message from the people at ‘Good Old Games’. They were asking about the ‘Hostile Waters’ multiplayer patch, a patch that, over the years, we’ve been asked about every six months or so. Every time we’ve been very grateful for the attention but have politely declined releasing it – ownership of the patch is something of a legal grey area, we think. Chatting about it with some of the guys today, it seems that at least two of the coding team have tried to get the thing working again in their spare time over the past few years, with limited success. Believers in the supernatural might say that patch didn’t want to be released, goddamit. It’s happy being myth rather than reality – the Lord Lucan of Rage Software. To be fair I know that given enough time they’d get it going, but I sort of hope they don’t. Here’s the message I sent back to Good Old Games in any case, which I think’s going to make it onto their forums:
“We’d wanted the game to be multiplayer day one for sure and, for a while, we were developing it as a multiplayer experience. Various commercial constraints made this road difficult, however, meaning we had to cut back to just the single player experience mid-way through development.
By the time we finished the game it really was very much a single player experience, and the patch was just that – a patch to try and add multiplayer to what was now at its very core a single player game. This was a patch we had a little over three months to develop and deliver.
As I write this I come to a realisation I’ve never had before – the game is better left with only the thought of the patch and what it might have been like, rather than the reality of what it was like. The game, as it was released, is the game we made and, maybe putting this to bed once and for all, I think it should stay that way. The patch is the mystery box; best left unopened……”
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