This is not as an easy of a task as you make it out to be, and becomes more difficult every year as the cost of creating an AAA game increases.
Software is complex, and the more complex it gets, the more bugs there are. There’s no such thing as bug-free software, and for every bug/feature you think “this should have been obvious to anyone making a game like this”, there are hundreds of other bugs/features that you didn’t think of but someone else thinks “should have been obvious way before release”.
(disclaimer: i am not involved in game development professionally, although i have been a software engineer professionally for decades. however these concepts apply to software development both inside and outside of the gaming industry. i also find it disgusting when gamers put on their “armchair software developer” hats and talk about how easy it should be to write a game without “whatever issue i’m currently dealing with”)
Planning. They had set a goal, a deadline, a budget, assigned teams. To get some predictable result.
If a buggy mess isn’t their goal, they fucked up something else on their multiple releases. Like not meating deadlines and leaving little time to test and fix things. Or not having clear communication between departments. Or scrapping things they can’t implement in a hurry to launch at least some build (to fix it later?).
Their games are impressive and individual parts of them are cool. But why are they so janky as a whole? And do they just accept it?
Besides the old corpse of an engine and it’s CS, they have challenges like creating a big open-world with NPCs to qualify as a Beth-game, to update visuals and physics every time, to stay relevant with new trends in industry. But they still decide they would make it – and then launch F76 as it is.
It’s not toxic to say their production cycle is fucked and they sell betas. No shame in buying and enjoying them too. Why to defend them on repeated failure to deliver a working product tho?
Software bugs are not aware of, nor do they care about, all of your plans, deadlines, budgets, assigned teams, predictable results, communication between departments, or anything else. By definition, software bugs are unpredicted results. That’s what a bug is: a problem you weren’t prepared for.
Nobody’s goal is a buggy mess, nobody intends to miss a deadline. What happens is some people spend as much time on something until they’re told not to, and this becomes a business decision that comes down to estimated cost of developer time, estimated cost of not implementing it, and sometimes the bug that you care about the most is not prioritized, because of the “cost to fix” vs “cost to not fix” to project managers and executives.
You’re not special. The bugs you want fixed aren’t special. The developer who wants to fix this bug out of personal pride isn’t special, nor is their work. The only thing that is special is developer time vs profit from that developer’s time, and that decision is not made by anyone with any level of passion for the project. Just “cost of doing this” and “cost of not doing this” vs profit when doing/not-doing, which is a decision based on money only.
The whole meme of this post is a clipping issue; in real life, clipping is physically impossible, it would require two things to exist in the same physical space, and the physics that enforce that in the real world are free; we don’t have to check to make sure the physical world is mathematically possible. In game development, there is a mathematical/time cost to every interaction that real life solves with physics. There’s no way to tell a computer “don’t do anything that isn’t physically possible”, because in-game objects are not physical objects and are not affected by physical reality at all, because they are abstract mathematical concepts that are not grounded in physics, just pure math.
This is not as an easy of a task as you make it out to be, and becomes more difficult every year as the cost of creating an AAA game increases.
Software is complex, and the more complex it gets, the more bugs there are. There’s no such thing as bug-free software, and for every bug/feature you think “this should have been obvious to anyone making a game like this”, there are hundreds of other bugs/features that you didn’t think of but someone else thinks “should have been obvious way before release”.
(disclaimer: i am not involved in game development professionally, although i have been a software engineer professionally for decades. however these concepts apply to software development both inside and outside of the gaming industry. i also find it disgusting when gamers put on their “armchair software developer” hats and talk about how easy it should be to write a game without “whatever issue i’m currently dealing with”)
Tldr: still letting them slide
Planning. They had set a goal, a deadline, a budget, assigned teams. To get some predictable result.
If a buggy mess isn’t their goal, they fucked up something else on their multiple releases. Like not meating deadlines and leaving little time to test and fix things. Or not having clear communication between departments. Or scrapping things they can’t implement in a hurry to launch at least some build (to fix it later?).
Their games are impressive and individual parts of them are cool. But why are they so janky as a whole? And do they just accept it?
Besides the old corpse of an engine and it’s CS, they have challenges like creating a big open-world with NPCs to qualify as a Beth-game, to update visuals and physics every time, to stay relevant with new trends in industry. But they still decide they would make it – and then launch F76 as it is.
It’s not toxic to say their production cycle is fucked and they sell betas. No shame in buying and enjoying them too. Why to defend them on repeated failure to deliver a working product tho?
Software bugs are not aware of, nor do they care about, all of your plans, deadlines, budgets, assigned teams, predictable results, communication between departments, or anything else. By definition, software bugs are unpredicted results. That’s what a bug is: a problem you weren’t prepared for.
Nobody’s goal is a buggy mess, nobody intends to miss a deadline. What happens is some people spend as much time on something until they’re told not to, and this becomes a business decision that comes down to estimated cost of developer time, estimated cost of not implementing it, and sometimes the bug that you care about the most is not prioritized, because of the “cost to fix” vs “cost to not fix” to project managers and executives.
You’re not special. The bugs you want fixed aren’t special. The developer who wants to fix this bug out of personal pride isn’t special, nor is their work. The only thing that is special is developer time vs profit from that developer’s time, and that decision is not made by anyone with any level of passion for the project. Just “cost of doing this” and “cost of not doing this” vs profit when doing/not-doing, which is a decision based on money only.
The whole meme of this post is a clipping issue; in real life, clipping is physically impossible, it would require two things to exist in the same physical space, and the physics that enforce that in the real world are free; we don’t have to check to make sure the physical world is mathematically possible. In game development, there is a mathematical/time cost to every interaction that real life solves with physics. There’s no way to tell a computer “don’t do anything that isn’t physically possible”, because in-game objects are not physical objects and are not affected by physical reality at all, because they are abstract mathematical concepts that are not grounded in physics, just pure math.