This game being semi-broken, missing content, and not having a patch...

[SL83]

Just so you guys know - I've seen this happen countless times with many of my favorite games.

It's not really the developers fault.

Sure, they made coding errors and left features and content out of the game. Why? Because the publisher that makes all the calls for the game probably decided it was time to release the game.

The developers most likely said something like: "It's not ready yet - critical things are missing, and there are flaws in the code."

The publisher most likely said: "We don't care. We're releasing it."

Publishers like to rush games out the door. They don't care if it isn't ready. They don't listen to the developers. They don't understand how games are made. All they care about is money.

The longer a game is being worked on - the more money it is costing them.

Is it possible if they listened to the developers and let the developers call the shots on when it was ready - the game would sell better because it's fully functional and has no show stoppers? Yeah - but they don't care.

They want the game out the door - going gold - on the shelves.

After the game is released - they generally abandon it if it didn't meet their expectations.

Sometimes they already have low expectations of the game and have planned on abandoning it ahead of time - they'll just make up the cost on some of their other 50 games they released this quarter -all of which were pushed out the door early despite the developers saying: "It's not ready."

Blizzard, BioWare, and Valve are examples of companies that take the time to do it right.

Vivendi Universal, Take 2 - they like to shove the shit out the door. Toss a grenade and run.

So yeah - I'm quite certain the Devs released the patch to the Publisher weeks ago, and the Publisher decided they would rather spend the effort and resources releasing content they can charge for. If the game dies out - then they don't have to spend resources on releasing the patch.

They may just be sitting on it waiting for that to happen.