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.
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.
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.
I like to link them to any modding SDK (official or unofficial) and as them why don’t they make it.
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
💯
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.
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.
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
Maybe the suits can fix that in a week by using AI.
/s btw
Hey ChatGPT, code a new island!
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.
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 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.
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.
“Our software is a bloated mess” is not the defence they think it is.
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).
Doesn’t seem to hurt Bethesda. Oblivion remaster drops and the Internet ate that shit up like the pile of old shit it is.
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.
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.
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:
