God of War is a very good game that has been getting an unprecedented number of title updates. The PS4 exclusive launched on April 20 and in its first 11 days of release has been updated eight times.
The most recent patch, which upgraded the game to version 1.17, was released on Friday, ending a streak of updates that had begun with the game’s day one patch, which was numbered 1.10.
Details have been scarce about what these updates do. The “update history” screen on the PS4 lists 1.17 as offering “various bug fixes and improvements.” The same has been the case for updates 1.16, 1.15, 1.14,, 1.13, 1.12 and 1.11. When 1.12 hit, a Sony Twitter account tipped people off that that update included an option to increase the game’s text size. Otherwise, it’s been hard to decipher what any of the updates do.
All of the post-release updates have been small. The 1.17 patch is 33.89MB and would download over most modern internet connections in a few seconds. Applying the update requires a quick reboot of the game, which is a minor inconvenience to those of us who leave their PS4s in suspend mode between sessions but is otherwise not a big hassle.
It’s nevertheless unusual for any big new game to patch at this near-daily rate. The February 2017 PS4 exclusive Horizon Zero Dawn had about a patch a week for its first few weeks of its existence. The May 2016 exclusive Uncharted 4 also did about a patch a week early on, though also had several “live updates” sprinkled in that tweaked parameters in the game’s multiplayer mode. Like Horizon, God of War is single-player-only.
We’ve asked Sony about it and haven’t gotten official word about what’s going on yet. If they do, we’ll patch this article up to version 1.10.