The Deadlines this Game follows needs to be Adjusted!
Rant Start!
I know how necessary new updates and content is for live service games, but the latest patch is just another in a mountain of simply bad updates that should've been delayed. Legion 1.0 happened already, Twins 1.0 happened already. BHVR had ample time to realize this update wasn't finished and the precedent set in the past was all the warning they needed not to let the game get to this point.
I don't really know what to say that we haven't all heard of or seen ourselves. Between the game suddenly deciding to flash lights so harshly the devs have to warn people to ask their doctors before playing, the rubber banding many players are experiencing, map collision not working sometimes, pallet breaking not working sometimes, killer powers not working sometimes, etc. Frankly, it's embarrassing.
BHVR made the PTB specifically so this wouldn't happen. Everyone and their mother told them this update was broken the moment we got our hands on it. I don't know which higher up at BHVR needs to hear this, but playing so recklessly with the one game almost your entire company depends on for revenue is a bad idea and I don't need to explain why.
The devs themselves likely aren't to blame for this. They're just workers under deadlines, and it honestly sucks to see them have to take so much crap all the time simply because they're forced to send out products that aren't ready. The whole reason Starbreeze had its publishing rights bought out was specifically because of their crunch culture issues, so why is this still such a large problem?
This game isn't invulnerable. I don't think it's fated to die soon or that this is the nail in the coffin or anything, but if an update came along that genuinely broke the game past the point it was unplayable, I honestly couldn't say I'd have faith that BHVR would do anything other than make a vague statement and kill switch a quarter of things that actually need to be turned off.
Rant over. Look, this aside, the past year has honestly been one of the cleanest comebacks I've seen from a game in awhile. After the duo flop that was Knight and SM, it kinda felt like Armageddon, but Larry, Alien, Chucky, and Unknown really did a lot to change the game and its rules, and in my opinion most of the changes have been healthy. I just wish we didn't have to accept the obvious misstep that came with it.
Do better BHVR, or else I'll…uh...play the game for another eight years? Yeah, that'll show them.
Comments
-
WIth how little changes they make a ptb like that shouldn't come into existence. They spend literal months and come up with blantently bad changes, small amount of changes and just bewildering changes such as the mere idea of the twins rework, soul chemical and summoning stone going from mid but interesting to trash and lame, DS animation being removed. This patch amounted to almost nothing, years spent talking about the twins rework for them to get slight number changes and nothing else.
You don't spend 1 and a half months to make nothing changes and when one big patch a year. I'd like to think there's no more than 2 devs on the balance team, one that thinks up the changes and one that implements them into the game.
The reality though is that frustrating games can be ever growing if they get properly updated but bhvr even if they have some how upped their game since I joined in 2021 is so below expectation that it isn't the case.
4 -
honestly it taking a thousand years to add specific animations to things is irritating but wait they reverted it for ds atleast the vaccine animation wasn’t reverted
3 -
I think that might be the worst part of it all. With the Twins rework being reverted, the DS buff and Haddonfield rework are basically the only changes worth noting (ig aside from the new shop UI and UW)
With such relatively small content for a mid chapter, it feels all the more insulting that they still updated to UE5 and introduced Pandora's Box of Bugs on us.
There definitely needs to be more balancers and bug fixer's hired, although I imagine the spaghetti code means training new employees is a nightmare.
0 -
I can't specifically say the balance team is large but bhvrs team in general is very large. I bring this up often but league is a frustrating game that has probably at least the top three most players in the world outside of mobile games. But it has a two week balance cycle that keeps such a large system somewhat fresh. Let me be clear league has a higher level of frustration potential but not the frustration consistency of dbd. That stems from how little the devs know about their own game and how infrequent they balance.
I'm pretty sure league has no more than 10 people that come up with and implement changes on a two week cycle that averages 15 changes a patch working on a terrible 32 bit game from 2009 so I don't really think spaghetti code is an excuse. Overwatch is in the same predicament as dbd right now and it's also due to their balance/change/design team, they've been running that game into the ground for years.
It's almost like a relatively small game like dbd would benefit from just mindlessly listening to their top content creators at this point which isn't the case with every game. But I'd trust some goofy person who barely cares about balance like jrm more than the current team.
0 -
It's almost like a relatively small game like dbd would benefit from just mindlessly listening to their top content creators at this point which isn't the case with every game.The thing is, its not a small game. Sure its not league, but when they hit the 60 million player mark in November they also said they had 300 people working on the game every day.
I usually defend BHVR pretty heavily. I get the balance issue, the meta is very different depending on region, SWF vs soloq is a huge challenge, that the level of sweatiness is left up to the player, and the ultimate goal is not a balanced game but one that is tilted toward the killer. That doesn't mean I think they make the right decisions on it, but I at least understand the problems they face.
But the bugs? If it was just one bad patch I'd say to give them a break, but its like every patch we get completely new things that are broken. I usually disagree with the idea of an 'Operation Health' style patch, but if every update is going to have bugs it really should be considered.
The whole reason Starbreeze had its publishing rights bought out was specifically because of their crunch culture issues, so why is this still such a large problem?I think its all the platforms. Releasing a patch on something like PC is pretty easy, but things have to go through testing on consoles (not for bugs in gameplay, but I think to ensure compatiability). That means there needs to be firm dates that probably can't be moved.
1 -
It seems to be a workflow issue. Many of these things are issues that come up in a test build. That's normal. But those are usually mostly cleaned up on a dev build, let alone before it's pushed to production. We're genuinely getting the test build on live servers. And if this isn't the test build....my god.
2 -
I really don't think content creators should give marching orders to professional game developers.
0 -
I couldn’t agree more, I have several friends that play with me on PC and PlayStation that are not on the forms here, but I can confidently say that they would agree with this response you put in as well.
Behavior is a talented crew. I give them that, I just think I need to be more careful and allow more time for things to get rolled out before releasing certain aspects.We have other aspects of the game that takes what should be only a couple months takes years for them to push out.
Sadako is the perfect example of a rework that was thrown together changed so many times and then thrown out to live service. She still has a lot of things that behavior should’ve taken care of and didn’t, and I feel like that goes with a lot of other killers as well.
For example Freddy should not have taken almost 5 years for them to finally get around to a rework. My fear is it will be the same result of the twins son number changes a possible revert on some thing.
All reworks should aim to be as successful as Billy’s was.
1 -
I don’t either but they play behaviors game hours on in day out and day in advertising their game, bringing in them new gamers/customers everyday.
I’m sure they have some valuable feedback to provide to behavior.
2 -
"The thing is, its not a small game. Sure its not league, but when they hit the 60 million player mark in November they also said they had 300 people working on the game every day."
That only helps my argument to a laughable extent. 300 people and they couldn't produce consistent even semi-competent patches.
"I usually defend BHVR pretty heavily. I get the balance issue, the meta is very different depending on region, SWF vs soloq is a huge challenge, that the level of sweatiness is left up to the player, and the ultimate goal is not a balanced game but one that is tilted toward the killer. That doesn't mean I think they make the right decisions on it, but I at least understand the problems they face."
Yeah league faces the same challenge on level far greater than swf vs soloq. Champs preform so extremely differently at different ranks that they have to decide to balance for the higher or lower end sometimes. Garen, one of the most simple characters in the game shouldn't be functioning above a 50.5% at high ranks, that means he's over tunned. The hundreds of items factor in to each champ and the runes that heavily impact the meta at any given rank need to be taken into account. DBD by comparison is easy mode unless their personal spaghetti that much worse as a game that came out 7 years later. Surely bhvr with an easier game to work with, with such a large amount of devs should be preforming FAR better than their current standard. Clown can't be buffed in dbd because of how simple he is and frustrating he would be to play against as a high level survivor if he could actually compete with them. You have to admit they make very few changes and half of them are typically irrelevant, maybe more every single patch, which takes a month and a half. 300 hundred people, 300 and they do next to nothing to change what matters in their game.
I don't actually think they want the game to be skewed towards killers when both sides are going all out, they just are that unaware of their own game. 60% makes sense when thinking about the many ways survivors throw the game by playing for fun, but it doesn't translate well. Tunneling is extremely frustrating for average survivors(almost all players) and they have openly stated they don't intend to deal with it. They buff ds back up to what it was but the damage is done, killers know it doesn't matter that much.
Those professional game devs preform very poorly. I'm not saying comp players should influence balance but quite a few of the top content creators know far better than the devs. It'd be quite odd to think otherwise at this point. Otz would literally nerf blight into a b tier killer given the chance as he hates him, but I'll take that L for the greater good of the game. Nurse exists because "it's fine for her to be op we know and want her to be that way".
I'm not even a giant fan of any given content creator anymore but they do know better than the devs, they would take the game to a better place in just a couple patches.Good on bhvr they spent years making a twins rework just to **** out something that looks like a middle schoolers last night final project. Props to them though! They reverted it and kept some number buffs! Really exceptional.
They have or had a fog whisperer discord for years and almost all suggestions got out right ignored so it was just worthless.
So in some games you'd be right but not this one, they should be giving marching orders because they would make the game exceptionally better!
2 -
They updated from UE4 to UE5. I only know very little of programming, but I certainly know from a friend who works with stuff like this that an engine update can be very complicated and is always prone to be buggy on release.
For example: Certain bugs in the engine could have been fixed in a way that is not compatible with their code. Now the Devs need to first find out what exactly changed so they can redo the code. Sometimes even commands change. It's not something you can do in a day.
They were probably already working on it for a long time, because most bugs/glitches we have are of graphical nature. And fixing these is always low priority.
The next big update is also the anniversary patch and they needed to update the engine because support is running out for UE4 soon. So I guess they did not want to have all the glitches during the anniversary.
Programming is not just "write a few lines and it will work". It is very complex and even if you only have like 60 lines of code, finding a bug there can take HOURS.
0 -
Programming is not just "write a few lines and it will work". It is very complex and even if you only have like 60 lines of code, finding a bug there can take HOURS.Absolutely. I'll be upfront that that I don't have the most extensive knowledge of coding, and its not meant to undermine the difficulty of the task.
But none of this would be secret. Was ending support for UE4 sprung on them on that last second? Did they have reason to think it was going to be a seamless transition? As you said, people should be well aware that transitioning between enigines is going to be a time consuming process.
And buggy is one thing. If this latest patch was an anomaly I think a lot of people would be far more understanding especially given the engine update. But its a common thing to have new, significant bugs appear in every patch.
2 -
Tbh I don't know when and how exactly the Devs were notified of the support ending soon.
We only know that they work on the updates way before they are released and I can imagine that the engine update took a lot of manpower from the other updates.
Also "fixing a light switch can result in the elevator not working anymore, because the wires are not installed correctly". This is an analogy my friend likes to use when talking about Bugfixes. You may fix one issue but get 2 more in return.
Just look at Fallout 4's Next Gen update. It has more bugs than the base game had before.
0 -
Also "fixing a light switch can result in the elevator not working anymore, because the wires are not installed correctly". This is an analogy my friend likes to use when talking about Bugfixes. You may fix one issue but get 2 more in return.And if every time you replaced the light the elevator broke and the people in charge never fixed the wiring, they deserve to be criticized.
0 -
In our case that would be the engine.
And if the wires are finally fixed, you have to figure that out first.....
0 -
Using a Bethesda game when talking about bugs isn't really a flattering comparison for DBD. Fallout 4 and the rest of the series are notorious for bad programming and especially horrendous bugs (although New Vegas still goes hard). If this update took a lot more resources than usual, I'd say the next few chapters are in some extremely hot water.
I have worked with programming in the past, and you are absolutely right that engine switches result in more bugs, which is exactly why this update should've been polished far more before release, especially considering that it aside, there wasn't much of anything substantiative added. Haddonfield was reworked, that's cool. UW was gutted and the five Twins players in the game got a QoL update. What else? The shop looks fresh…
This update, out of all of them, had the absolute least reason to not be pushed back, as the trials themselves are almost unchanged and so many new issues were added they farrrrr outweigh the positives.
If it wasn't for the fact that new content is being added in June (ie deadlines), I'm certain that simply delaying or rolling back the update altogether would've resulted in a far more playable experience.
0 -
Its unprofessional for them to leave bugs in the game for YEARS (plague) take months to balance unbroken perks (made for this) and release a PTB that already in hindsight was terrible due to feedback only to revert nearly EVERYTHING. If anything, that is more unprofessional than anything a content creator couldve done.
0 -
I chose F4 because we all know that Bethesda is on par with BHVR bugs concerning (although they are a lot larger than BHVR). Is it good to have such a buggy game? No. The only difference is, that it's not BHVRs own engine they have to deal with.
I understand your frustration and especially the rubberbanding gets me, but that is the worst I had to deal with so far. I did not even encounter the strobo glitch once fir example.
Also rerolling is not easily done because consoles have special requirements for releasing updates. So they probably cannot do it.
1 -
I have encountered the Strobe glitch about six times, had at least three matches where I couldn't break a pallet, and about four instances of map collision simply not working, alongside the rubber banding issue pretty consistently.
Our different viewpoints seem to be at least somewhat tied to our different experiences with this update. Even if rerolling isn't possible, that's all the more reason why each and every update needs to polished since there is quite literally no going back once it's out.
0 -
They fixed the strobo glitch yesterday. The only annoying stuff I encountered so far is rubberbanding. Then there is only minor stuff like Singularity's chests not having the progression bar or Lèry's Gen signs not working properly. Or a skirt glitching into the legs.
I think it is VERY dependent on your hardware on what bugs you encounter. I for example have a R7 6700XT and a Ryzen5 6500 (I think. Always forget the CPU) and DBD is installed on my ssd.
0
