Chronicling the inability of gamedevs to make video games

[Acrux]

I never thought something called the Prince of Persia would end up being demonically inspired.

[KnightoftheWind]

This **** went through two entirely different iterations and THIS is what they finally ended up with? We were probably better off with the early PS3-looking one. Not like this Ubibros...

[LemonDemonGirl]

Both characters look like **** now

[J1M]

Both characters look like **** now

Imagine how big the committee that selected that character design must be to end up there, when the default starting points were Princess Jasmine and Gemma Arterton.

[KnightoftheWind]

Biggest downgrade in demake history?

[sheet]

The Persians got jeetified. I wouldn't even wish that upon Arab characters.

[WhiteShark]

The devs don't actually know what Persians look like, do they. This is another 'Egyptians were black' moment.

[Roguey]

Iranians absolutely devastated that Canadians think they look like nogs and *****.

[MrTwinkls]

Both characters look like **** now

Imagine how big the committee that selected that character design must be to end up there, when the default starting points were Princess Jasmine and Gemma Arterton.

Modern devs don't do or can't do Arabian Nights aesthetics anymore for some reason. Last game I remember was Mirage: Arcane Warfare and it flopped.

► It's one of my favorite settings though

► Seriously. Watch The Thief and The Cobbler.

[rusty_shackleford]

persians are heckin valid POC just like italians

[KnightoftheWind]

Will she survive?

[Roguey]

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy already did that, copying the imitation. They even retconned Indian ancestry into their not-Lara Croft character so that the story wouldn't be "Anglo woman saves Indians from themselves."

[TND]

Will she survive?

It's a horde shooter.

[KnightoftheWind]

[DemoGraph]

Random dev on Reddit: Why Is Game Optimization Getting Worse?

tl;dr
1. Premade blackbox solutions (external engines, libraries, etc.) are prevalent, documentation is bad, nobody tries to control code.
2. Set priority of performance and testing lower than features, get ****.
3. Gamemaking became industry: large budgets, profit-oriented management, hype-based goal-making, marketing lubes fuckups.

P.S. Lol, "console architecture forced us to pay attention to quality before, now console performance is high, and we're lazy".

Not stated there, my input:
- Software engineers are spineless shirkers. They're paycheck-oriented not product oriented so they
a) are ready to work in profit oriented, rather than product oriented, companies,
b) cave under management pressure constantly.
- There's no reputation system that would batch blackmark everyone who worked on ****** games. Free market does not get shipped with institutions.
- There's no workplace culture.

Also also

One thing that a lot of people tend to either forget or have rose tinted glasses for, but there were plenty of older games that ran like ****. Games running poorly is not a new phenomenon. Two notorious examples that spring to mind are GTA 5 on PS360 (this one is still obviously fairly modern, but it ran closer to 20fps than 30fps most of the time) and Shadow of the Colossus on PS2. It ran dreadfully.

GTA 5 = 2013, Shadow of the Colossus = 2005.
"Old"

[rusty_shackleford]

*****

[rusty_shackleford]

Wolf Among Us 2 gets delayed out of 2023 just a week after announcing a 2023 release date.
https://www.polygon.com/22925746/the-wo ... 23-trailer
https://www.eurogamer.net/the-wolf-amon ... and-crunch

To avoid burnout and crunch it takes us at least 11 years to make a 15 hour long game you see.

Still no release date

[rusty_shackleford]

Ark 2 delayed for another 1½ years, devs are however continuing with their plan to shut-off Ark servers and anyone who wishes to continue playing Ark will be forced to pre-order Ark 2 that may or may not be available sometime in 2024 to get access to the Ark "remaster". Yes, it's as ridiculous as it reads.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/ ... -remaster/

BONUS POINTS: They originally stated Ark's remaster would be free. Here's one of the owners(?) of the studio stating it will be free:

Ark 2 is a survival game sequel to Ark: Survival Evolved, featuring a new story with Vin Diesel, advanced traversal mechanics, and "soulslike" combat. The game has been delayed multiple times, with a 2027 launch being the most recent optimistic estimate

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Random dev on Reddit: Why Is Game Optimization Getting Worse?

tl;dr
1. Premade blackbox solutions (external engines, libraries, etc.) are prevalent, documentation is bad, nobody tries to control code.
2. Set priority of performance and testing lower than features, get ****.
3. Gamemaking became industry: large budgets, profit-oriented management, hype-based goal-making, marketing lubes fuckups.

P.S. Lol, "console architecture forced us to pay attention to quality before, now console performance is high, and we're lazy".

Not stated there, my input:
- Software engineers are spineless shirkers. They're paycheck-oriented not product oriented so they
a) are ready to work in profit oriented, rather than product oriented, companies,
b) cave under management pressure constantly.
- There's no reputation system that would batch blackmark everyone who worked on ****** games. Free market does not get shipped with institutions.
- There's no workplace culture.

Also also

One thing that a lot of people tend to either forget or have rose tinted glasses for, but there were plenty of older games that ran like ****. Games running poorly is not a new phenomenon. Two notorious examples that spring to mind are GTA 5 on PS360 (this one is still obviously fairly modern, but it ran closer to 20fps than 30fps most of the time) and Shadow of the Colossus on PS2. It ran dreadfully.

GTA 5 = 2013, Shadow of the Colossus = 2005.
"Old"

SotC and GTA were truly ambitious games for their times and got away with the performance because of the unmatched experience they offered. It was part of the selling point. Nowadays large maps at high fidelity is big standard and not revolutionary so there isn't a justifiable reason for poor performance. Poor performance in the name of ambition is only somewhat justifiable if you are Star Citizen where you can seemlessly fly through multiple solar systems to a planet to a spaceport and get out of your ship and take a train ride to a city and sit down at a coffee shop with very high fidelity.

[Jason Bright]

It's not my recollection at all that GTA V ran 'closer to 20fps than 30fps most of the time' on PS3.
It might not have been a solid 30 but it was a fairly solid game for the console, it felt consistent.
Skyrim would be a far better example of a game that ran like **** on PS3.

[rusty_shackleford]

every game that wasn't a ps3 exclusive ran like **** because ps3 had weird hardware nobody wanted to optimize ports for

[J1M]

Random dev on Reddit: Why Is Game Optimization Getting Worse?

tl;dr
1. Premade blackbox solutions (external engines, libraries, etc.) are prevalent, documentation is bad, nobody tries to control code.
2. Set priority of performance and testing lower than features, get ****.
3. Gamemaking became industry: large budgets, profit-oriented management, hype-based goal-making, marketing lubes fuckups.

P.S. Lol, "console architecture forced us to pay attention to quality before, now console performance is high, and we're lazy".

Not stated there, my input:
- Software engineers are spineless shirkers. They're paycheck-oriented not product oriented so they
a) are ready to work in profit oriented, rather than product oriented, companies,
b) cave under management pressure constantly.
- There's no reputation system that would batch blackmark everyone who worked on ****** games. Free market does not get shipped with institutions.
- There's no workplace culture.

Also also

One thing that a lot of people tend to either forget or have rose tinted glasses for, but there were plenty of older games that ran like ****. Games running poorly is not a new phenomenon. Two notorious examples that spring to mind are GTA 5 on PS360 (this one is still obviously fairly modern, but it ran closer to 20fps than 30fps most of the time) and Shadow of the Colossus on PS2. It ran dreadfully.

GTA 5 = 2013, Shadow of the Colossus = 2005.
"Old"

SotC and GTA were truly ambitious games for their times and got away with the performance because of the unmatched experience they offered. It was part of the selling point. Nowadays large maps at high fidelity is big standard and not revolutionary so there isn't a justifiable reason for poor performance. Poor performance in the name of ambition is only somewhat justifiable if you are Star Citizen where you can seemlessly fly through multiple solar systems to a planet to a spaceport and get out of your ship and take a train ride to a city and sit down at a coffee shop with very high fidelity.

I'll grant you 'artsy', but not 'ambitious'. Shadow of the Colossus is an empty plain filled with fog and half a dozen creatures.

[rusty_shackleford]

I got ico with my ps2 and it was one of the worst games I've ever played, every redditor that praises it and/or shadow of the colossus should be tortured

[J1M]

I got ico with my ps2 and it was one of the worst games I've ever played, every redditor that praises it and/or shadow of the colossus should be tortured

As PS2 owners it's the best they had. Probably weren't even aware Mechwarrior 2 existed.

[Oyster Sauce]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/553850 ... 2944621372

We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!

Oh you really can just do that

[rusty_shackleford]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/553850 ... 2944621372

We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!

Oh you really can just do that

"Developers learn about file compression"

[J1M]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/553850 ... 2944621372

We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!

Oh you really can just do that

"Developers learn about file compression"

It's worse than that. They had the same files repeated on average 6 times in the install.

I'm assuming the reason Helldivers 2 wasn't mentioned in the quote is because the real "inability of gamedevs to make video games" headline is that Nixxes (****** PC port company) are now considered to be experts on PC optimization.

[Oyster Sauce]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/553850 ... 2944621372

We have followed through on our plans and made small reductions in the PC installation size over the last few patches while still adding new content. While this was a good start, our short term fixes have not been enough to keep up with all of the new content in the latest patch. The longer term goal has always been to bring the PC installation size much closer in line with the console versions. We are happy to report that, thanks to our partners at Nixxes, we have reached that goal much sooner than expected. By completely de-duplicating our data, we were able to reduce the PC installation size from ~154GB to ~23GB, for a total saving of ~131GB (~85%). We have completed several rounds of internal QA and are ready to roll this out to early adopters as a public technical beta. Our testing shows that for the small percentage of players still using mechanical hard disk drives, mission loading times have only increased by a few seconds in the worst cases. This is live NOW!

Oh you really can just do that

"Developers learn about file compression"

They had every texture duplicated dozens of times, because of reasons

The reason the install size is so big is because the game duplicates assets. And it does it a lot.

Instead of having 1 copy of a given texture (or other asset), that texture is instead duplicated and bundled in multiple different files with other assets that use that texture. As an example, the Devastator and the Heavy Devastator meshes (their 3D models) are stored in separate files. However, each of these files also has a copy of several of the same textures because they both use the same textures for their main body. The normal map for the devastator body appears 44 times in the game files.

[rusty_shackleford]

That's reasonable, my filesystem handles deduplicating & compressing so they shouldn't worry about it.

[rusty_shackleford]

if I were to release a game all the files would just be on the disk uncompressed, anyone who complains would be told to use a modern filesystem