Bully 360 patch due this week

By Tom Bramwell Published 10 March, 2008

Rockstar dealing with crashes, etc.

Rockstar said late on Friday that it will release a patch for the Xbox 360 version of Bully: Scholarship Edition "within the next week".

The publisher said it was "very aware of the problems some people have been experiencing with the Xbox 360 version of Bully" and offered its wholehearted apologies.

The biggest problem we've had is hard lockups that require the console to be reset, and these seem to affect even very new consoles like our office Xbox 360 Elite, and happen every few hours.

This is particularly problematic as Bully uses a GTA-style manual save-game system rather than auto-save checkpointing.

Other complaints have centred on the frame-rate, which hasn't bothered us in all honesty, and some audio glitches, which we haven't experienced. Tsk - it's all about us these days.

It's a shame really, because we do love Bully, as you will see when we publish our Bully: Scholarship Edition reviews this week. Given the problems and distinctive features of each, we decided to handle them separately.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (17) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • jonsaan #1 4 years ago

    Hmmmm. My 360 used to do a pretty good job of locking up regardless of what game it was playing.

    Yes, yes I know. Call me a troll if you wish.

    /slinks back under bridge.

  • Lebowski #2 4 years ago

    It's locked up once in seven hours for me. Can forgive it though as it's a great game. (£30 in HMV on the high street)

  • rashes #3 4 years ago

    Might pick this up so during the week so.

    Slightly off topic:
    I'm not keen on 1up's new scoring system which gave this game a B-, sounds good but then it registers as a 67 on metacritic which I would regard as a really poor score.

  • penhalion #4 4 years ago

    Hang on! Does their statement mean that they are only fixing the crash bug, without addressing the frame rate issues?

    Do they just love to drag bad publicity around with them or something.

  • Kiigan #5 4 years ago

    I normally don't care too much about frame-rate issues, but it is nonetheless disappointing that a whole new generation of hardware can't give Bully a more consistent frame-rate.

  • DiamonKn #6 4 years ago

    Has anyone experienced a lapse on the gamer~score?

    Example I only attended 4 lessons and 20 minutes later the (Teacher Pet) achievement popped up on my screen despite not completing the 6 classes required.

    Also any other achievement I have actually earned just pops up randomly despite completing the task ages before it pops up? (Although this may be that points are awarded at a certain time of the day on the game like when curfew starts or something?

    Anyone else?

  • Darren #7 4 years ago

    I'm a bit concerned that this title update will break the game for me, like it did BioShock until it was finally addressed in a later update, as I've been playing the 360 version for almost 12 hours now and haven't encountered any crashes or freezes at all. Even the kiss bug that IGN reported froze their 360 for upto 40 seconds is nowhere to be seen I've kissed over 50 people in the game from both sexes!!! Apart from some very rare audio glitches and an erratic framerate in outdoor locations, more noticeably the town, the game runs fine for me and neither of those issues has any effect on the gameplay.

    I guess I've just been lucky but it does make me wonder if this issue is somehow related to the numerous different builds of the 360 rather than the game itself. As I mentioned earlier, BioShock initally ran perfectly fine on my 360 until it was patched and then it started hitching constantly and the framerate dropped to a crawl whenever a Big Daddy appeared onscreen until it was finally fixed in the last update. Yet other people reported hitching and stuttering before the patch which was why it was updated in the first place!!! Odd. Considering that the 360 uses fixed hardware, you'd think everyone would encounter the same problems but that clearly wasn't the case with BioShock and doesn't seem to the case with Bully either. I suspect that this title update will fix the issues for some but cause problems for others... :?

  • Darren #8 4 years ago

    @Kiigan - Apart from the horrific and indeed tear-riffic intro sequence, Bully appears to use v-sync throughout the actual game so that probably explains the fluctuating framerate. It's clearly not been optimised properly for the 360 so depending on how much is onscreen the framerate can go from being smooth (indoors) to running at what feels like 10 fps at times (outdoors with lots of people around). Personally, it doesn't bother me as Bully isn't a game that requires a constantly smooth framerate anyway and it's never so bad as to affect the gameplay IMO. I find slowdown far less intrusive than screen tearing but given how superior the 360 is to the PS2 and how only the textures, lighting and resolution are better in this new version - the modelling appears identical to me - then it's somewhat surprising that the 360 isn't running the game at 60 fps with ease. Still the framerate is only poor some of the time anyway, most of the time it seems to be 30 fps for me.

  • MrE26 #9 4 years ago

    It's locked up once for me and i'm up to chapter 3. Thankfully i'd just saved my game. I've had a couple of audio drop outs too, particularly when i first started playing. The framerate isn't an issue for me, although it really should be a solid 60fps. It's hardly a graphically taxing game.

  • BBIAJ #10 4 years ago

    10 frames a second Darren!?

    And you don't find it a problem, yet tearing has you foaming at the mouth?

    Yeah, whatever, I can't say that it's ever dropped that low, if at all.

  • GamesConnoisseur #11 4 years ago

    Yeah confusing why and when locks occur but still I know that from my playing of Bully (Chapter 3 at moment) only had one lock up so far, nothing on the scale I had with BioShock before adding in new harddrive. Frame rates issues is not as big as it is being made out by some, did not really notice it much as so engrossed with the game and certainly worth having.

    Hoping the patch will improve it for everyone.

  • penhalion #12 4 years ago

    These lock-up issues seem related to the way the way the game uses the harddrive. I suspect that people with the memory card will not experience these issues. Be interesting to see if anyone running this with a memory card is experiencing lock-ups and freezes.

  • ~j~ #13 4 years ago

    Other complaints have centred on the frame-rate, which hasn't bothered us in all honesty, and some audio glitches, which we haven't experienced. Tsk - it's all about us these days.

    Nice one EG! now they wont bother fixing the frame rate at all :)

    I predict similar frame rate probs for GTA 4. probably worse.

  • Darren #14 4 years ago

    @BBIAJ - I said 'feels' like 10 fps not that it *is* 10 fps, it may well be higher than that, e.g. when you run out of the Boys Dorm in the morning, the framerate is noticeably low and if you pan the camera around you can see how low as movement is somewhat jerky. However, it isn't frequent enough elsewhere to be even slightly annoying and it certainly hasn't once affected the gameplay so it isn't a problem, no, it just distracts from the graphical polish, that's all.

  • Darren #15 4 years ago

    @~j~ - Back when GTA IV had an October 2007 release date, some of the previews of the 360 version mentioned that the framerate was terrible but given the extra development time the title's had, I doubt that will be the case now. The PS3 version maybe... ;)

  • Feanor #16 4 years ago

    So what do 360 gamers who don't have it hooked up online do? Say thank you, and ask for another shafting?
    Edited by 1 at 10/03/08 @ 16:27

  • Feanor #17 4 years ago

    "Slightly off topic:
    I'm not keen on 1up's new scoring system which gave this game a B-, sounds good but then it registers as a 67 on metacritic which I would regard as a really poor score."

    Blame MetaCritic, not 1up. A B- should work out to a 75% score like it has does on gamerankings for 10 years.

    http://ww w.gamerankings.com/htmlpages4/9...