‘Fallout 4’ Patch Process Explained, Beta Patch Coming Next Week

Fallout 4 is closing in on its second week of being in the hands of PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC gamers. A number of bugs and performance issues have already been discovered in that times and Bethesda Softworks detailed Thursday its patch plans for the three platforms. Interestingly, the developer is going the beta route with its patches and PC owners will get it first.

Bethesda Game Studios posted an update on the Bethesda website thanking the fans for the support and making Fallout 4 its largest game launch yet. As previously reported by Inquisitr, the game shipped 12 million units at launch with around 1.2 million players on Steam the first day.

The developer then turned its attention to supporting Fallout 4 with an upcoming patch. Unsurprisingly, the large game world of the greater post-nuclear apocalypse Boston area has its share of glitches. As explained below, PC gamers will receive a beta patch first next week followed by a full release on PS4, Xbox One, and PC when the patch is ready.

“It’s true that the freedom our games offer you can lead to unintentional consequences that are sometimes bad, when the game combines too many unexpected elements at once. Given the scale and complexity of the systems at work, especially when allowing you to build your own settlements, we’re happy that Fallout 4 is our most robust and solid release ever, and we’d like to thank our amazing QA staff who worked as hard as anyone to break the game so we could fix it during development. But a hundred testers will never replicate the many millions playing the game now, and we’re hard at work addressing the top issues,” a Bethesda Game Studios rep wrote.

“Our process for updating the game will include releasing a beta patch on Steam, followed by full release on PC, then release on the consoles. This process has worked well for us in the past and allows us to get more fixes out faster. Expect to see more updates, that are smaller and more frequent, than a few big ones. This allows us to make sure each fix is working right, as any change can have unintentional side effects in a game this huge. We expect the first beta patch to be up next week.”

What areas the first Fallout 4 patch will address is currently unknown at this point. Bethesda is likely working on finalizing the details and will put out a changelog when the beta patch has been finalized. A number of bugs have been identified by users, as previously reported, including one glitch that allows users to gain an infinite number of bottle caps, the in-game currency.

The performance of Fallout 4 is not a pressing need, compared to the crashing to the desktop on the PC, but would still be a welcome change. The game is not able to maintain a steady 30 frames per second (fps) on the PS4 and Xbox One and can drop down to around 20 fps or lower in some sections. Even the PC has framerate issues when walking through building at times.

Bethesda has not gone out of its way to acknowledge any of the issues with the game, so it is hard to gauge which direction the patch will go. That said, Fallout 4 has been a relatively stable release thus far compared to issues discovered with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3.

PC gamers interested in receiving the Fallout 4 beta patch should go to their Steam library, right-click on Fallout 4, and then select the “Properties” menu option. Once the “Properties” box is up, select the “Betas” tab and you will see the option to opt into the beta. The opt-in option is not available at the time of this article, but expect it to appear just prior or after the patch is released.

[Image via Fallout 4]