Thank you for the info, but for a patch that's more than a few GB in size (I'm on PC, by the way), simply launching the game and waiting for the patch to download and install may not be optimal -- especially considering that not all of us have the fastest of download speeds. I'm capped at 10 megabits/sec on the download, and at top speed it downloads about 7GB per hour, but I do need to use part of that bandwidth for other purposes. So having to wait a couple of hours or more after I press "play" would likely have me gone and busy with other stuff by the time the game has actually launched.
I hope it will be possible to simply verify/repair the game files and the patch will be downloaded by doing so, and then afterward when it's all nice and patched, I can launch whenever I have the time available to play -- or will that not work?