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I have this obsession with playing all PS4 games without patches when I first buy them, and we are at the point where buying a disc basically means purchasing an obsolete, unfinished version of a product. The severity of this varies from product to product. For example... Resident Evil 2 (remake) is pretty much complete on disc, whereas something like Conan Exiles is a barely functioning build of the game without updates, with even the large majority of objectives labelled "COMING SOON" in the menu.
Especially thanks to PS4's ability to easily record gameplay, I find exploring these near "prototype" versions of released games pretty interesting. Final Fantasy XV, which was notoriously considered "unfinished" by many, is actually quite playable from start to finish on disc. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of wild bugs that were patched out later... including what might be the best video game glitch ever, the "Armiger Glitch." Back on the subject of Conan Exiles... that game even had features which have since been "removed," like an option for first person combat.
We are probably nearing the days of digital-only consoles, especially with platforms like the Switch that sometimes require half of the physical game to be downloaded anyway. Still, it's interesting that with physical copies still existing, we actually can boot up "older builds" of some games that in a digital-only landscape would simply no longer exist... which is currently the case with PC gaming. The fact that PS4 doesn't allow you to outright disable game updates speaks volumes about how nobody is really "supposed" to play the version of a game on disc.
Having said all of that, preserving the most up-to-date versions of these games may be the bigger problem many years from now.
Especially thanks to PS4's ability to easily record gameplay, I find exploring these near "prototype" versions of released games pretty interesting. Final Fantasy XV, which was notoriously considered "unfinished" by many, is actually quite playable from start to finish on disc. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of wild bugs that were patched out later... including what might be the best video game glitch ever, the "Armiger Glitch." Back on the subject of Conan Exiles... that game even had features which have since been "removed," like an option for first person combat.
We are probably nearing the days of digital-only consoles, especially with platforms like the Switch that sometimes require half of the physical game to be downloaded anyway. Still, it's interesting that with physical copies still existing, we actually can boot up "older builds" of some games that in a digital-only landscape would simply no longer exist... which is currently the case with PC gaming. The fact that PS4 doesn't allow you to outright disable game updates speaks volumes about how nobody is really "supposed" to play the version of a game on disc.
Having said all of that, preserving the most up-to-date versions of these games may be the bigger problem many years from now.