This sucks. I remember seeing the membership price hikes a while ago. It has been an interesting experience being someone loved RS to death in the mid-late 2000s, signed up for the 2007scape private servers, saw OSRS get announced and become so popular that I ended up getting to play it on my ipad, and now seeing this era of crazy price increases and layoffs.
Almost makes me wish I played it more back when times were good, but I always ended up playing IM and quitting for a year plus when I died.
I was about to start playing runescape classic before it got bought out. I played it as a kid and have friends that have stuck with it since they were kids. Friends told me to hold off because this new company is raising the subscription price. Seems like another golden parachute scheme for some scumbag ceo is underway…
someone likened it cost as much as WOW, with less content.
for monthly, 6 months, yearly. the original price before the jump was 12.99, 49.99, 79.99USD
the new ones are 14.99, 69.99, 99.99USD member ships. they got greedy, and they pretty much change ownership a couple times, now a PE firm?
BUT people sitll using in game gp to buy membership, but how long will it last. since ingame it cost 128million gp per bond. bond is currently 8.99/bond. i stopped because last year it massively jumped in gp price.
So the new RuneScape was just a cash grab? “reduce complexity “ by reducing headcount just means management incompetence, it also doesn’t make you more agile, proper guidance makes you more agile.
“Drats! My evil schemes are thwarted yet again by reason and sensible suggestions! When will this citric tyranny end?!?! Curse you, Lime! !!!”
Mr. Hacker falls to his knees, releasing a primal scream towards the heavens, torrential rain soaking his purple tuxedo, turning brackish as it mixes with his salty tears of rage.
turn of phrase. Bond villians generally have some weird philosphy that guides their actions, like this attacker who is using a cyberattack to push a goal of threatening a company to make their stuff open source.
The reaction to Clair Obscur has been wild. I had a friend I haven’t talked to since high school - when we were both big Final Fantasy fans - reach out to ask if I’d played it. A bunch of guys at work are talking about it who I didn’t even know were gamers. I hope we see a lot more of these passionate, creative projects and the infrastructure to support them.
I was skeptical about it. I saw a lot of it being compared with Final Fantasy and I’ve been largely pretty disappointed with most Final Fantasy offerings since X.
Picked it up recently on the recommendation of another Lemming and, holy shit, this might be the best RPG I’ve ever played. Hands down, it’s that good. God bless the French. This game is making me feel things I haven’t felt since I was a teenager.
Seriously, I keep trying to get people to get a taste of it, to the point I’ve even gifted it. It’s been fascinating and beautiful and devastating. Haven’t finished it yet, but getting very close and I only regret it’ll have to end soon.
I originally wasn’t going to get it. I saw the Persona style combat menu and RPG… I have limited time to play games so I have to be picky.
I caught someone playing it… oh yeah, bought the game right away. The writing is amazing, and there’s no “grind” you often find with many of the JRPG-style games
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.
In the wake of all the layoffs and such I don’t know if any former employees have (as vaguely as possible) discussed the codebase yet. It seems like such an absolute nightmare.
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.
And even then it’s sometimes impossible because how much can you keep in your head at once. Everybody specializes on these large projects. I may have 30000 ft view of how things operate but getting down into specifics can be hard. I have some intimate knowledge of the learning management system we develop for, which is way less complex than most games, and there are always little gotchas when you make code or architecture changes.
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.
In the real world there is no entirely reasonable code base. There’s always going to be some aspects of it that are kind of shit, because you intended to do X but then had to change to doing Y, and you have not had time or sufficient reason to properly rewrite everything to reflect that.
We tend to underestimate how long things will take, precisely because when we imagine someone doing them we think of the ideal case, where everything is reasonable and goes well. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the case whenever you do anything complex.
I agree, real code always has tradeoffs. But there’s a difference between a conceptually simple change taking 3 weeks longer than planned and 6 months. The reality is game code is almost always junk and devs have no incentive to do better.
Getting a feature functional and out for launch day is the priority because you don’t have any cash flow until then. This has been exacerbated with digital distribution encouraging a ship-now-fix-later mentality.
This means game devs don’t generally have experience with large scale, living codebases. Code quality and stability doesn’t bring in any money, customer retention is irrelevant unless you’re making an mmo.
The correlation between code quality and game quality is almost negative. When you’re doing groundbreaking stuff or going for your own artistic vision it’s tough to code well, even more so when you hit a jackpot and have to expand quickly (e.g. League spaghetti, Palworld)
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.
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.
That’s kind of a funny example because, on a quick skim, nothing he did was exceptionally clever or unusual (other than workarounds for not having source code). R* basically paid him 10k for some basic profiling that they never bothered to do.
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.
Gamer who doesn’t understand how gamedev works gets mad at guy telling them they don’t get how gamedev works, demanding their treats get here, right now anyway after being told it actually takes a bit to make. News at 11.
Yeah, you’re probably right, the video game you personally made is probably better and we’re just lazy. BTW I demand 20 hours of brand-new content to be released next week, and it better be cutting-edge, uniquely interesting and creative, bug-free and $4.99, or else you’re a lazy dev, too.
It’s genuinely funny watching these people learn absolutely nothing when slapped in the face with hard facts.
UI is incredibly complex under the hood. Cryengine is also difficult to work in. There are tons of reasons games with distinct outstanding features don’t switch engines, though, and it’s usually due to the specific features said engine provides, no matter how difficult it becomes to work with as a legacy system over the years.
There is NO reason for hunts UX to as fucking terrible as it is. They literally took it from bad to straight up awful. Believe me, I know how hard to design and implement a good UI can be, I’m a software engineer. I’m not just handwaving “make it better, duh”. It’s flawed from the user requirements up. It’s like they never used their own ui before. It’s stunning how thoroughly they don’t comprehend how people have a terrible time navigating the game menus.
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Aktywne