Fez’s outspoken creator Phil Fish announced yesterday via Twitter that the Xbox 360 version of Fez will finally be patched.
Fez was originally released in April 2012. While the game was critically acclaimed and sold well, it launched with a number of bugs (including a few game breaking ones.) Fish and his team at Polytron managed to fix a lot of the major bugs with a patch the following month, but the update introduced new bugs that caused some players’ save files to become corrupted. Fish told players that he wouldn’t be able to issue another patch to fix those issues, as his company couldn’t afford the cost of releasing another update over Xbox Live. According to Fish, Microsoft wanted to charge him “tens of thousands of dollars” to release another patch for Fez.
Fish’s dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s policies has caused him to give up on Microsoft platforms: while Fez was originally published by Microsoft Studios, Fish recently announced that Fez 2 is in development for the PS4, but he has no plans to release the game for the 360 or Xbox One.
Microsoft recently announced that they will finally stop charging developers for title updates and re-certification tests on 360 games. Microsoft’s policy reversal will apparently allow Polytron to finally fix the 360 version of Fez, which still features bugs not present in the game’s PC port, which was released a year after the 360 version. Fish says the patch is still a few months away from being released, but nonetheless, this is good news — Fez is a great game, and now 360 players will be able to enjoy it without living in constant fear that their saves are going to get corrupted or that the game will get stuck in an unwinnable state.
