It got to a matter of no respect for the players. Seriously.
EVERY new big update (New DLC and mid chapters) brings more bugs and they seem to be growing exponentially with each one.
I thought devs would use the WoO of changing UE4 to UE5 to at least do something about the code, but of course not.
And it's also getting common for PTB bugs to go live.
For me this bug situation happening over and over again got to the point of that it's not an accident or that is difficult to maintain a game for 8 years. It's just that BHVR don't care if we are having a good experience or not with DbD. It's a total lack of respect for it's customers (me included). Plain and simple.
Meanwhile the skin department is non stop creating skins for Feng and Sable.
When the guy in the last Q&A at reddit asked why they don't do a "Health Chapter" to address this kind of stuff and the BHVR representative replied "it's because our Art Designers would have nothing else to do" was one of the most pathetic excuses I saw in my entire life.
Honestly I still play the game because I'm too damn competitive, so I play multiplayer games a lot and in this one I can play as one of the characters I love most from any kind of IP: Wesker.
He's the biggest reason I'm still here and now Dracula from Castlevania is coming. He too will make me hooked on this game a little more. Will co-main Wesker and Dracula.
But, seriously, this lack of respect is sad and it's getting to me.
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I disagree that BHVR don't care if the players have a good experience. I believe that they do (in general, of course I can't speak for every single person who works there). But I would guess that most of the BHVR employees genuinely do care.
I think the problem is more linked to complacency due to lack of competition. Give credit to BHVR, they are the only game in town when it comes to good asymmetrical horror games, and they deserve the rewards they get from the hard work they put into it. But the lack of competition means that they really have no incentive to quickly fix things that are broken. People don't stop playing the game or spending money on it, even when there are game-breaking bugs. OP - you're a prime example of this based on what you said. If players were fleeing to another game in droves due to game-breaking bugs, I think things would be handled quite differently and with more urgency.
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Adding into this, developers get way too much undue credit for how much control they have over the studio's business decisions. Let's get one thing straight: being a developer is a job title, let's not forget that.
The people ultimately making the decisions, with or without the input of technologists, is their business team: product owners, scrum masters, etc. Releases are often pressured and can't be delayed because of community backlash (ironically) and because the business team sees return on investment by delivering a minimum viable product rather than delaying a release entirely.
There's a lot of complexity involved in the software development industry and I think too many people on the outside looking in are giving way more heat to developers than they deserve. Yes, BHVR knows they're the coolest kid on the block, but that allows the *business team specifically* to make hasty decisions about passing bugs that would probably otherwise be showstoppers to a reasonable developer who cares about the critical reception of their updates.
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Good.
You guys seems to be reasonable people (and with that I mean you're not cursing me XD).
So let's make some "corrections"/notes about my original post. :)
-Actually I'm not playing the game since Lara's release since I work at night and when I woke up there was already a lot of info regarding the bugs. When I say that I still play this game is actually "I still didn't uninstalled and play one or two days a week to not get rusty".
-I tend to mistakenly use the word "devs" to blame the responsible people behind these issues, when in fact Cyberpunk 2077 showed us that the real culprits are, let's say, the financial department . Hope This is the last time I do this. :P
This is probably what is happening here. Chapters should indeed be delayed until this kind of crap is fixed.
-I too think that the lack of competition is another issue here. I was rooting for TMC success because of this exactly problem.1 -
I just wonder how some of these bugs even happen. They often times have bugs hit live right after doing a PTB that never had the bug. They ALSO often will have bugs on the most random thing. How did Wesker get bugged on an update that didn't touch Wesker? It's like "We updated Billy and 3 random killer perks...and it broke lockers".
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u know the bug department and the art department are not the same department right? they could pump out 600 cosmetics next week and that still wont be the bug department just art designers and the marketing departments.
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Just FWIW I think I'm learning more often than not the word "devs" is used in reference to the development studio as a whole rather than the actual software developers. I don't think there's anything wrong with that since it hurts to type "development studio" a thousand times, but in discussions like these where we are criticizing the actions, inactions, or decisions made by the studio, I can't help but clarify we're talking about the decision makers of the company, who aren't necessarily technologists.
You make a lot of sense, which seems to be lacking in some of BHVR's recent updates lol. Ideally, releases could get delayed so that every release can try to introduce minimal bugs, but there are valid (but still questionable) reasons why they don't in reality. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to add new features to a game filled with technical debt and not end up breaking something seemingly unrelated even with an infinitely long release cycle, so even if we were to give up a year of our life waiting for a bundle of new features and bug fixes, it'd still end up just causing more bugs anyway.
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I think this is the weirdest part for me too.
Nick Cage update had NOTHING to do with Pinhead and yet he had to be kill-switched because when he hooked survs the entire game crashed.Yes, I know.
You seem to not get the point here. BHVR said that as an excuse to avoid the question.0 -
You say that until the new Claudette cosmetic (specifically the left shoe) becomes responsible for Nurse blinking backwards for some reason.
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i mean last i checked sables new footwear had no sound. so would not shock me, but coding something into a game is not the same department as the people creating the art
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Hundreds of employees for an extremely simple game but it somehow can't function properly for longer than a month.
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The shoe comment was a joke. Wasn't expecting there was actually a current bug surrounding a cosmetic, lol.
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lol dbd in a nutshell tho
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You criticize them then immediately follow it up by telling them they won't have to fear you drawing any consequences from this because all you need is something shiny. Well played.
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'Why don't the devs care about the state of the game' 'Ooooh shiny new chapter, i'll drop money on it regardless'
You are the problem.1 -
DBD suffers from the TF2 problem of being built on spaghetti code and going on for so goddamn long that untangling all of the spaghetti would genuinely take years
We absolutely should deserve better, but expecting patches to not have bugs at this point in DBD's lifespan is a fool's dream
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When you run a live service game like DBD you tend to find yourself backed into a corner. The players might, overall, understand if the 'devs' forego a chapter to work on game health. But the shareholders won't, and neither will the employees working on the game who rely on their income from BHVR.
A 'game health' chapter, or otherwise dropping content to focus more on debugging, will just cost them too much money.
It's more likely that they'll want to find otherways of streamlining processes to free up manpower for debugging. That said, there's only so much you can accomplish by simply throwing more people at the problem.
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Coconut.jpg?
The difference between TF2 and DBD is the motor engine, since the one from TF2 are always the same as the beginning, DBD got each time on a new "version" of the engine (unreal engine)
That's why people are now very upset, they upgrade to UE5, but the bug are worse than before, they don't change the code, it seems a copy paste on the new engine and call it a day
I'm super sure that, if behavior, stop for six or seven month to make new character in the game, just for patching and correcting all the bug and clean up the spaghetti code, everyone gonna be happy with that0 -
The game hopping engines from UE4 to Ue5 was a miracle in and of itself, quite frankly I was surprised the game wasn't buggier and how quickly BHVR dealt with all the actually serious problems
BHVR can also not simply take a few months off from making a character to fix the code, because then everyone would have a fit and whine about no new content however good of a reason they might have
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They should have different departments that focus on character creation and bug fixes separately. Just like how they have a different department focusing on cosmetics. They can push out bug fixes, especially for all the major bugs we've seen recently, new characters, and new cosmetics all at the same time.
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You sure? I know the forum is an echo chamber, but if they state about that, lot of people gonna be okey with that
And since, each new character come with new problematic perk/combo perk or killer problematic when they first come in game or when a buff/nerf/rework happen (twins, Skull Merchant, Knight, ..) I think it can be good for everyone1
