Maybe the suits can fix that in a week by using AI.

/s btw

I am not a game dev and do not have a stake in this personally but also dislike the 'lazy or incompetent dev' line that gets used sometimes. While ALOT of games seem to be made with really shitty code, with a game that seems as complex as Helldivers 2 adding a new feature can be a lot more complex than expected.

First there are non-technical factors: bosses that might not want to implement the feature and needs to be convinced, the devs might not know how to implement it and need to do research which takes time, artists that need to be added to the pipeline for assets, budget or other financial concerns (management might not think the feature will contribute to revenue), or even something like petty internal politics.

One the side of technical problems there is combinatorial explosion where adding ONE feature means thinking about how it interacts with all the other features. There is the problem of possible technical debt where you might inherit bad code from previous devs that you need to change before you can add anything. There is also the problem that the feature might not be technically feasible; remember that a game has only a fraction of a second to do its calculations and display them to the player while also checking for player input. This does not even begin to consider the problems caused by being a multiplayer game with possible network problems.

On the discontinued engine, the studio founder said that they were already in development of Helldivers 2 when it was discontinued according to the Wikipedia article.

Sure, larger businesses have more developers to get more work done. But there comes a time when throwing new developers at a problem convolutes the process and actually slows things down more than it helps.

Something that seems simple to you like a flashlight attachment may not be so simple under the hood.

Solo indie devs have an advantage because they're familiar with all of the code. They're the ones that wrote it.

They don't need to learn a new part of the code when making fixes or changes. They don't need to explain to another dev that "you don't change how this information is passed in here because you'll need it to look just like that in some other section that you'll never touch".

Additionally any decisions/changes/etc. are all decided by one person, no need for meetings to get everyone on board and explain exactly what you want to do. No need to try to get everyone to understand your vision for what you want to happen.

A famous comic might explain this process a little better:

But like, the commercial said that making games is just sitting on a couch and pressing a sound board to add that one sound effect in level 3, so like I don’t know why they want money for it.

If gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they're clearly idiots.

If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you're estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that's because you (as a company) coded your software badly.

Yeah I agree this seems more like tech debt and possibly a shitty architecture to me, both problems that ultimately come from poor management. The codebase I'm responsible for at work was developed in a mad rush, and the levels of pointless coupling and interdependence sometimes makes it hard to change anything without spending forever tracking down all the stupid little places that piece was touching. That shit comes from management pushing you to just do the thing already and move on, which works for a while until things get so messy you have to slow down or spend some time on a refactor. Someone could easily have made a technical decision for the sake of expedience, which was then built upon and became interconnected with other things in a way that made changing it require a major change, which of course no manager will support, so the work gets broken up into 100 tiny stupid tickets trying to move toward adding the new feature without ever making a breaking change, slowing down the whole thing even more.

It was only an example. As the asset already exists in the game elsewhere, adding that same asset somewhere else in the game should definitely not take even an intern more than a week to implement.

Again, it is understandable in certain circumstances that major content drops take time. But for something as simple as the flashlight attachment example (which again is only a hypothetical example), there is no excuse for something like that to take 6 months or more to implement. Even if they have other priorities, something like that is so menial to implement that it would not take any significant amount of time away from higher priority development. Particularly because, in the example, other guns already have flashlight attachments, it already exists in the game. Unless they programmed the game in the literal worst way imagineable, they likely have a modular weapon system with slots that accept attachments. Very easy to add a new slot and allow it to accept the flashlight attachment, again as an example.

My Helldivers gripe is that the war bonds cost too much for the casual player. 1000 super credits takes a while to gather, and even grind. Paying actual money for them is about $25aud per war bond. I think there's eight war bonds now? That's a full day's income, and you still need to collect medals to unlock the contents of the warbond.

Edit: You all don't need to explain this to me, I'm aware of the options for getting super credits. None of that changes how I feel about the game and that I'm losing interest because of it.

That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.

I own something from that. I tried running it once and it would barely load. I gave up. Didn’t try again even on a new pc

It kind of is, unfortunately. Games are often developed with a lot of pressure and the constant dangling of the budget being cut off. I don't think the devs are incompetent and think what they produced (code quality wise) would be the best, but what could they do if they need a result to present to the publisher end of week and then don't get money (aka time) to clean it up but instead they get the next deadline.

On the other hand I am also not sure I can blame publishers. Things can easily spiral out of control if managed badly in the other direction.... see Cloud Imperium Games (i.e. Star Citizen).

But you don’t “need” to unlock them all on the day of release, there is no FOMO component, they don’t disappear after a month.

And if you play enough to unlock them faster than they can get them out, you definitely have the time to grind the 1000SC to unlock them.

Hey ChatGPT, code a new island!

That's nothing new.

Gamers who don't know any programming, or maybe made a little utility for themselves. Looovee to bring out the old "just change one line of code", "just add this model", etc. to alter something in a game.

They literally do not understand how complex systems become, specially in online multiplayer games. Riot had issues with their spaghetti code, and people were crawling over eachother to explain how "easy" it would be to just change an ability. Without realizing that it could impact and potentially break half a dozen other abilities.

Mostly agree, 98% of requests are unrealistic. Most of these requests are not even simple.

But many times, things ARE fucked. And when that happen - dear gamers, don't curse devs, as a team. There was shitty ceo, who couldnt make a straight decision or changed them 200 times a day, because felt some popular new feature totally must be in the game, that ruined whole concept. Many times, the concept were shitty from the start, then blame director of that. Even more often, publishers pushes their financial decision over dev team (hello Helldivers2 vs Sony). Yet another time, some lawsuit shitstorm happens, that makes devs scrap something (hello Palworlds vs big_n). And many times, its all together.

I like to link them to any modding SDK (official or unofficial) and as them why don't they make it.

Players: it's not unique enough and that makes it boring. It's like they rushed this one with some standard stuff.

Have to disagree. The war bonds have been some of the easiest to pay with in game currency compared to games like cod where their cod points feel next to worthless.

If you are netting very few credits per hell dive, you may be playing with those that don’t need them or playing bots, or a newly released content. Farming on level 1 will often get you with like minded folk, especially before a war bonds release. Farming is quick when you realize you don’t have to extract, just abort to ship.

See: Destiny and Telesto.