I’m a PVE RP player with my own server and while I like a lot of these cosmetic “economy” things, comparing how much was broken in the release (and remains broken) compared with what I got–I would just as well not have updated. And frankly it bugs me that I’m forced to update my sever (another point, yes).
But really. Was this 2.1 release soooooo necessary? You couldn’t put in a couple more weeks of play-testing to get things solid first?
As a 30 year programming veteran, I’m always disgusted by the sloppy test-release cycles many gaming companies have.
It’s not a big deal, given the world we live in, but seriously Funcom, do you really think y’all did a good job?
It’s even worse when you see what it’s like on the inside. No unit testing, no automated regression testing, QA people are almost always contractors and treated badly by everyone else…
Mind, I’m not talking about Funcom specifically, because I haven’t worked for them.
I agree. I feel the strategy for release here is built around a foundation of either arrogance or ignorance i’m not sure which. Meaning “if it compiles, ship it”.
The attrittion rate of customers are on track to double this month, so to me if i were in the product management hot seat i’d be worried about this strategy. I’d be looking at my customer base thinking “maybe i should speed up communication, win hearts & minds back and try a different approach”.
Not this crew, they’ll double down on a bad strategy.
I mean you could argue that a conceptual roadmap would also have given player base a chance to unpack how this entire thing fits together with a future vision. When I asked the devs for that, the response was it wasn’t fair to raise expectations on customers only to break them.
Dont forget that you can literally see their codes in dev kit 60% of it is available to us to see and change to our discretion. Mark my words if we didnt have mod I would have already dropped the game and never played it
Been playing PC games since the 80s, and MMOs since the mid 90s.
There is one truth that happens over and over again.
The game companies set a goal (beat WoW) and there have been countless good games ruined because they did not listen to the players.
The goals for these devs is set in stone, and the stuff has to be put out when the time says to do it.
Kinda dumb to the average person.
Siptah is in early access, we expect problems and changes.
Exiles have lost of EA time, I was in the last 4 months of it. YET they still treat it as its in EA.
On my favorite MMO of all times, I saw 300,000 players quit in one day.
In 2006 we went to the last convention for the game.
There were 400 players there, and 3/4 were over 40 years old. The Devs told us their game was for the 18-25 demographic, and thats who they were building the game for.
So we all left.
I wouldn’t draw any real conclusions from compiler use alone. Any large project is going to have variations like that, depending on how distributed the development wing is, how many third party tools they are using, and what frameworks they are using to speed the development process along.
I think @CodeMage 's point cuts more to the root of it; there are areas where lessons need to be learned around process, and that problem is endemic in the software industry and not just a Funcom problem. They are currently demonstrating that problem quite clearly however, unfortunately.
I’d like to think that that is changing though; I freely confess I am biased a little because I love Funcom games…
Well … i’ve worked on a compilers and its not a big issue. In fact, cross-compiling with Unity3D or Unreal Engine (IL2CPP for example) isn’t scary outcome, especially given the simplicity of Conan Exiles atm.
One has to take stock of the games current recipes… eg:
Static World Mesh (Tiled)
Static Caves
NPC and Player Animations Static.
Climbing Mechanics Static.
AI / Pathfinding …because its static…easy.
Particles / Graphics - Pretty meh and not ovarly used (no real concern for benchmark issues in GPU budgets)
Instance loading / unloading (LOD) - Static…makes it so much easier to manage.
P2P Networking - Nope, its Peer To Server to avoid likely network security issues.
So what am I missing about this game that makes it extremly concerning that a dev team can’t fix existing bugs/issues while at the same time not really doing much beyond what Unreal Engine kind of gives you out of the box for free in terms of optimisation, performance management and cross-compile compatibilities.
Resources… and attention to finishing what they start…thats the only “compiler” issue that stands out tbh.
Depends on how experienced one is and where they got that experience. Programming covers a vast variety of topics and technologies and use cases these days.
