One of the only knocks we gave Section 8: Prejudice regarded its matchmaking system. Specifically, our review mentioned the game's lack of a party system and the general difficulty of playing with Xbox Live friends online. Apparently ours wasn't the only complaint, as TimeGate has addressed community feedback with a new title update.

While the new update won't add a party system to the game, we've been informed by TimeGate that "servers are more likely to try to put friends or Xbox LIVE Party members together during auto-balancing." Furthermore, ranked Swarm matches will now only require two human players instead of four.

Additional fixes were also applied to usability, dedicated servers and a pair of crashing issues. See the full patch notes after the break.

Stability Updates:

Fixed a rare shader system crash that could occur randomly during gameplay
Fixed a crash that could occur when signing out of LIVE when a message about downloading DLC was on-screen, then attempting to access the marketplace from the DLC message


General Updates:

Fixed an issue where the game was not correctly upgrading from the Trial Version to the Full Game when logging in with a LIVE account that had previously purchased the game

Usability Updates:

Improved visibility of the Loading screen Deploy button after map transition
Fixed an issue where an inactive sign-in change would disconnect players from Prejudice Online
Fixed an issue where custom match browser search options saved from a previous run of the game were not reflected in the UI on subsequent runs, even though the actual search options were saved correctly
Added the ability to reconnect to Prejudice Online without resigning-in, by selecting the Stats button without a connection.

Dedicated Server Updates:

Added improved Region and Language dedicated server options to help players join servers that are near their region and have players of the same language
Fixed an issue where idle dedicated servers would get into a bad state after an extended period of time
Added descriptive error message for when a dedicated server fails to launch due to requiring an update
Fixed an issue where dedicated servers would sometimes not reconnect to the stats system properly