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'
-
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
This still cracks me up even though I heard it so many years ago
-
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.
-
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?
-
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?
-
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- The organization has outdated policies that make delivering changes difficult.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.
-
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.
-
Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap.
As much as everyone love Oblivion...it all started from there with the $9 horse armour DLC.
God knows why.
Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.
Kids. Fucking kids. Thankfully I am never that stupid to buy individual DLCs even when I was a child, which is compounded by familial circumstances and education, but kids will be kids. Either they stole their parent's credit card to pay for useless virtual items, or they were spoiled and never taught with financial literacy.
wrote last edited by [email protected]horse armor that didnt even add armor to horses (edit. Functional armor, before someone ACKSHUALLY's me :p)
It just, iirc, 3x'd the horses base health.
I am still salty about that shit to this day, because its what lead us to the miseryscape of nickle and dimed bullshit we have today.
-
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.
Can’t be done is usually shorthand for the cost massively outweighs the benefits. No different from remodeling a building. Like coding, literally anything is theoretically possible but sometimes you’d have to redo so much existing work it’s never going to be worth it.
-
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)Lol hunt takes six months dev time to make the ui twice as worse
-
Don't compare actual games to scams.
-
Don't compare actual games to scams.
I mean, it really depends on how you define scam. If you're so loose with the definition that you would have considered No Man's Sky a "scam" when it first released, then I can understand that.
Otherwise it's not really a scam. There's a free trial going on right now in Star Citizen.You're free to check out the game for yourself. It's in a really good state compared to what we've previously seen (not even close to bug free, but way more playable than before).
-
Well in Helldivers 2s case, its not helpful that they picked to use a dead game engine. Autodesk Stingray has been dead for a while.
Also, I might agree except that solo indie devs in their basement can add many basic features in 6 months time, not just one. I get that some features, like new maps, mechanics, or characters take time. But for example, when a game mechanic already exists elsewhere in a game but not in a different part (for example, a flashlight attachment on one gun but not a different gun), there is not a thing in the world that will convince me that would take 6 months to add. And if it would take 6 months to add, that is entirely due to laziness or incompetence.
Working as a solo dev on a project you know by heart is literally the easiest work to do. If you’ve never had to work on a large old codebase you have no idea just how hard it can be to make changes.
I’ve done this sort of thing for years and I would not even give an estimate on a change for a new project without some time to look at the code base.
-
I wish my clients would understand that, and my code is a lot simpler than a video game.
I built an API connector for work (I'm a hobbyist, not a pro) to download what is the most common cargo transported by trucking companies from the DoT database. Everyone complained because they had to enter the company names correctly into a CSV as it wouldn't accept typos or do fuzzy matching, nor could it automatically determine which was the head office of a company, only return a list of all of the offices.
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]They meant buying all eight, which is funky to me since a day's income for me is more like $120 CAD. edit: but also an extra ten bucks is zero surprise, we already have that issue in cad for exchange rates and aus likes to put extra charges on video games tho i dunno about dlcs.
-
Lol hunt takes six months dev time to make the ui twice as worse
closer to 2 years. its crazy how incompetent crytek is.
-
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.
menu system
I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he's spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.
Changing these things is neither easy nor fast.
-
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.
Tbf memory leaks can be very hard to diagnose and can also be hard to avoid in any software written in a language like C++, which is probably what Diablo 4 is written in.
-
This post did not contain any content.
But other media said that coding is as simple as asking couple of question on chat.
-
Tbf memory leaks can be very hard to diagnose and can also be hard to avoid in any software written in a language like C++, which is probably what Diablo 4 is written in.
wrote last edited by [email protected]In large scale online games you have issues ranging from obscure things causing memory leaks based on drivers, hardware combinations, etc. and all the way to basic things getting overlooked. One of my favorite examples being GTA5 online.
They forgot to update a function from early testing, and it was in the game for about a decade before someone else debugged the launch process. And then realized that it was going through the entire comparison file for each item it checked on the local list. So "changing a few lines" ended up reducing initial load times by up to 70% depending on the cpu and storage media.
EDIT: I've been drinking and probably misreemebred parts, so here is the post about how he found the issue
-
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Well why didn't you start 6 months ago. It's not my problem. I paid full price. If you wanna be left the fuck alone sell games for $15 and take your time no one will bother you. When you start asking $80 a game the price sets expectations. Devs lack of planning is not my problem as a consumer.
