Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'
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I like to link them to any modding SDK (official or unofficial) and as them why don't they make it.
Well for one they're a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.
It's even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn't fix in 3 years.
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Even if you're an actual software dev, it's still pretty much impossible to guess how much work something is without knowing the codebase intimately.
wrote last edited by [email protected]When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...
When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:
- The codebase is fucked
- All resources are going to new features
- Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
- Your current dev team is sub par
Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.
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as a professional software dev, games with fozens or hundreds of abilities that interact with eachother scare me
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yea, in things like MOBA games you have to compensate for so many edge cases that the amount of interactions between abilities is as you say, scary.
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Half a year's work takes 6 months? I had no idea
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
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So then why don't they have regular bulletins in their games showing 'Look, look! These features will be coming by xx/xx/xxxx!' ?
Things set the timeline back? 'Oh no! Looks like we won't be releasing this on that date, it will actually be this date!'
Seems like a non issue for anyone with a 6th graders capacity for interacting with other humans. These are IT folks, with the added layer of gamers to boot — though. Anticipating motivations and responding to others input isn't exactly a strong suit.
Edit: oh, beyond that — I have very little sympathy for a developer of a content drip. You're out for the money, don't whine when people inevitably get sick of waiting for a little more of something they've already gotten maximum enjoyment out of.
Try telling your users (who are gamers) that the feature they want is being pushed back. See how well they'll react.
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For Palworld, a new island takes 6 months, per the article. Probably talking about Sakurajima and the big southern one. That makes sense, since it's not just putting stuff there and calling it a day on the first finished thing, some level design has to happen so the place makes sense and doesn't feel super boring to explore.
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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.
Ignoring the part about the super credits and fomo stuff, the money confuses me. Is regional pricing so different that you're paying an additional $10 AUD compared to US and EU pricing? Additionally, $25 AUD as a full day's income? Even a low hour, part time job earns way more than that. I feel like your situation might not be financially compatible with buying things like that, I'd cheat or pirate if it's that important to you. $10 USD is not much for DLC, and while I strongly dislike purchasable gameplay mechanics in games, it's supporting the continued development and it isn't egregious. $10 is a burger, or a coffee, and I'm saying this as someone well below the poverty line.
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This post did not contain any content.wrote last edited by [email protected]
if it takes you 6 months to add a new fundamental game mechanic then thats understandable
if it takes you 6 months to remove an unnecessary popup then youre incompetent.
(looking at you, Hunt Showdown) -
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.
6 months doesn't sound unrealistic for re-doing a menu system. Designing, reworking art, re-programming workflows and then testing everything can take several months. Even just the logistics of releasing it after it's done, that alone can take a month.
Yes, it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work that has to be prioritized with the scope of the project and the team members available.
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Ah yeah that's a tricky one. I guess as developers we'd all like to be ambitious and plan for millions of users but that sort of hardware and architecture takes time and money that might not be realistically in the budget/scope.
I've also not really got insight as to who would have a say on that kind of hardware, whether that's PMs or devs. Probably higher-ups, right?
I think for something like this, you'd rent cloud servers as you'd expect the number of concurrent users to change over time and ideally would be able to spin up more capacity when you need it without having to have those machines available all the time. You still need some kind of system that decides when to order more capacity with enough warning that it's actually available (you can tell AWS you want a VM immediately, but it still takes a couple of minutes to transfer your data onto it and boot it up, which is longer than people want to sit in a loading screen) and decides which servers to assign to which users.
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Absolutely, it's impossible to know how much. But it's a lot easier to grasp that it's rarely just "changing a few lines" when it comes to these types of situations.
Specially since many programmers have encountered clients, managers, etc. who think it's that simple as well.
You did it twice, so I'll be the grammar police:
Especially = particularly
Specially = for a specific purpose
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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.
a big part of the complexity in programming (especially game programming) comes from balancing flexibility with speed (both implementation and performance). At some point, decisions are made weighing out risks, priorities and plans that will solidify a part of the code base in favor of speed (or some other factor) at the cost of flexibility.
this happens all the time
A lot of the reasons a solo dev or modder seems like they can progress so fast changing things is they aren't facing a lot of the same factors and they aren't needing to go through any rigorous testing.
At some point in the process, there's too much risk and and overhead involved to make any change. This is totally normal from triple A down to game jams.
And, you can't ignore that some of these things come down to game design. A change like you're suggesting, just adding a light, can negatively affect the balance of things even if it seems like it wouldn't.
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I wish my clients would understand that, and my code is a lot simpler than a video game.
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Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
Two minutes silence for every minute
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Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
This still cracks me up even though I heard it so many years ago
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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.
Diablo4 has memory leak issues. As a software engineer myself, I just don't see any excuse for a game this long in production to have memory leak problems.
There is no doubt that a lot of games are getting rushed without being properly tested.
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Absolutely, it's impossible to know how much. But it's a lot easier to grasp that it's rarely just "changing a few lines" when it comes to these types of situations.
Specially since many programmers have encountered clients, managers, etc. who think it's that simple as well.
My favorite one is "Just add multiplayer".
Sure. I'll just go right ahead and toggle it in the engine. Why didn't I think of that?
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The developers aren't in charge of what's in the game, the PMs and accountants are
Yess. I boggles me that the narrative is still "devs this, devs that". It doesn't take becoming a game dev to understand that actual software developers are not calling shots on plot twists, monetisation model and so forth. Like, what the hell is wrong with people babbling about devs?
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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.
Alternative reasons (not mutually exclusive):
- The organization has outdated policies that make delivering changes difficult.
- The systems used in development and delivery haven't been invested in enough to automate repetitive steps, optimize workflow, and increase safety of changes.
Again, complex changes are obviously going to take more time, but if the simplest changes take significant time or effort then something is wrong.
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The developers aren't in charge of what's in the game, the PMs and accountants are
To be fair, the Prime Ministers should really be focused on more important things than a game companies software development.
