Coming in so close to the holidays and the fact they left a feature out of the packaged game is a sign of a game being rushed to market while including it with a day 1 patch so they can continue working on it while it has gone gold. If that isn't then I don't know what a better indicator you need. Would you developers to go on forums and go to the press saying "We rushed the game?" Cause I doubt that's gonna happen any time soon.

You don't have the right to bash any game for content when you haven't even played it.  How can you judge whether or not a game is "sloppy" or "rushed" when there's no way you could have even played it yet?  Those are both terms that you've used to describe Fable 2 in this thread, so my question to you is how do you even know? 

Day 1 patches are the norm these days, and that's not necessarily a good or bad thing.  It depends on the circumstances.  Anyone who's looking forward to Fable 2 should be glad that the multi player will be added in the patch, because it was done to tighten things up before release.  I come from a PC gaming background where any time you buy a new game, you almost always have to download a day 1, or at least week 1, patch and then a video card and possibly sound card driver update and that's not including the time it takes to install the game itself.  So a 10 second patch on launch day for Fable 2 is hardly going to bother me.

I too come from PC gaming, in fact that's my main platform right now. Yet I haven't noticed a huge increase in day 1 patches. Maybe if we're talking MMOs where there's just so many little mobs that could be broken that chances are one will be yeah we will see a first week patch, yet usually we don't see one until later and even then the patch does nt contain a component of the game that should have been in the packaged version. Being "rushed" is not a quality of a game that you need to play to know about. It's a property of a game which is acquired when a developer rushes to release the game before a certain time, usually the holidays, instead of pushing back the release date a little bit. I also did not call the game sloppy, I called the developers sloppy. Not pushing a game back to hit a certain deadline when it should be pushed back is sloppy and a bad practice.

LOL.

It's entirely possible that a change MS is making/has made to XboxLive caused an unforseen problem.  I'm fairly sure that Fable 2 will be using XboxLive in ways that are somewhat new.  For example, take a look at the online Pub games.  This is definitely something out of the ordinary (the ability to play a "pre-game" online then import the results to the main game after it comes out).  They probably just discovered some scenario that didn't exist in their original test environment.

Come work for me in my software engineering department for a while... but you'd better not make any mistakes or have any unforseen circumstance arise...

If you give me a good QA people, hopefully yhey will not. I spend twice as much time debugging and testing crap in my projects than actually writing them,.. Th thing is this isn't a fix, it's a content patch and let's say it is the new XBL structure, what excuse would LBP have then?

Look, I'm not saying that what happened could not possibly have been avoided.  On the other hand, perhaps it was unavoidable from a practical perspective.  Look at the Hubble telescope... an incredible amount of money was spent trying to make sure every "t" was crossed and every "i" was dotted, so to speak, but yet there was still a major problem discovered late in the game.  The project wasn't rushed as much as there were different teams making different assumptions about design parameters.

I've been in software development since 1980.  Telecom, kernel work, etc., etc.  No matter how hard you try, there will always be some bug that will eventually bite you in the hiney.  And as OSes, hardware, and system interfaces/layers become more complex and feature-rich, the problems just keep getting more and more difficult to completely debug.

I know it's frustrating as heck when bugs creep up in software, but it's getting really difficult to debug new games these days, particularly considering the code is often in the millions of lines.

Now that doesn't excuse the companies that just ship sloppy code out the door...

Very good points all, but again this isn't just a bug fix patch, it's a content patch. There is some difference. This is furthered by the fact that Lionhead is a MGS developer and I'm pretty sure they have been aware exactly what the updates to XBL are/ I'd venture to say that they've even had the older versions of the code all along so as to make sure everything for it worked. But that's all assuming the XBL update really does change something big because if that's the case then older games shouldn't be working with XBL without a patch of some sort.

I wonder if the huge xboxlive update will break some online games.

The fun thing is what actually happened at Lionhead could be this:

"Gee guys, we won't have enough time to polish the dog AI if we have to get the netcode finished by gold time"; "np, we'll prioritize dog AI and deliver netcode via patch"

But what our friend Vlad321, defender of users with non-unlimited bandwith ISP's thinks it happened is

"GAME ISNT DONE! RUSH DELIVER AND COLLECT GOLD! BRING IN THE BEER!"

In other words, you don't have any knowledge, nor any proof, yet you spam the forum with your catastrophistic assumptions.

Btw, anyone here who works on software development can please lecture him on how software is in truth NEVER finished and theoretically speaking it could stay in development forever because there's always something to polish and optimize?