It would also be great if devs added things during development that should simply be there at launch. Instead of that, shit gets rushed out the door with promises of future fixes and updates. And then devs get all huffy when people rightfully ask for things to be added that are supposed to be basic launch features…
There’s a strong argument that the server architecture needed to be better at launch, but then the game sold more than an order of magnitude better than it was expected to, so no one would have noticed that it scaled badly had the player count been in line with their design and testing.
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.
Fair! I’m in web so wouldn’t know either. What kind of software do you work in? I’ve been thinking about jumping careers lately after realising that I quite like architecting a more complex system, and sort of hate working with front end web dev😂
Well, the fact is that there are also a LOT of dumb customers willing to buy crap. God knows why.
Just look at the trending / best selling lists on Steam. There’s shit on there that I wouldn’t play if you paid me. Yet somehow there’s enough of a customer base for that that they sell it.
Honestly, Steam should look into setting a minimum quality level for things sold on the platform.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
honestly though, the game is a complete package AND it doesn’t come with a bunch of fucking microtransactions/live-service/etc. etc. Gaming is the one area where I think we would all like to see our games be made the same way they were 10-15 years ago, instead of the bullshit from today.
You should see unions soon. Gaming industry is going to force every game designer and developer under a union because of the insecurities. A union guarantees they can’t fuck with you like the crunches. Or the absolute worse is when they have to do unpaid overtime which I think is illegal.
True, I didn’t really mean it to that extreme. and yea not saying gaming industry was perfect, there was plenty to gripe about in the past. Just on average, as a whole, the industry seems worse. The one exception I think are Indie games.
That‘s the critical one. It‘s not about budget or outsourcing or whatever. It comes down to who makes the decisions and why. In a lot of cases it‘s people with a finance background who couldn‘t care less about the medium they‘re working with and that can be a major issue. Gaming being a bigger industry than music and film combined has attracted a lot of people who only think in dollar bills and it shows. Luckily however, there are still a lot of passionate teams with leaders who have a love for games.
Yeah, and given this is coming from a dragon age writer that’s pretty explicit.
A cancelation is a full stop and needs to be treated as such with any resources from it that can be carried forward needing scrutiny before being brought in, with them understood as a fortuitous situation. None of this 'we’ve spent 10 cumulative years on it" when this round is just one year
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Aktywne