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.
“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.
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.
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.
Tbf memory leaks can be very hard to diagnose and can also be hard to avoid in any software written in a language like C++, which is probably what Diablo 4 is written in.
In large scale online games you have issues ranging from obscure things causing memory leaks based on drivers, hardware combinations, etc. and all the way to basic things getting overlooked. One of my favorite examples being GTA5 online.
They forgot to update a function from early testing, and it was in the game for about a decade before someone else debugged the launch process. And then realized that it was going through the entire comparison file for each item it checked on the local list. So “changing a few lines” ended up reducing initial load times by up to 70% depending on the cpu and storage media.
EDIT: I’ve been drinking and probably misreemebred parts, so here is the post about how he found the issue
That’s kind of a funny example because, on a quick skim, nothing he did was exceptionally clever or unusual (other than workarounds for not having source code). R* basically paid him 10k for some basic profiling that they never bothered to do.
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.
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:
- 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.
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 agree, real code always has tradeoffs. But there’s a difference between a conceptually simple change taking 3 weeks longer than planned and 6 months. The reality is game code is almost always junk and devs have no incentive to do better.
Getting a feature functional and out for launch day is the priority because you don’t have any cash flow until then. This has been exacerbated with digital distribution encouraging a ship-now-fix-later mentality.
This means game devs don’t generally have experience with large scale, living codebases. Code quality and stability doesn’t bring in any money, customer retention is irrelevant unless you’re making an mmo.
players? you mean marks
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
I bought a pledge early on. Sold it a few years later for double the price. Great investment!
