If you read our review on Alpha Squad, you already know that it had a few bugs upon release. Steve, from Dragon Divide, was kind enough to comment on the review and let us know that they were actively working on solutions to the problems. Well, it looks like the promised patch is finally here to fix up those issues for those that bought Alpha Squad. On the Dragon Divide site, Steve has an article that sheds some light on the situation on why the patch was delayed as long as it was and as well as how the XBL Indie Games channel works. Considering that it takes major devs like Infinity Ward and Dice weeks to release patches, I don’t think a week or two is that bad. He also talks about upcoming plans for Alpha Squad patches:
I wanted the first patch to be a content update that included a new enemy, new stage and some of your suggestions, but 2.0 was primarily used to correct the unplanned issue. A future update will include these extra features and I would like to try some kind of episodic-like system as long as we still have space in the game file to do so.
The Indie Channel system has a hard-cutoff point for submitting XNA 3.1 projects. That cutoff date is February 7th and after that time all games must be submitted with the 4.0 framework. I would like to get in a content patch, Alpha Squad 3.0, before Feb 7th and have a massive update later to convert the entire game to 4.0 and add in the remaining suggestions. The final version of the game, appropriately enough, will be Alpha Squad 4.0.
According to a tweet from Dragon Divide’s twitter account, the patch is live. So, if you’ve been waiting to pick up Alpha Squad, now’s the time to do it.
