People for once not being overworked has made it clear that the scope of modern AAA video games is unsustainable.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Yep. Not every game needs to be a huge open world (or in this case galaxy.) Give me tight well written games that are complete on launch, that's all I'm asking for.
Titanfall 2's campaign is one of the best examples of this. Not very long, but high quality and ridiculously fun
I'm playing Titanfall 2 multiplayer right now.
Best sub $10 game in a while.
Words can't describe how happy I am that the official servers are back. One of if not the best FPS games in the last decade.
Yeah a really great game for really cheap.
I haven’t tried the multiplayer but I loved the story.
I got this on sale, because I liked the original games premise but didn't want to buy a MP-only game. I've yet to play it though. XD I hope it lives up to expecations.
Trust me
We really went from
2D platformer saturated To 3D platformer saturated To FPS saturated To Sandbox Saturated To 50+ hour $70 incomplete open world saturated
scope of modern AAA video games is unsustainable
Helpful hint, it's not just video game programming. Those hijacked gas pipelines in the US, unsecured SCADA systems weren't because every sysadmin was falling asleep, it's because nobody pulling the trigger wanted to listen to the sysadmins screaming that blindly deploying shit without audits, was a bad idea.
In pretty much every single technological failure, there's usually a common thread. Someone did (or forgot to do something) in the name of profit.
Sysadmin - can confirm.
Have a VP wanting to ram a newly acquired Europe entity through a migration and I am just yelling in every meeting about regulations. No one gives a shit so I’m just making them sign everything they say. CYA in full deployment.
On the acquired side, currently going through integration. We had a looking date to cutover a major portion of our systems and it was absolutely only a fail forward situation if it went south. Surprisingly, they recognized and listened to us saying it wasn’t ready and needed more time…got us six more months but definitely a rare moment from my experience in IT. Hopefully a sign that the new company knows what they are doing.
I can side with what you're saying, but I don't understand how forgetting something in the name of profit in other industries has anything to do with the pace of game development.
It fails downwards. And I know that doesn’t make sense but when you push something through as fast as possible everything below it falters.
QA is garbage, QC is garbage, development becomes garbage because of those fast timelines because something has to be cut. You can’t do everything you need to do with shorter timelines - and that’s where it becomes “in the name of profit”.
You're describing the state of application/game development, yes.
But again, what was that rant involving other industries about?
Just that it’s fairly similar across other industries. It’s a pretty common thread in most industries when people try to force things through without planning properly.
Also I wasn’t ranting about other industries, just making a note that it occurs everywhere. Profit for profit sake has made a lot of industries worse, including the gaming industry.
Edit: do you think QA/QC and development work only occurs in the gaming industry?
Many modern AAA games has become glorified toilet paper rolls. They tried to keep manufacture then in hopes to milk everything possible, then when you are at the end of roll they hype and sell you a new one. Make them feel like you absolutely have to play the next installment to get a closure or something new branching out.(prequel/sequel/reboot/timelines/etc.)
It was unsustainable at the pace and amount pre-covid, unhealthy for hardcore gamers as well. We have to actively not buying and playing new games cause I can play certain amount per day/week.
With covid and post covid, I actually finished more games compare to before. Well, the extra 2 hours not needed to commute I can do whatever I wanted.
"I'm old, stubborn, don't know how to manage remote teams, and have no interesting in learning." - Todd Howard
Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sheds so much light on Bethesda's decades-old problems.
Edit: I'm looking forward to seeing what Ted Peterson, Vijay Lakshman, and Julian Lefay do with The Wayward Realms. These three are the actual fathers of The Elder Scrolls. Todd has been shitting on their legacy since Redguard.
AAA studios were used to having local build farms, in-person build-review sessions, and testers being in the same physical space so engineers could see what's going on. They have collections of unreleased hardware that need to be distributed and secured.
It's not simple to completely overhaul a setup like that and go full remote. You're moving 100s of GB a day to each dev and trying to change every one of your processes.
Every AAA engineer I know complained about how how slow everything was remote. Studios are figuring that shit out now, but I don't think "hurr durr Todd Howard old" is really accurate or adding anything to the conversation here
There is some truth to remote being worse for engineers especially less experienced programmers that can't talk to more senior programmers face to face.
This is where tools like Slack Huddles or Zoom come in handy. Need some face time? You are a click away. Need to collaborate on one screen? That’s one more click. Need to pair program? That’s a click.
There is nothing that is done face to face that can’t be done faster, better, and more efficiently using readily available digital collaboration tools.
Sure, the technology is available and it works well (mostly). But people are not machines, and in my experience quite a lot of them are not as comfortable communicating through chat and webcams as they are in person. Older people in particular don't really get that they can be used for quick, informal conversations, and only use them for preplanned meetings.
So like they work as expected except for those that intentionally use them wrong?
I can gaurentee you conversations can have the exact same flaws
For sure, there were other issues, which were amplified by the distance and the lack of communication. Point is you can come up with the best technical solution to a problem, but at the end of the day if the people aren't able or willing to adapt, there's not much you can do except fire them (which I couldn't) or move on (which I did).
I strongly disagree, I am a software engineer, have worked on the field for over a decade, while I understand that's not enough to be one of the extremely senior developers but nevertheless I'm a senior software engineer that can answer any and all questions posed from a beginner or even a mid leven engineer. The company I work for pairs developers when they first join so you have someone who's expected to be there to answer anything, this creates a positive climate and makes new joiners feel safe to come and ask questions, which in the long run makes them feel comfortable with doing the same.
When you send a message to someone on slack he can finish what he's doing then respond, on an office setting the question will cut your thought line and cause you to lose track of what you were doing. Back when I worked at the office there were days I couldn't get any work done because after 30min of investigation someone asked me something, then I had to redo the full backtrack of what I was doing only to be interrupted again for something stupid like shown a meme or be asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. The company I worked before my current one got so efficient during COVID that there wasn't any work left to do, the managers had planned a year worth of projects and we finished them in a few months and they had to rush to try to find things for us to do. However working from home makes micromanaging harder, so managers who want to micromanage make everyone's life harder (including their own), and then complain that the engineers are producing less.
Citation needed
100% is way too subjective to claim, if I ask someone something and I can review the semantics of how they worded it as many times as I need, I'll definitely understand it better than if told me it in person and my ADHD brain just missed it
Made Starfield Development "Very, Very Slow,"
Should have upgraded their PCs, I guess...
Probably not so much COVID and instead trying to coordinate 27 different outsourced studios. Why not just make it mostly inhouse like before??? If we're talking scale issues; why introduce these by aiming for deluge of samey procedurally generated worlds instead of the one quality handmade world you're already known for?
Hopefully we'll see a couple of those "plans" crop up during the game's life cycle, and hopefully a couple (hundred) bug fixes.
Plus official mod tools but I'm not too eager for them, I have full faith the modding community will perform miracles even without them.
That's pretty obvious from the planet surface and travel system. Apparently virtually every pixel of a planet surface is another procedurally generated map, but the UI and gameplay make them hard to access and not really useful anyway.