this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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[–] mriswith@lemmy.world 86 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (31 children)

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.

[–] Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 77 points 1 month ago (14 children)

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.

[–] shoo@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] shoo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

And games are usually one and done, so there's even less motivation to write sustainable code.

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