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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.
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
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'm a software dev and it should only take 7.
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.
as a professional software dev, games with fozens or hundreds of abilities that interact with eachother scare me
Half a year's work takes 6 months? I had no idea
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
This still cracks me up even though I heard it so many years ago
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)
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.
But other media said that coding is as simple as asking couple of question on chat.
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.
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…
What I don't understand is why do developers make bad games? They should just make good games instead.
Gamers want good games, not bad games.
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.
supposed to be basic launch features
isn't this very subjective and dependent on the game and scale of success?
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.
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.
But you don’t “need” to unlock them all on the day of release, there is no FOMO component, they don’t disappear after a month.
And if you play enough to unlock them faster than they can get them out, you definitely have the time to grind the 1000SC to unlock them.
Have to disagree. The war bonds have been some of the easiest to pay with in game currency compared to games like cod where their cod points feel next to worthless.
If you are netting very few credits per hell dive, you may be playing with those that don’t need them or playing bots, or a newly released content. Farming on level 1 will often get you with like minded folk, especially before a war bonds release. Farming is quick when you realize you don’t have to extract, just abort to ship.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
“Our software is a bloated mess” is not the defence they think it is.
Doesn't seem to hurt Bethesda. Oblivion remaster drops and the Internet ate that shit up like the pile of old shit it is.
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.
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.
