Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
bitlog.com306 points by jakevoytko 18 hours ago
306 points by jakevoytko 18 hours ago
It's interesting that he brings up Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 (and Quake for that matter), though, because I think it really foregrounds why these discussions are so fraught.
I worked in early AAA in the late 90s, and it's true that games were often quite rough around the edges. But they were also often biting off WAY more than they could chew, inventing genres and innovating like crazy, often in messy ways that didn't always work. But that meant players were often also routinely and genuinely surprised by the experiences they encountered in even big budget games.
He lists a bunch of quality of life and balance issues that were fixed in Diablo 3 compared to Diablo 2... but, well, Diablo 2 was obviously _important_ in ways that Diablo 3 wasn't. It's a much greater game.
And lurking in the background is the hard fact that often the progress with software (certainly game software) entailed turning to much better software engineering standards, using much better external libraries or game engines with much larger teams, and relying on much more process to capture and filter all those rough edges... and along the way, you've built a much, much larger team with a much larger burn rate, and so all those experiments and innovations become much more dangerous and need to be corralled and controlled and mostly stifled, and as the cost of all this to build skyrockets your entire game design _has_ to focus on your business model and your microtransaction story and your live services first and foremost, because you've boxed yourself into a corner where that cash flow issue is the central fact of your game / software design.
(I experienced this evolution first hand in the FPS space)
All of which is to say, I think there are multiple different axes at play here for evaluation, and it's probably fair to say that software _undefinably_ was much worse in the past along some of them... but not all of them. And there are probably deep tensions and tradeoffs between some of those axes.
I think this entirely discussion really is muddied, though, too, by the fact that hardware got radically better over this entire arc as well, and so many programming techniques in the past that made software more brittle or crash prone hinged on memory and computation optimizations techniques that really had nothing to do with the software culture of then or now. It was just a response to the realities of the hardware.
You could take this further and argue that Diablo 4 further "solves" the problems of Diablo 3. It is accessible to a far wider audience than D2 and D3.
For someone who played D2 and D3 for thousands of hours, D4 typically comes off as really awful. The accessibility tradeoff means that the cheesy (and enjoyable) strategies you used to enjoy in former iterations are no longer feasible because the auto adapting numerical difficulty system is so aggressively casual. Every time you get a big piece of gear, it is watered down to pointlessness immediately. D3 and D2 do not have this problem, but their difficulty curves are more discrete and unforgiving in many areas.
WoWs difficulty-leveling was the worst thing to ever happen, even though at the time it seemed really good, because it removes the difference - if everything always scales to you, there's no real reason to improve.
Makes me wonder if a game studio could instead pepper the amount of money it takes to build an AAA title and instead give it to teams of much smaller size, and leverage the radical focus that can come with such arrangements where a team is given finite resources and has to make due, compromises and all.
Bet across 10 teams instead of one, that kind of thing.
Willing to bet a 30 million dollar budget game will play and look great with proper focus.
Even if only 1-2 take off, it’d be overall better wouldn’t it
Factorio is by all accounts extremely polished, and with a crew significantly smaller than many AAA titles.
There are some others that are similarly placed - Stardew Valley, arguably Minecraft (or GTNH heh).
I think the problem for the studios is they don't know HOW to do those 30 million dollar games, but they're really good at the 300 million dollar ones, and they're not selling to the users, they're selling to corporations (think Microsoft/Playstation/Target).
(It's also rare you have a game that is allowed to improve the way Minecraft, Factorio, or Stardew Valley have; go back and play builds or releases from around "when they went big" and you'll find they're horribly rough - I love Minecraft 1.7.10 but I simply cannot play without the QoL mods from GT:NH for long.)
> It's also rare you have a game that is allowed to improve the way Minecraft, Factorio, or Stardew Valley have
Honestly I think this is the hardest thing, I've spent a bit of time now trying to look at how indie works, including building out a small team to put something together and you either need to get funding, or it's pretty gruelling.
You can build something small slow and steady, but you've got to luck out and hit the zeitgeist if you don't want your project to collapse for a lack of money.
Or you have to have someone support you, I mean Stardew Valley famously was building for 4 years before they released, with his partner supporting him, that's a huge survivorship bias.
Project Zomboid is another game that comes to mind that's been being built for a long time for a dedicated community. However they managed to get a paid prototype out early, even though they had cash issues and a fair bit of bad luck.
Not sure what the story behind Factorio is come to think about it.
> Even if only 1-2 take off, it’d be overall better wouldn’t it
Sometimes how projects are run is weird, like how Hi-Fi Rush seemed to be doing well and then Microsoft axed them despite it:
> In his letter to staffers, Booty said the closures were “not a reflection of the creativity and skill of the talented individuals at these teams or the risks they took to try new things.” And while the changes will be “disruptive,” Booty said that they are “grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades.”
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/microsoft-shuts-down-...
Case in point, the original release of Hearthstone was built by a team of like 10 people. Indies pull that kind of stuff off all the time, but it's comparatively rare for a big studio to do it.
It seems like Nintendo is the only one I've heard of routinely doing it?
And I'm not sure why? I would have thought producing and refining new IP would be good to do now and again, at least releasing something novel once every few years?
Or perhaps they prefer just buying external IP.
You're describing Kepler Interactive (https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/kepler). They've had one massive hit and a few smaller scale successes. So it does seem like a working model.
Riot games tried exactly this with Riot Forge, but it was shut down because none of its 5+ games they tried amounted to much in terms of sales.
Riot Forge was created in order to recruit their Head of Creative Direction (https://x.com/Ghostcrawler/status/1749782446839615511).
If that's true, there may not have been many at Riot who were super passionate about it. Obviously Ghostcrawler was but was probably spread very thin.
Taking a look at one of their releases: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1276800/CONVERGENCE_A_Lea...
Seems like a generic platformer priced at €30, but don't worry! You can also buy skins for a couple extra €.
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Looking at another one: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2252143/The_Mageseeker_A_...
An action RPG where you can buy extra spells for your character as a DLC...
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Hmm, no idea how their business model didn't work out.
As i sit here listening to the diablo 2 soundtrack while working (lol), i dont recall a ton of D2 issues... Most of the time the problem was my dial-up connection.
Also, aside from the dupe bugs, his "improvements" in Diablo 3 I consider it's downside. Changes that are framed as QoL changes in games are very frequently just reductions in risk or investments in your character.
His general outlook seems to be that the small teams of the past creates more rough edges and that the larger teams on modern AAA games creates a smoother experience but requires more concern for income because the cost is so much higher for the larger team.
I get that comparison but I think he's totally missed the advantages of the small team. The cheaper dev cost means less risk of financial ruin if the game fails which means innovations are less risky. Less developers means the vision of one person can shine through more which results in a more creative end-result, for better or worse.
The "too many cooks" in the kitchen is a real problem of modern software, especially games. Huge budgets mean games need huge audiences to be successful which means everyone needs to like it. The death of productivity software is, unsurprisingly, anything that stands in the way of productivity. The save bugs he mentions are real killers. But for games, as an art form, the turn from focusing on the vision of the artist to the desires of the audience makes for uninspiring work.
I'll take bugs all day long if it comes with a unique experience.
There are real QoL changes that simply make the game better - but there are also QoL changes that simply remove the game. It's an extremely delicate balance, and easy to get wrong in ways you don't notice until it's too late.
For example, quest tracking in modern games is phenomenal, and people used to add addons to do that - but there's really a way in which "figure it out yourself" and/or read the guidebook/talk to people was better. Same with pug tooling - no need to find a group anymore, the computer does that for you, but you also don't develop relationships with those around you.
> but there's really a way in which "figure it out yourself" and/or read the guidebook/talk to people was better.
Going to have to disagree on this one. Perhaps if you have an extremely well architected game that will organically guide a lost player in the right direction it can work, but I have many painful memories of just blindly exploring entire maps and clicking on every NPC because the obvious route of progression wasn't doing anything. Sometimes it would be an actual quest bug and I'd just be wasting my time.
Particularly in large open world games like GTA/Witcher 3/etc, quest tracking of some sort is mandatory.
Blindly exploring parts of the game and talking to npcs that you would have run straight passed towards the quest beacon doesn't sound as terrible as you're making it sound.
I wasn't "exploring" in the spiritual sense or "talking", I was brute-force-searching the entire map to find whatever stupid magic button or item or conversation the devs were forcing me to have so I could keep playing the game.
Completely immersion breaking.
That's exactly it, really, amazing games are degraded by the modern over-hand-holding; but the average game is much better for it.
The interesting thing to me is D3 had everything going for it before it was developed and released. It had an answer book with D2's success. They had a rabid fan base with over 10 years of data to see what did and didn't work with D2.
To be fair I only played D2 in 1.09, 1.10 and 1.12 with LoD so I don't know what day 1 looked like but I'd consider D2 still to this day the best ARPG I ever played where as I stopped playing D3 shortly after release after completing it (before it nerfed everything) in hardcore mode from the beginning, it had no longevity. I didn't even buy D4.
I think it's harder to have a sequel be well received when the previous version was considered as good as it gets for a large player base. With that said, I'm still surprised how D3 panned out.
To me that is a sign of someone who games a lot, they've maybe not a chef themselves but are always in search of new flavors and experiences.
Whilst there are many epicureans, the vast majority of time played/food consumed is going to be pretty bland, and the audience both wants and expects that.
Thankfully there is room enough for both, and I think the tension between them is interesting.
This is a relatively recent attitude. OG gamers expected to have their hair blown back through some combination of novel game mechanics, setting, and storyline pretty much every title every time, and if a game didn't deliver it didn't sell.
> OG gamers expected to have their hair blown back through some combination of novel game mechanics, setting, and storyline pretty much every title every time, and if a game didn't deliver it didn't sell.
That is not my experience having gamed "seriously" since 1992. Everyone has different tastes. And besides folks over identifying with a console or platform, I recall most folks just trying a lot of different things then settling into what they enjoyed.
Sports games in particular have always been popular through many phases of low/no innovation because that just wasn't a priority to most of that demographic.
Your expectations remind me more of GameGate than 90s and oughts era gaming.
> OG gamers expected to have their hair blown back .... pretty much every title every time
OG gamer here (started on the Fairchild Channel F). This is absurd.
What is true is that the hardware rapidly advanced, and as programmers got familiar with each platform the software also advanced, but the shelves were full of stinkers and disappointments and copycats.
I don't expect my hair blown back, I'm just looking for something novel. I play a lot of half-baked, buggy titles because they have some interesting angle.
Fair, a lot has changed in the space over the last 45 years. Take the proliferation of titles that are basically just you having a job as an example. That shit absolutely would not scan with older gaming audiences. Why it became popular is a complete mystery to me. Audience expectations for their entertainment dollar spent have definitely declined sharply.
> That shit absolutely would not scan with older gaming audiences
Are you quite certain about that? https://archive.org/details/Lemonade_Stand_1979_Apple
That's an edutainment game for early grade schoolers. (I should know; I played it in that era.) Nothing in it would hold an adult's attention.