Homefront Patch Status & Sales Updates

Homefront has been out a little over a week now, and some gamers have had their share of negative experiences with THQ’s patriotic shooter. Since release, Kaos Studios has been hard at work on fixing these issues so that gamers all over can finally get to enjoying the game that they hyped so much.

Homefront‘s first week on the shelves was filled with news both good an bad. First came the reports that THQs stock had taken a massive 20% dive during the first day of the game’s release, a sudden dip attributed to the relatively poor reviews that the game had garnished from media outlets. Our own Homefront review scored the game a 3.5/5, a respectable score for the first game in a new IP.

Surprisingly, this did not deter THQ from reporting rather positive news in the days that followed. Shortly after news started to circulate that THQ’s stock was in trouble, THQ was pleased to announce that in its first day on the shelves, Homefront had sold 375,000 copies of the game. Today, THQ sent another press release with updated sales figures, indicating that Homefront has now sold through 1 million units around the world, from shipping 2.4 million units to date.

Meanwhile, reports have been circulating that a number of players are having trouble with the game freezing on the PS3 and Xbox 360, with a small group of Xbox 360 owners reporting that their copy of the game would not even load to the main menu. This prompted Kaos Studios, Homefront’s developer, to announce that they were working on a number of patches to be released for the console versions of the game as well as the PC version.

The patch news doesn’t stop there as Kaos has revealed that they’ve submitted patches for review to Sony and Microsoft, and they hope to get them live to players as soon as possible. A number of details regarding what the patches will entail have also been released and are included below.

The Homefront Team has been working around the clock identifying and fixing issues surrounding Multiplayer functionality. We want to give everyone an update on what issues are known, how we are working on them, and when you can expect to see fixes available for download.

Important Notes:

• Xbox 360: The Homefront team is finishing up our first Critical Title Update that will address the Profile Corruption issue (also known as the ‘Freeze’ bug), as this is our highest priority. We are also including a fix for multiplayer connectivity and ping time issues, where players are being sent to distant server locations at the expense of performance. We expect this update to be submitted to Microsoft really soon and we will be working with them very closely to get this approved and deployed as quickly as possible.
• PlayStation 3: We are also working on several multiplayer connectivity and freeze issues on this platform as well. Many Homefront issues occur equally across all consoles but the PlayStation 3 Comprehensive Patch will be sent to SONY as soon as the issues are resolved.
• PC: The PC patching process is a much more “real-time” situation, given they do not need to go through any kind of certification process and fixes are being made and delivered as soon as they are resolved.

Homefront Update Plans

Update 1: Xbox 360 Critical Title Update

• Scheduled for Microsoft Submission ASAP
• Fixing the Xbox Live Profile Corruption ‘Freeze’ Issue
• Fix for players being matched in distant server locations

Update 2: Additional Game Issues Fixes

• Playstation 3 Update will release as soon as fixes are ready.
• Xbox 360 will submit as soon as Update 1 is released live.
• Fixes include:
  o   Multiplayer Freezing (affecting  X360 & PS3)
  o   Experience and Statistics Resets (affecting X360 & PS3)
  o   Improving Party Matchmaking & Joining with Friends (affecting X360 & PS3)
  o   Fixing the Beacon Error (affecting X360 only)
  o   Correcting inconsistent Leaderboards data (affecting X360 & PS3)

Strangely, the hacking that has been plaguing the PC version of the game has yet to be addressed, but hopefully this will be an issue that Kaos will bring up with their next announcement for the title. It will be especially important as multiplayer is expected to drive sales of the title as both THQ and Kaos aim to have the title sell more than 2 million copies in an effort to break even on the new IP.

Homefront was released for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 last week in North America and Europe.

Source: Homefront Blog