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.
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'
Submitted 15 hours ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
Owlboi@lemm.ee 51 minutes ago
slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org 4 hours ago
Half a year’s work takes 6 months? I had no idea
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
It would also be great if devs added things during development that should simply be there at launch. Instead of, shit get 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…
ramirezmike@programming.dev 1 hour ago
supposed to be basic launch features
isn’t this very subjective and dependent on the game and scale of success?
Goronmon@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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.
FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.
secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 3 hours ago
Soo true
lagoon8622@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
The developers aren’t in charge of what’s in the game, the PMs and accountants are
rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I agree with the sentiment, but I don’t know Helldivers 2 – what basic launch features were/are missing?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
Lol 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 an a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough) then if it takes 6 months to fix thats because you coded your software badly.
ramirezmike@programming.dev 51 minutes ago
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.
Ugurcan@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
No doubt.
simple@lemm.ee 5 hours ago
cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough
I still remember when they somehow broke the Xbox version and nobody could get past the start menu.
JordanZ@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I had to read an article about that. It apparently coincided with the release of the second DLC. It was pretty broken on PS5 as well. That just screams some high level exec said it MUST be out on the announced date cause they told someone that it would be. Likely part of a contract or their bonus was tied to it. Doesn’t matter if it’s unplayable. It ‘met’ the release deadline. Now we’re just ‘doing maintenance’.
I’m a dev and I firmly believe that if people could see the software they use daily as a physical object like a car…they’d be more “Hell, no. That’s a death trap” than they probably realize.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I like to link them to any modding SDK (official or unofficial) and as them why don’t they make it.
shoo@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
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.
mriswith@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That’s nothing new.
Gamers who don’t know any programming, or at most have made a little script themselves. Love to bring out the old “just change one line of code”, “just add this model” 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 break half a dozen other abilities.
Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
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.
billwashere@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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.
shoo@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it’s under the assumption of a reasonable cobe 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.
mriswith@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
cactusupyourbutt@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
as a professional software dev, games with fozens or hundreds of abilities that interact with eachother scare me
mriswith@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
In most professioonal software you can compartmentalize and abstract. In things like MOBA games, the amount of interactions between abilities is as you say, scary.
Having an ability that does two types of damage, and then changing the order of which one hits first. Can literally break a game.
Tower@lemm.ee 8 hours ago
See: Destiny and Telesto.
nfreak@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
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.
yoriaiko@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
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.
Jax@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
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.
lorty@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Try telling your users (who are gamers) that the feature they want is being pushed back. See how well they’ll react.
JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Maybe the suits can fix that in a week by using AI.
/s btw
jonne@infosec.pub 10 hours ago
Hey ChatGPT, code a new island!
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 9 hours ago
Players: it’s not unique enough and that makes it boring. It’s like they rushed this one with some standard stuff.
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
pyre@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
players? you mean marks
b3an@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I own something from that. I tried running it once and it would barely load. I gave up. Didn’t try again even on a new pc
VonReposti@feddit.dk 7 hours ago
I bought a pledge early on. Sold it a few years later for double the price. Great investment!
dumblederp@aussie.zone 11 hours ago
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.
erin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 53 minutes ago
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.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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.
dumblederp@aussie.zone 7 hours ago
I’m definitely experiencing FOMO with the warbonds I don’t have. I don’t have the time to play/grind or the inclination to pay for them, so I am missing out. There’s three warbonds that I don’t have and sure I’ll eventually get them maybe but right now I’m missing out. Being able to unlock things is a big part of a game to me. I’m not dedicated enough to HD2 to skip the other games I want to play in order to get the unlocks. The whole process is lowering my interest in the game. I paid for it, I want to use the new toys that get released with it.
Redredme@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
1000 super credits are easily farmed just by doing missions. Do low level missions, race to the poi’s with the car, rinse repeat.
Fun? No. But you said farming so this is it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
By just playing the game for little over a week, so no farming, just playing, i’ve gathered 700 sc.
The medals are easily gathered doing level 5 and up missions and completing your personal orders. And taking part in the majors of course.
dumblederp@aussie.zone 7 hours ago
All that stuff is great if you’ve the time. I’ve got maybe 1-2 hours a week for the game.
renrenPDX@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
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.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
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.
AsimovIV@discuss.tchncs.de 13 hours ago
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.
applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
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.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
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.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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.
Shiggles@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
“Our software is a bloated mess” is not the defence they think it is.
Brunbrun6766@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Doesn’t seem to hurt Bethesda. Oblivion remaster drops and the Internet ate that shit up like the pile of old shit it is.
aksdb@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
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).
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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:
DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee 4 hours ago
The PC build is trash
Donebrach@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.
ICastFist@programming.dev 55 minutes ago
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.