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’

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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horse armor that didnt even add armor to horses (edit. Functional armor, before someone ACKSHUALLY’s me :p)

It just, iirc, 3x’d the horses base health.

I am still salty about that shit to this day, because its what lead us to the miseryscape of nickle and dimed bullshit we have today.

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The developers aren’t in charge of what’s in the game, the PMs and accountants are

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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?

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To be fair, the Prime Ministers should really be focused on more important things than a game companies software development.

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Soo true

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supposed to be basic launch features

isn’t this very subjective and dependent on the game and scale of success?

Rayquetzalcoatl

I agree with the sentiment, but I don’t know Helldivers 2 – what basic launch features were/are missing?

AnyOldName3

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.

Rayquetzalcoatl

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?

AnyOldName3

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.

Rayquetzalcoatl

Interesting!

What kind of system would allow for that? Would queueing help?

AnyOldName3

Unfortunately, I’m not the right kind of software engineer to answer in more detail than that.

Rayquetzalcoatl

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😂

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’

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’

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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’plus-square

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’plus-square

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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’

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’