Technically, Turbine has been doing this for a while with their game clients, but given that few other developers are unwilling to take on this same method, I figured Blizzard gets some notice. What’s the worst part of patching? If you have low bandwidth, your answer is likely the downloading portion. On large patch days, you can probably forget getting any World of Warcraft action in until sometime later in the day, assuming your connection holds up during the patching process.
Tentonhammer is reporting an addition to the WoW: Cataclysm beta, that will allow players to stream patches, allowing them to download only a small amount in order to get into the game while the rest downloads in the background. Your experience will not be ideal, according to the patch notes, but the hope is to minimize the time between patching and playing. There isn’t much information as to what “less than ideal” equates to, but in the realm of big patches and slow download speeds, it is better than nothing.
Hopefully this feature is made standard when World of Warcraft: Cataclysm goes live later this year.
More on World of Warcraft as it appears.
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