Sumez wrote:
I think there are a few examples of PS4 games that won't even run, or at least aren't beatable without the initial patch.
I think there are more than a few examples of pre-internet games that fit this description as well.

But yes the situation is obviously different now. People
expect post-release maintenance of problems, and similarly developers
expect to do the same, and the release process has adapted to take this into account. ...and the reality of this is some games that would have been
cancelled in a pre-patch era instead get released with the hope of recovering enough loss to make it to patch. Hard to compare this to the previous era, because they just wouldn't exist then, they would have just died before you heard about them.
A lot of glitches that people make a big stink about in, e.g.
Assassin's Creed Unity aren't any more critical than the average NES game bug. Most game releases for consoles with a QA gatekeeping process like PS4/XB1/Switch are as playable as
most games from the SNES era, but now there is a demand to fix even minor problems. If using Relm's sketch ability broke your save in Final Fantasy III in 1994, you wouldn't be getting a viral tweet about it with a patch the following week, you'd just start over, or give up.
Overall, if you want to play your PS4 totally offline, it's actually
pretty viable, IMO. They have a testing process specifically designed to ensure this, and with extremely rare exceptions it
does work.
...but taking patches improves the experience overall, and with a second generation the UI has gotten better (i.e. passive update downloads instead of up-front). In most cases you really can just ignore and skip the update when you start playing, but most people actually want the content of that patch, even though they're not happy about waiting for it at that particular moment. Initial install to hard disk is still a frequent problem, though... but at least that seems to be faster and less prominent in this generation than the previous one. (...and PC gamers were living with that one since the beginning anyway.)