This is tragic. I have been on NexusMods since the 2000s. I learned how to mod games because of that site. I will be pouring one out for this landmark of a website after work today. Paid for Lifetime and everything, because the website made it easy to find, install, and update mods for any given game that supported mods. Damn, man. Damn.
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.
Sounds to me like you’re not considering that they likely have a massive list of priorities to address and a flashlight attachment is simply not even close to the top of the list.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
I don’t think the game engine has anything to do with it. The common criticism against Helldivers 2 is that there should be more enemies, biomes, weapons, missions etc.
Adding a new enemy isn’t easy work. People think it’s just dragging a new 3D model to the map and then it’s done.
First it needs to be planned. It must be conceptually different from all other enemies so people don’t complain about that it’s just a copy paste reskin. Then it must be developed, which includes code, modeling, animation and sound design - all working in tandem.
And finally it must be tested and tweaked to ensure it mechanically works with all other systems in the game, like other enemies, weapons, missions, etc. Maybe during testing they realize it’s not as fun to play as they imagined, so they have to go back to the drawing board and iterate. Each iteration can affect code, modeling, animation and sound design. However, all involved aren’t just waiting in standby for feedback from play testing. They’re currently working with 100s of other things at the same time.
And then after a month of work they realize it’s never going to mechanically work, and they have to start from the beginning with a new idea.
Then repeat all of the above until they find something that actually works. This could easily amount to 6 months of work.
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.
Does it though? I feel like there’s a difference between chatting with your mates and posting stuff aimed at your customers - especially things that might drive them to take actions that will affect your bottom line.
Yeah, often learning anything more than the meme itself is that way, if only because you often find out about the rather sad route many of those early viral meme people went down.
Heard the same crap when they moved from 60 to 70 just a few years back.
Heard how video game development is too expensive while publishers posted record profits.
Heard all about how the same 50 dollar game "back in the day"would cost hundreds now, disregarding how gaming was so much more niche back then too.
Heard the same crap about how these “full price games” would lessen the need for egregious microtransaction
This will again, do nothing to lessen any of that, just push more record profits as gamers won’t be able to resist rewarding the gaming industry for their bad behavior.
I have 1139 games. Had the account for 20+ years. Most of the games are from humblebundle and according to anothet website that goes off of retail prices, total would be over $15k.
Wow, I’m at ~$3800 and have 535 games on a 15-ish year account, you’ve done good for yourself. I’ve also brought in some games from humble bundles, but if I have to guess these total 20% of my purchases at most.
Thanks. I rarely buy full price. My first purchase which isnt included was the Half-Life Orange box so i could play Natural Selection, a Half-life mod at the time.
Lol, the Orange box was my first purchase that installed Steam too. Technically should’ve done that with HL2, but I played it way after release, and sadly all I could afford at the time was the pirated version. But having sinked in so much dough through Steam afterwards, I doubt Valve would care.
Genuine question for PoE1 veterans: What is it exactly, that people want from the sequel?
With my little experience in 1, I was excited about the new gem system, and the idea of not having to deal with stacks of 20 prefixes on high-end mobs, and it seems that at least with the latter nothing has changed
Yes, because getting so lost in the skill tree that you can easily gimp your character by clicking on the wrong node is exactly the direction they need to push more towards.
I kind of find it fun to try new directions in the skill tree instead of just following someone else’s guide. Yes, it means I might gimp my character and I have but it’s not that big of a deal to fix and try something else.
My expectation was combat would be more of a setup/payoff play style with situational skills and players suffering resource attrition over long fights and maps when compared to PoE’s use one skill to clear the entire screen as fast as possible so you aren’t one shot by a random rare that is harder than the map boss.
A lot of what they’ve said helped inform that understanding, but it’s really hard to meaningfully combine skills when mobs are basically trying to shoot/rush you as soon as you can see them.
The writing was on the wall for PoE2, so I’m not angry or disappointed, I’ll see where things go.
I would have wanted:
less boss fights, not more, I find them bad and boring.
maybe an interesting take on the gem system, but essentially removing it is lame. They also removed / didn’t reintroduce some gems that unlock certain interesting options, so I’m still waiting on what they game is like on actual full release.
maybe a revision and tighter integration of the more interesting league mechanics (incursion? ava’s thing)
could have done without an idiot plot in terms of writing
the slow combat isn’t bad, but the game is confused. You just can’t have both fair fights with rare mobs with white gear and white mobs and rare gear. Either one is too easy or the other is too hard, or the items lack oomph. Impossible to resolve.
I was happy when it was going to just be an extension of the base game that made it prettier, smoother, and skyrocketing the already gratuitous content. I was truly looking forward to not having to admit through the same campaign each league for 8 hours. (Guess why I’m not playing Poe 2 0.20…)
Making it a different game was a clear signal that they wanted to follow The Vision that we’d already seen play out with ruthless mode.
the new gem system - there was this promise, that you don’t have to roll fusings/chromatic/jeweller orbs anymore to make the sockets fit for your build on a certain item.
the graphical update - game looks phenomenal, let’s be honest here.
Technical Upgrades on the engine - PoE1 has a shitton of technical debt and runs like ass. I was excited for them to be able to maybe start from scratch, or solve some longer lasting pains, that they never got around to with PoE2 (since the games ended up so different, that they drifted apart).
More smooth gameplay - I enjoyed the look of some of the older demos. It really seemed like travel skills felt more fluid and combat overall had more flow to it.
But honestly, I’m not really the right person to judge PoE2, I played roughly 10 hours in 0.1, almost finished Act 1 but then Life got a bit in the way and my playthrough fizzled out. From what I remember, monsters were too strong and too fast, playing melee kinda sucked (as is tradition).
I find it kind of funny how games are becoming more mainstream, but every once in a while I still meet people that are like “games are a waste of time”. But then again I guess people said that about movies and tv and still do sometimes.
Also I’ve been playing guild wars 2 again. Base game is like 10 years old but it’s still fun
I think the people who often say this feel some personal guilt for how much time they feel they’ve wasted instead of doing whatever it is in life they have yet to achieve. It’s a matter of perspective.
My RX480 from 2016 is still kicking, if crashing a bit. At this rate when it breaks I’ll just use my steam deck docked instead of selling my liver to buy a new GPU
Less than a year since I upgraded from my RX580 and I only did it because I got an amazingly stupid deal on a RX7600 ($175 about 3 months after launch). Otherwise, the card is fine and is, in fact, still being used on my cousin’s PC.
Owlcat in general, despite their buggy releases, make absolutely ambitious and exciting games that are terrifically well written. Wrath of the Righteous is my favorite CRPG out there, and Rogue Trader is close to that as well.
Hey wow, look what happens when we don’t buy their games and loudly organize to tell others not to buy their games over this bullshit!
There’s still nothing Sony puts out that I really think is all that good, but hopefully this serves as another message to the industry to stop with this dumb bullshit. Funny how Sony has been getting a lot of those kinda messages recently.
I recommend waiting until they revert the restrictions on countries that can’t have PSN. That’s the indicator on how serious they actually are about making PSN optional. So far the restrictions are in place so fuck em.
games are famously terrible at boycotts. if people didn’t buy spidey2 the most probable reason is that the reviews are full of thumb downs saying it runs like shit even on the best hardware.
Or at least release the server code when you shut the game down, so anyone can spin up a server of their own. Community servers are fine, but you should always be able to host your own for friends to play on.
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