Twisted Metal to get demo, day-one patch

By Brenna Hillier

Eat Sleep Play boss David Jaffe has confirmed a demo is inbound for Twisted Metal.

In a video post on his blog, Jaffe said the developer is winding up production on the demo and expects to have it finished early this week.

The demo is the last bit of work Eat Sleep Play has to do – except for a patch.

“We’re doing a day one patch, which is gonna be a very, very, very small patch,” Jaffe said. “I’ve gone on record: I hate patches. But that said – they’re important in some cases.”

Jaffe made his opinion of day-one patches public att GDC 2011, and then again at PAX, where he gave a popular keynote (with lots of swears).

“There are a couple of bugs – we don’t want to release it buggy,” he admitted, “But we’re also doing it for some real final tuning and balance.

“Once you go gold, you have a couple of weeks to really play the game, and me and the QA guys we’re just like ‘you know, this seems a little unbalanced. It would be really cool if this weapon did a little less damage.’ It takes a lot of time to suss those things out.”

The designer also mentioned a few more substantial tweaks he’s interested in making to the game’s levels, which would require a more substantial patch, and have therefore been put on the backburner.

“You start downloading a huge, memory-intensive level and it starts to feel like ‘I just bought this, I just wanna play,'”

“If the game is successful enough we’d love to do future tweaks and adjustments to the game, and some of those hopefully will be level-based,”

The game’s success seems to be a very important factor in the possibility of future updates.

“If we ever touch Twisted Metal again, it’ll be either that it’s successful enough that there’s a big enough community that says ‘hey, we’d really like to get some of these in via patch’, or there are some really heinous bugs,” Jaffe said.

You can watch Jaffe’s full, 27-minute long ramble below, which includes detailed information on the game’s multiplayer. Twisted Metal releases on February 14 in the US, and February 17 in Europe.