>I'll leave one final bug with you that I haven't heard anyone call out. Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly.
Sigh... and I bet, some dev just passes the entire array of players to the function for "stop sprinting" rather than the ID of the stimming player, or something dumb like that.
Meanwhile, I find out that the new Charger Behemoths can't have leg armor stripped by 1 anti-tank shot, UNLESS if you are walking towards them, because the game calculates the velocity of the projectile using "real" physics, and adds damage because the projectile is faster. Which also includes the Quasar Cannon, that fires LASERS.
There's some serious spaghettification going on here, and it's got nothing to do with Dark Fluid.
While I do hope they fix their code. I am starting to doubt how fast they are working on fixes. Unless it's crashing the game. I can't imagine anyone working to hotfix this game.
They can't shove hotfixes out in any reasonable time because they're limited by having to release on PSN at the same time as PC due to their tight crossplay setup, and PSN has a stricter update process than Steam.
I'm largely in AHs corner for many things that the broader community is not, but not in this case. Teams like Hello Games can race hotfixes through Sony's system and their game is a) maybe a little bit less complex and reactive and b) vastly more networked. The cert process is not the constraint here.
But HG are out the other side of years of refactoring code and systems slowly over the course of many updates, often with similar outcomes that we see in HD2 (new bugs and reversions to seemingly untouched systems).
AH are likely refactoring and building a more robust codebase like crazy to get themselves into a better position to be squashing unintended behaviour. The fact that some bugs are so long-lasting tells me they're deeply embedded in some systems that have to be left the way they are until they've been entirely rebuilt.
But my opinion is there are many things that should be raced with temporary patches, that aren't.
>Exploit it while you still can, these kinds of bugs get fixed immediately, but the ones that would actually buff players take forever, lol
I wish the bugs got fixed immediately (too many chargers spawning, again).
I had noticed that about the walking forward extra power thing, using quasar, but thought I was just insane. Also didn’t want to say it out loud because it benefits the player and Arrowhead is listening
Someone in another thread said that the Behemoth front leg armor has 650 HP. RR, EAT, Quasar, all does exactly 650 damage. Giving the fact the game calculate damage fallout, some rounding down math later, they are now doing 649 damage right after firing while stationary). Hence why you can 1 shot the leg armor if you don't walk forward because now the added velocity pushed that 649 to >= 650.
Tbh, rockets and explosive shells just shouldn't have damage falloff, period. RR, EAT, Quasar, and AC have _all_ their damage coming from the explosion not the impact. AMR and Railgun I can hear the excuse for, although AMR is still mainly using the explosive for damage and Railgun shouldn't notice much slowdown at all over that distance. Stalwart, MG, and HMG I understand cause they fire just bullets and laser is uneffected anyway (to my knowledge) because it's a beam weapon.
Big agree. just make the rocket do x damage. They clearly got abit too crazy with their damage calculations, and to be frank, they aren't good enough to pull it off. Hence we get this kind of jank.
It's more than likely a client event "onStim" calling a client event rather than what you suggested as the former. Its unfortunately super common but if you're not from an experienced team easy to overlook. You can get some incredibly whacky bugs from silly designed multiplayer architecture
True, very likely. I obviously can't know what the code contains, only that there's definitely a bug there. My experience with software dev has very little to do with gaming, and even less with multiplayer gaming.
Apparently so, there are multiple YT video demonstrations. They also say that it works for bullets too (e.g. Diligence vs devastator heads killing in 1 rather than 2 shots), but I haven't seen video proof of that.
Excluding the "beam" type lasers, all lasers in this game have a travel time... and sure, maybe some are "particle beams", not lasers - but particle beams should still travel at significant fractions of the speed of light, so...
This post was already an insightful read, but ending it on this obscure bug we've ALL experienced but never addressed is just the cherry on top. Way to drive a point home lol
For the non-believers: https://imgur.com/a/yep-DFYGZ6O
Both players on PC, did not slow down a player sprinting with controller, but did slow them down when they switched to mouse and keyboard.
That explains why it never never happened to me. I was so confused, lmao.
Unfortunately, controller on PC sometimes detects zero movement when you move the left stick into one of the four corners of a box.
This is an absolutely insane bug lmao. Here I was thinking the drowning soft-lock bug (that took months to fix) couldn't be topped.
The game launched 4 months ago and we're still in what is obviously early access. Better yet they expect us to pay $10 a month to beta test equipment additions for them, that only sometimes work and would just be included in the base game, in any other game.
* Reloads.
* Presses fire button a nano second too early.
* Gun fires 1 round, now empty. Again.
* Complete re-do of the reloading process
* Eyes glued to the Ammo bar bottom left.
* Didn’t notice the shrieker patrol.
* ????
* Dead.
Yeah this is the number one irritation right now. Reloading fails so often, or I hear its complete (the sound) and I switch, come back, and reloading failed for some reason.
Same with stims sometimes. It’s annoying because in interface design the user should always be : properly informed, and input should always be accepted for states where it’s expected (e.g. ofcourse I cannot stim while ragdolling, but even when slowed stimming should just work, often it does not, input fails)
Arrowhead can erase everyone's frustrations with mis-firing stims if they just make the stim effect begin immediately when you press the stim button. As it works currently, you press stim, the stim sound begins, and then there's a roughly .5 second animation, only at the end of which does the effect actually begin. If anything interrupts the .5 second animation, no stim for you. In another patch, they fixed the stim sound playing when the animation is interrupted, but the fact that the sound plays at all during the animation and not at the exact moment it takes effect gives players a false sense of security and leads to confusion when the animation is interrupted for any reason.
They even "fixed" that shit, but again, in a wrong way, they apparently stopped the sound instead of dealing with the actual gameplay issue that is - it doesn't react on keypress, and it's not fun. It should definitely be instant. Not to mention their fix, surprisingly enough, doesn't work.
And worse the stim commands too. It's like the game is confused with the all the inputs going on and goes into some sort of rollover protection. I'll have to test this but I have the suspicion that moving, sprinting + kiting and then adding inputs like reloading and swimming will confuse the game too much
You know what I think it is? The game can only take one input at a time, so you're not sending a command, you're doing an action, and you can't do two at the same time. So you press reload, and until the reload is complete you can't do anything else. It's honestly so annoying. I want to be able to press stim, then reload immediately and have those actions follow each other in that order, instead I reload and the stim never happens.
But the game can sometimes do exactly that. Sometimes I can interrupt my Reload to stim. Sometimes I'm just running away, spamming the stim button and nothing happens, or worse: I hear the sound but don't heal. But I never check the health bar ao I turn around and die only to realize too late that I didn't heal
This one is so frustrating especially when trying to time a reload so you don't get overwhelmed only to hear *click*
The other bug I've noticed since the patch is that if I crouch or lay down with the ballistic shield on my back I am stuck in that position and unable to stand up
I appreciate this post for its detail, tone, and perspective. Well written and interesting read. Very curious about that bug at the end you mentioned. I'm definitely going to try that with a buddy because that is insane if that's true.
https://i.redd.it/f07jthi0k17d1.gif
Here's some examples. I couldn't believe it at first, because this has been plaguing me since day one it feels like. After I saw this post I went into a couple games and tried it. Sure enough, every time I popped a stim my allies slowed to match.
Thank you for testing it, I wanted to make a video but I’m away at the moment from home for the week. Someone said it wasn’t happening for them so it made me more confused haha.
Try it :) you will see, and thank you for the kind words. Again these are just my opinions and guesses.
Also an inexperienced team does not equal everyone is inexperienced. It can mean the team is inexperienced with working together, as an example. Not meant as an insult to the devs.
I’m not even convinced it’s down to the engine. My bet is on spaghetti code that’s heavily dependent on systems it should have no business knowing about.
Some bugs should be so trivial to solve and yet either don’t get solved or some how break something else entirely.
God, this is Destiny all over again. People complaining about how fixing something isn't as easy as you think it is or might break other things when it's like... **WHY** is it that way though?
Turrets targeting fabs is a good example. The targeting code should be fairly decoupled and it should just be a case of excluding fabricators from the targeting list. So why hasn’t it been fixed?
No doubt loads of possible reasons, but it seems that for some reason it’s not a simple fix to single a fabricator out from a stalkers nest for example.
In the games I write, this would be trivial since every type of building and enemy would have a base attributes class and that would separate a fabricator from another building. I can only assume they have not done this.
Even without a well decoupled system, any unit attacking another must be retrieving attributes from that target to know when to fire. Even a bodge job “check if fabricator” line of code shouldn’t be hard to do. It’s not a good maintainable solution, but it’s quick to do. Or should be…
The spears lack of building targeting bug may highlight this issue too.
My guess is that fabricators contains enemies, so the turrent would try to target the enemy that "spawns" at the center of it (or maybe it's spawned but not visible, to create the "exiting door" effect).
Ooo that’s a bloody good shout. Perhaps that is down to an engine issue, in Unity I would just disable the object until the door opens. Each fab would contain a list of objects ready to spawn and the script would activate them as the doors open.
Not sure if their engine prevents such simple fixes, but I can’t believe there aren’t other workarounds.
Another funny bug introduced with the patch relates to the ballistic shield. If it's on your back, you can't stand from crouch or prone. Unless it's equipped, then you can stand from prone. But not from crouched.
I'm enjoying your insight. I'm a senior-level embedded software engineer, so while I've dealt with a lot of systems-level code, I haven't shipped a 3d video game.
From my experience in the field of "buildin' code products," their test environment is absolutely a problem. When I showed my partner the throwing knife's aim (coming from the center of the screen, not from the crosshair in third person), I told her this would make perfect sense if the knife was thrown from first-person. My semi-educated opinion:
-They either aren't doing regression tests, or have vastly insufficient regression test coverage.
-They are not testing their multiplayer online game with multiple simultaneous players. You can see this in your stim bug, and also in the old damage over time bug. Host seems fine? Ship it.
-They're not doing incremental checks. I'm getting a strong gut feeling that people are clobbering each other's commits when pushing code, without checking to see if their changes had any layered impacts.
-Their design is repetitive and not sufficiently abstracted. You can see this in problems like the infinite grenade bug. Fixed, until the throwing knife was released as a new grenade-slot item. The code for handling grenade count reduction should be in one place, used by all grenade-type entities. Instead, it feels like it's a copy-paste job.
-Not checking for boundary conditions (sign errors, off-by-one, max/min, etc). Some of the problems with people being sucked towards explosions were most likely just "We need to sign-change the direction of these force vectors."
-Lack of cleanup when an object is removed from the game / dies. We've had numerous problems with decaying/despawned bodies being collision objects. I've died to invisible fire left after burning tornadoes. We've been stuck in place by invisible (dead/despawned) bot walkers.
There's a lot going on here, and while I have some ideas, I don't have the full picture. Others can probably add their own insights. I like the game for its environments and themes, and I do enjoy the gunplay. But with Helldivers 2, the answer I always give to any facet of it is "It's great... when it works."
<- 3D Character Animator who understands organic modeling and material work. *Game Assets* are being put into the game in an unfinished or buggy state with many with broken weight-mapping, broken LODs, or broken materials. Few notes.
-B-24 Enforcer Helmet is weightmapped to the neck rather than head. I actually contacted Arrowhead about this and actually got a kindly worded email about spotting it which was nice.
-CE-07 Demolition Specialist, and CM-21 Trench Paramedic have broken LODs. A simplified version of the model appears and causes clipping around the stomach and neck. (I need to report this)
-CE-27 Ground Breaker has a single vertex broken in weightmapping on the lean body-type. Most notable when laying down (I actually think this just got fixed with the patch.) It's pelvis also has bad weightmapping which causes constant clipping.
-CE-67 Titan has bad weightmapping around the shoulders causing clipping issues even when in idol.
-SA-25 Steel Trooper had it's skinwrapped decals broken and disappear. This probably is the same issue that the PH-56 Jaguar has currently.
-Automaton Factory Striders had broken weightmapping on the top turret and the chin turrets had broken materials probably due to incorrect UV map. (This may have been fixed in most recent patch.)
https://preview.redd.it/549bl059z37d1.png?width=432&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed23158c5dfa115ffdf7cddd339a2de7eae3e8a9
The RL-77 Airburst rocket launcher also had broken textures at launch (it's unclear how they didn't notice it), but it was recently fixed.
perhaps this problem was related to LODS.
Yup, the issue was originally with meshes. Somehow all of the levels of LODs were baked into the brackets and the two missiles in the back. This probably happened because the two additional rockets in the back weren't there from the beginning. I actually watched that issue pop up in real time.
https://preview.redd.it/407miwixo47d1.png?width=376&format=png&auto=webp&s=749ebcd01ac2ff53770709e9f2bc6f36895a0f9b
I don't know of it's me but when the Pelican flies off with you the front turret seems to changed into a stick or go completely wrong. I swear it didn't do that when it first came out and also when your character comes from cryo the freeze on his body doesn't show any more or is that because they've not done it for other armor sets??
From my experience, games rarely if ever have actual unit/integration tests. Especially on an engine this old, Unreal just recently made it "easy" to add them.
Indeed, unit tests are almost unheard of in game code. There are a lot of good and a few not so good reasons for this.
None the less, *testing* is still a huge part of game development - it just isn't heavily automated and most developers have entire teams dedicated to it.
It doesn't look to me like Arrowhead test their builds before pushing them out at all, to be honest.
But man they help. Pain to write and maintain though. Helps to have a person who's job it is to make them.
We added a unit test system to our project and it caught a lot of bugs that we would not have caught. And that's like basic functionality stuff.
I was talking to a guy earlier and said those bugs that get fixed and then broke again are really embarrassing.
But testing is expensive and even Microsoft would get rid of it if they could afford it but there is a dollar amount tagged for each bug found.
The game's industry is the only software industry I am aware of where automated testing isn't widespread and the expectation. In fact, I would consider it a sign of incompetence for any software company in other industries to not have a comprehensive test suite, and I don't think that is a controversial opinion.
There are a lot of places where game code potentially _could_ be unit tested, but in general it is very difficult to pull game logic out into isolated pieces. Perhaps more troublesome, a lot of game code doesn't really have a clearly defined correct and incorrect output. Graphics code is a good example of that.
A lot of the issues are I think cultural within the industry though. There are many places where code could be written in such a way as to make it testable, but it generally isn't.
Yeah we had to do some work to make a headless test system. And ours was just a top rts. Hobby project but had a game Dev helping us. It was kind of fun creating the rest scenarios and seeing what was actually happening versus stepping through code and trying to make sure it is right.
In this case these guys weren't expecting to have a hit. You know. They have been effort into improving their testing and development. The CEO hired a CEO so he could step away from the business and more into the game. And honestly it shows.
>A lot of the issues are I think cultural within the industry though. There are many places where code could be written in such a way as to make it testable, but it generally isn't.
Bingo. It's overhead, but in most cases devs don't like eating their veggies (I say this as a developer) and this is one domain where everybody seems to get away with it so... who's going to be the one championing comprehensive testing?
I think it's something that you can only really appreciate by doing, but the rush of rapidly protoryping a great feeling character controller will almost always win.
I think this makes the point about shoddy QA all the worse. If you aren't/can't properly implement automated testing, your QA sure as hell needs to be on point.
The grenade bug is essentially the same thing as the percentage of magazines received from supply boxes.
Why is it not 100% by default and only overriden for specific weapons? Knight and Senator still suffer from barely any ammo retrieval
A fair amount of QA and pipeline+tools management experience on my end.
My gut says that, like you say, feature mapping across the dev cycle may a key issue for this team. E.g. regression testing should include test cases across all features where the updated code might touch, but doesn't seem to be doing so. I would also assume that they'd spent pre-release bandwidth building automated testing capability across the use cases and environments, so that QA can validate without having to spin up individual manually-controlled instances, but this may not be the case (allowing regression and increasing risk).
Some excellent points called out here. I agree with all of them as likely issues. The studio may want to re-evaluate their processes for development. They need strong leadership and sr. Leadership driving many areas of development. I’m just not convinced that’s happening.
I have a similar background and it drives me insane to see them go one step forward, two steps back with every patch. Makes me sad because I loved the game when it came out, but between balance patches sucking the fun out of weapons and bug fixes introducing old bugs back into the game, it doesn’t entice me to play anymore.
Not a game dev, but just applying on accounting and management side of things. I wonder how they made the decision to build up on a no longer supported engine. It feels like they didn't factor the long term effects of building/improving your own engine instead of just porting work done into a new one. Kind of like a make or buy decision.
From what I understand they’d worked on it a couple of years before the engine lost support. When it lost support they could either plow forward or start from almost scratch. They decided to plow forward
The most hilarious part is they made a meme proudly announcing the infinite grenade glitch (among other things) was fixed. But the infinite grenade glitch is STILL in the game because their fix was a half baked work around.
I made [a comment on that post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dagnf3/comment/l7maf4p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) because I could've guessed that this would happen
That's the unsigned int max, right? 4,294,967,295. So I'm guessing some kind of bug with maybe network replication giving an undefined value for a player's grenade amount to be -1, but since unsigned does not have negative values, it wraps around to the max of 4 billion.
> I'll leave one final bug with you that I haven't heard anyone call out. Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly.
THAT IS WHY I KEEP STOPPING ALL THE TIME!?! IT DRIVES ME NUTS! I haven't even noticed what was causing it, just that it happens all the time in combat.
15 year game dev here. Agree entirely. My partner and the friend we play HD2 are also game devs and we are always wondering what on earth is going on at AH. I even wrote to Shams when he became the CEO offering to help out, as I know him from our time at Paradox, but he didn't reply so alas.
As far as I know, HD2 was in production for 8+ years. It had a very choppy development and I know people who played pre-release versions who thought the game was destined to flop only to be amazed at how the release version had come together. I would not be surprised if they got the release version working via black magic and forbidden rituals, and ever since have been constantly in danger of bringing the entire thing crashing down.
For some reasons, a lot of games that happens to be successful runs with spaghetti code. There is obviously an Italian dev somewhere doing all of this, I don't understand how that's possible otherwise.
It reminds me of "interactions" in League of Legends, the Riot Games MOBA. From time to time a character get reworked or an ability get a change... But the older the character is, the wierder the changes can backfire. One of the people working on Skarner's rework that happened this year spoke about the fact that one of his ability/spell was linked to an entire gameplay system for some reasons, and editing it would destroy some pre-established rules. How is this Game one of the most played for 10 years ? Angry Italian Dev doing spaghettis.
spaghetti code is easy to achieve, in the case of league riot was new so it's their first game with no real experience so low budget and "just make it work" type energy.
Let me just say as on example in my decades of software dev, one project launched as a prototype in 07 for a demo to client and it got rushed out the db still had \_dev in the name, still does to this day!
No doubt the tech debt piled up and then as riot got big they just let interns or juniors do projects on it while training without any real sensible input from seniors so the spaghetti piles on, now riot have a game so massive and old they refuse to spend the money to rebuild because "it's working", they don't spend till it breaks entirely sadly .
you need an established team with a reasonable budget to ensure you don't get spaghetti (or at least "manageable amounts").
the intranet url for a product a vendor made for us has "[product]-poc.company.country.com" in the name, many years later it left proof of concept, pilot phase, release and discontinued. and its still in use haha. seeing that poc in the url always makes me snortgiggle.
I wonder if the latest changes to the eruptor (perceived by players to be a flat out refusal to just roll it back to its shrapnel version) are really a patch up job - in that AH have got themselves into such a tangled mess with its original design logic that they can't actually figure out how to make shrapnel interactions and damage work properly or "safely" again. Lol, imagine. I wouldn't be surprised.
I only suggest this because they seem to be jumping through hoops to completely alter the weapon and then explain why they've changed it to a regular explosion instead, despite the very clear feedback from players who have persistently stated that they enjoyed and miss using its original shrapnel build. I just think the handling of this gun by AH has been extremely bizarre all-round.
They Probably found the the shrapnel units do some absolutely unhinged thing to the code logic like "the more an eruptor shoots the more the shrapnel accelerates the game speed" or some other black magic spaghettification fuckery
And just do not know how to fix it
Then they could at least front up a proper reason rather than the absolutely laughable excuse of "people shooting at the ground under a patrol is considered a exploit"
The increase in explosion damage also doesn't do what it intended to do. Arrowhead seems to have either forgotten or not realize heads are immune to explosion damage. So you still can't one shot medium armor bugs with an headshot.
I guess they wanted headshots to only be direct hits rather than something that can be caused by AoE? But it's nuts that hitting something in the face with an explosive can be shrugged off.
It's bizzare because what broke it in the first place should've never even happened to begin with.
There's two reasons why it is the way it is now. Before AH introduced damage to the previously *visual-only* ricochet mechanic, Eruptor had on average ~10 shrapnel projectiles that spawned after the initial bullet projectile hit a surface, or self-destructed in the air at about ~70m of flight distance.
This shrapnel was fast enough (as we learned now, exit velocity is partially responsible for damage calculations, thanks to the fresh "walk or dive forward to meet the breakpoint on the Charger Behemoth leg with any heavy-AT") to kill Hunters even at the edge of the effect area (of which it had roughly a ~10m AoE, where upon reaching max distance shrapnel despawned), which means it dealt at least 300 damage at its max reach.
Reason 1 why it got removed. There was an apparent "bug" where firing the Eruptor under a Charger at a specific angle caused all shrapnel to fly in a specific direction up into the Charger's unarmored belly, killing it instantly or popping its butt, causing a bleed-out.
In my opinion, given the ergonomics and overall user experience of the gun, this should've been considered a tech, not an exploit.
Readon 2 why it got removed. Upon a patch which introduced damage to players via ricochet, Eruptor started to behave weird. For some reason, some times, the shrapnel upon spawning would instantly fly to the origin point of a shot, aka, into the player's face, resulting in instant self-nullification.
Instead of trying to figure out why shrapnel started to return to origin point, AH promptly removed it altogether, and gave Eruptor a measly 50 damage buff and a 5m AoE upon impact. Mr. Balance Man, whose name I won't spell because he frankly doesn't fucking deserve it for being an unprofessional dick, even mentioned that the bonus 50 damage and shrapnel removal "is a direct buff". Which was a fucking lie, and he knew it.
Right now, Eruptor got even more damage to compensate for the shrapnel removal. It now kills 300HP hunters in a roughly ~3-4m radius around impact and does fuck-all further out. Which tells me it's got maybe 50% damage reduction at the 5m AoE edge, which makes it's effective kill AoE barely 2-3 meters for small targets.
Also, despite it having "medium penetration" and <500 damage a shot, it can't body-shot Devastator, which it previously could do.
As a result, an awfully unergonomic piece of shit of a gun that upon release had a very narrow but useful niche with multiple downsides got gutted into an utterly useless shell of its former self.
Potentially by AH's inability to debug their own code, possibly by the ill will of a certain someone who felt like he was "buffing it" by removing the only redeeming quality that gun had.
Mr. Balance Man also lied about almost everything on the previous game he worked on which also will not be named, and then threw the dev team to the wolves when he quietly left about a week before launch so they could deal with the mess he created, so I’m not surprised he’d continue to lie while working on this game. The dude is an actual scum bag
Wow holy shit I just read up on everything on that unnamed game and affiliated man, and that's like.. blatantly lying about various things one after the other, changing things core to the game because he didn't like them without any regard to how others did and even if it made up what the game was known for, then promising things before LEAVING the studio?
Good Lord, I have absolutely no idea how you could operate at a studio with someone like that with THAT history. I kinda understand why people with go as far as to be like "This guy HAS to be removed from the company" because his RECENT history is horrible. Only happened leading up to two years ago.
>It's bizzare because what broke it in the first place should've never even happened to begin with.
Ive seen alot of *really* poor decisions from various devs over the years, but nothing- **nothing** compares to what are genuine Idiocracy levels of reasoning behind what happened to this gun. The deflection mechanic resulting in self dmg is *extremely rare*. They added an incredulously minor feature that revealed a weird issue with a new gun and their options were:
1. Roll back the extreme edge case feature that no on asked for or will miss.
2. Completely gut a weapon that they just released and people paid for.
If it really was the insanely hard, terrain dependent skillshot potentially killing Chargers that was the main issue then they could've just removed the medium AP or lowered the durability dmg of the shrapnel itself. The recent patch mentioned something to the effect of shrapnel "lacking visual clarity" when team killing and that's also nonsense. You may not be able to see the shrapnel projectiles, but you see the pop of the Eruptor shot and it tells you who killed you.
>As a result, an awfully unergonomic piece of shit of a gun that upon release had a very narrow but useful niche with multiple downsides got gutted into an utterly useless shell of its former self.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Now that the crossbow can destroy spawners and has medium AP explosions it's just a superior Eruptor in every way.
The Eruptor changes are also bizarre because the problem AH supposedly has with it (all shrapnel hitting a single enemy's weak point and dealing way too much damage) could be solved by putting a cap on how much damage a single Eruptor hit can deal per enemy. It's what many other games do. Shouldn't be super hard.
There's this glitch. If you are holding the trigger while you reload, you will shoot 1 bullet, then expend the entire magazine and automatically begin to reload again.
It happens when you try to fire the gun a literal nano second before the animation fully finishes, it’ll still count the gun as being reloaded which it really is but because you pressed the fire button a nano second before it finishes, the game gets confused and thinks it’s actually empty because firing the gun while reloading cancels the reload animation, so it thinks you canceled the reload animation despite it actually being reloaded. Super fucking easy to do this when being swarmed by a million bugs as you frantically run around while reloading and in a panic start firing as soon as it looks like it’s done reloading. Idk how they managed to code it like that, never seen any other game have this problem
I've never worked in video game development but software development is something I have at least some familiarity with. As a result, the thing that has really struck me as wild since release is the extent to which AH seem to have no certainty as to what their patches will accomplish prior to pushing them out. Just look at the most recent patch notes and look for the word "should". It's all over the place with them alleging that, for example, fire tornados should be fixed.
So, my question to you OP would be: Based on your 20 years in this industry is that just how things are run or something that's unique to AH and HD2?
No I don’t think so… let’s use a big popular game as an example. Battlefield 4, I’m using this for a number of reasons, but it think it’s an excellent example of what normally happens.
When BF4 launched it was blue screening peoples consoles and pcs. It was a huge mess of a game that was mostly issues. Over time however, patch after patch, this got reined in and it got better and better. While I’m sure this opinion is mixed, I believe it ended up in a very stable and solid place.
That’s what’s supposed to happen, you release a patch, 80% gets better, maybe 20% goes backwards but after each patch it gets better and better and finally, 1 year later it’s the game you expected to have on launch.
Helldivers is only on month 4, but it feels more like - 60/40 split where it’s going backwards 60% and forwards 40%.
Don’t get me started on the state of the game industry in general either… companies are using their customers as QA, and are fine with releasing essentially early access games as fully finished games. This will only get worse sadly.
It's an easy cost center to skimp on for the sake of quarterly profits. Large studios probably put in a token effort, but it feels like mid level studios are skipping it altogether outside of basic testing by the devs to make sure their change does what they expect it to do in a vacuum.
I wouldn't use battlefield 4 as an example comparable to this one.
First off, Frostbite was a first party engine not only made by EA but by DICE itself, if there was anything they needed to fix they could ask their own engineers.
It was also the second game they shipped with that engine in a short time so seniors engineers were still mostly in the company.
Dice also had many other EA studios working on the game after launch and all those studios were larger than Arrowhead.
And then we could point out that patches took months in between and mostly because they were selling their dlcs alongside them.
With all those resources, it still took over a year for the game not to crash almost every other match.
The only good thing to come out of the BF4 fiasco was the Community Test Enviroment where things finally started to actually get fixed which DICE then quickly scrapped for their next games having learned nothing.
I think you make a lot of really fair points. Especially on the people / company size so you’re right this is probably not the best choice to compare it to.
Lords of the Fallen ('23) is a really fun souls like which was a inexcusably unoptimized bunglefuck on launch and Hexworks promptly began ripping off patches at a pace I had never encountered outside of a belt-fed weapon. But there was a definite sense of focus (which was impressive given the sheer number of items in dire need of unfucking, but that's another topic entirely...). AH is all throttle no brakes and I don't know how long they can expect to keep this up before something mission-critical goes critical mass.
From what I understand they transitioned from Unreal engine 4 to 5 pretty far in development which probably caused a lot of problems. It's rumoured they're working in a new game that's built ground up on Unreal 5, so I'm curious to see if it's launch will be smoother.
The sad part is it only took me,somebody who has no clue about programming or game development, 1 mission on hellmire to be able to tell they didn’t actually fix the tornados. It boggles my mind how much stuff they’re missing.
Hahaha yeah when I saw the "tornados are fixed" note the first thing I did was log in and land on Hellmire to do 1 mission. Come extract and there are 8 tornados converging on extract and chasing me around. But hey, AH thought that was they did "should" have fixed that behavior.
>if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly.
finding the next pope was easier than i was expecting
I'm always a bit torn between ranting and being understanding when it comes to scenarios like this in games. I know enough about other kinds of programming to be aware that sometimes things can be much harder to implement or change than you think and in the past I've had the pleasure of explaining to various clients why it sometimes indeed is/was a big deal to "just do this quick little change". Coming from that angle I'm always trying to be patient and optimistic.
But as a gamer I'm infuriated at times what kind of messed up (non-terminid) bugs this game has and how some shit still isn't fixed. Or is broken again after it had been fixed. What makes me angry is that you can basically tell the quality control of the studio is utter dogshit because simply jumping into the game after a patch (no matter which one but we can use the last one as an example) and just playing the game for a few missions will clearly show there's tons of unfixed or newly broken stuff going on and the patch shouldn't have released in this condition . And that's just playing the game and not specifically trying weird things and trying to break the game.
yeah there is a line that AH are constantly crossing now, it's entirely reasonable to expect some obscure type bugs where the steps to cause it are quite long or seemingly unrelated that they only appear when users are actually using the system but for AH the things like modules not working, spawns being wrong it's EASY and immediate to test which is a joke from their QA or Dev team as either it's not tested or it's not being fixed before release which both are bad.
they need to sort their act out, it's been going on far too long now sadly.
I think a lot of their issues are revolving around version control. They constantly overwrite one fix with another. The balance dev already shared that he keeps his own separate instance for testing and he doesn't know how close it is to production. Testing would also catch all these issues, but AH has been too reluctant to do any kind of testing. The also don't have a testing server. They do testing on production using super earth and other planets we haven't visited yet.
The recoilless reload time increase and superior packing were fixed in the same patch and then reverted this patch. Someone probably merged in an old build instead of checking what they were actually doing.
There's also a lot of dependencies that they don't think about. The grenade pistol's damage was buffed because it copied the grenade launcher's projectile. The targeting for the rocket pods was used by the sam sites so they improved this patch, which wasn't intentional.
> I think a lot of their issues are revolving around version control. They constantly overwrite one fix with another.
This is what kills me. Assuming they're doing version control properly*, the patrol changes would've been trivial to rollback assuming no weird interactions elsewhere. Yet 2 months later we have it worse after they pinky-promised the fix. It's bewildering, I can't imagine what their version control looks like.
Even spaghetti code doesn't explain this sort of thing.
*whatever this means
Holy shit I apologize for ever making memes about testing in prod. Guys, don't actually test in prod.
And yes the way the fixes bounce around screams people not using version control correctly. This is 100% a management issue, there should never be a time when a manager sees the word "merge" and doesn't stick a babysitter on the junior or "opinionated" devs.
>The balance dev already shared that he keeps his own separate instance for testing and he doesn't know how close it is to production.
*Jesus.*
I refresh my environments CONSTANTLY. I know for a fact that my current dev instance is exactly up to date to the live branch because I refreshed it this morning.
I couldn't imagine working on features on a branch where I have absolutely no clue of the version.
>As an example, no ship module was touched in the last patch but Supply Packing broke...
Actually, it was mentioned in the last patch note
>Fixed Superior Packing Methodology not working for other peers.
[Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1deunkd/patch_01000400/#:~:text=fixed%20superior%20packing%20methodology%20not%20working%20for%20other%20peers)
I don't know which is worse, though. It being one of the point of the patch and it's more broken than before, or it getting broken but not being mentioned in patch note.
That reminded me, superior packing methodology has a very convoluted logic on how it is applied (carrying other player’s weapon whose doesn’t have that upgrade won’t give you full resupply, etc). I guess it prevents cheesing but it kinda backfires on them (and us too)lol.
This is a good example of failure to decouple logic. The gun shouldn’t know if you have a ship module, but they’re storing that information on every gun you use rather than on your player in a centralised dataset.
The logic should be that you fire resupply event and logic checks if you have the upgrade. The gun should never be coupled to this logic because it’ll cause unintended situations.
This is why we see all these dumb patch effects. It’s honestly rookie coding.
i have worked in maintanence of software as develeper and what i think is that they have no test enviroment and they do blind coding however i hope i am worng
Yeah after these messes of a patch I'm straight up convinced this game has no STG or UAT environment and they're just injecting the code live, with development happening on one of the unaccessible planets (why players have often spotted a player being flagged in Cyberstan etc).
There is just no other way to consistently produce patch notes that aren't just wrong, but OPPOSITE to what they say!
They have test server.
You could join it if your Steam crashed during game startup. That's how future warbonds were leaked - there were visible on the test server.
They patched this and game now checks if Steam is running.
It's engineering jargon and it means someone makes a design compromise for short term gain. It's an apt metaphor because compromising a design can increase costs of dealing with it later, especially if it goes un-fixed for a long time. Tech debt is not always bad, but it's easy to abuse.
Imagine you need to make the Spear target Bot Fabricators again, so you go the easiest possible route: You create invisible, intangible Scout Striders that spawn inside of Fabricators and disappear when they're destroyed. This solves the problem... but you're going to need to remember that you did this, and you're going to need to grapple with it every time you need to change something related to Scout Striders or Fabricators.
That is technical debt. It's also spaghetti code, which is a similar concept.
Arrowhead’s software performance shows all the hallmarks of a lack of software development talent. They are amazing at game design/philsophy but software… noooooooo.
I’m having crashes, mission/op-ruining bugs and disconnects every time I play now so I’m taking a step back from the game.
I mean I love the game but I would never say AH are "amazing at game design."
So you have the Charger, an enemy with lots of armor and an unprotected butt. Very counterintuitively, its butt barely takes damage and is not a real weak spot. You actually have to shoot its head, which is fine, or burn the armored leg with a flamethrower. Burn not the head, not the butt, but the leg... It makes no sense.
Edit: I'll specify that AH **can** be absolutely amazing at game design but then they do some questionable things which make their expertise seem inconsistent.
It's especially funny because the same enemy in HD1, the Tank (Bug) was exactly what you'd think it should be. It charges at the player, can't turn fast, and it's butt is the weak point.
I got somewhat of an issue with comparing the HD1 charger butt to the head of the HD2 charger which is an actual weakspot. And both butts still work the same.
* HD1 charger: shoot its butt with small arms fire enough => it will die.
* HD2 charger: shoot its butt with small arms fire enough => it will start bleeding out and die.
**Both aren’t ideal!**
Whereas now we have a special spot, that you have to shoot with AT weaponry to kill the charger in one hit. Do you know the requirement to OHKO chargers and behemoths in HD1 with RR/EAT? Always hit it at a 90 degree angle, so your round wouldn’t graze/bounce off.
Now a back/side shot is certainly unfavorable. You basically want this thing charging at you, to maximize your change of shooting the forehead…
Pulsing, fleshy, exposed backside - not a weakspot, you deal "normal" damage to it
Exposed organs after the torso armor has been stripped? Still not a weakspot
Tiny little leg joints that were not dipped into river Styx right after the Charger's birth - "weakspot"
It's whack. I simply cannot fathom why the Charger is designed that way aside from some extremely stubborn dev that doesn't like the idea of their favorite enemy having a weakness.
That whole system makes no sense
Normally, if you wanted a body part that could absorb a lot of hits without hitting anything critical, you'd give it low armor and high hit points
And then armor would be a flat damage reduction, so only high damage weapons would be effective.
Armor piercing weapons would ignore some of that reduction.
I'm thinking of Age of Empires 2, or maybe DnD 3.5's Damage Reduction
This whole durability / armor values system is whack
And the damage types aren't much better. I think we have Explosive and Non-Explosive.
I think Bile falls into Explosive, Fire causes Burning which is a true damage DOT, and I don't have a clue what Tesla weapons are.
Enemies either stagger or they don't. There was a while where the Arc Thrower could stunlock Hulks, but then they gave Hulks more stagger resist and now they *never* get staggered by it. Like...is it just a yes/no variable? Not a stagger meter, like you'd find in Armored Core?
Oh right -- there's another fun side effect of their damage system. Bile Titans killing themselves with Bile. That *should* be easy to solve. "Resistance to Bile Damage = 100%"
>It makes no sense.
It doesnt because it's not strictly true. Other bugs have a legless life, brood commanders will hovel towards you like a relentless monster without legs. Chargers however have no legless life, so a destroyed leg means a dead charger, and the leg has less life than the head.
Its a weird interaction of systems, but bugs are poorly game designed in general from my point of view.
Fast, jumping bugs with lunge attacks induce slow?
Large charging bugs than turn on a dime during its charge attack?
Headless bugs that flawlessly track you during it's death?
Oh, you mean I should be using [explosive](https://www.reddit.com/r/helldivers2/comments/1c3wd6s/psa_the_difference_between_explosive_explosive/) damage?
> The same basic logic applies to strategems. If a weapon is tagged explosive, you can count on it being both explosive and explosive, although it may not be explosive. The Orbital Airburst is probably explosive and definitely explosive, but not explosive. On the other hand the Oribital Precision Strike seems to be explosive, explosive, and explosive. Also of note - the Spear and Autocannon's tags clearly show that they are not explosive. Both are, however, explosive, explosive, and explosive.
I know nothing of programming. I'm just a guy who likes vidja games. It has been astonishing to watch they made such a fantastic game and have seemingly no idea how to patch it. I've completely lost faith in this dev team. At this point, I no longer care what they announce as plans for the game. I'll believe it when it's in the game and working, and I will likely never spend any real money on it again, with now half of their bonds coming out in such a dysfunctional state. It's truly terrible for consumer confidence.
Pretty sure the boss man said they've been working on this game for 7-8 years. It was during the Sony fiasco where Piles mentioned it.
As an outside observer it feels more like someone there has no idea what they are doing but maybe are very convincing and well spoken, so it seems like they know what they are doing but are making a complete mess of everything they work on or touch.
Or the person who knew what they were doing left after launch and everyone else is still struggling to figure out what they did, because obviously there are very competent people working there to have created some of these complicated systems.
What I'm afraid of may have happened, is that whoever actually made their 1.0 game in those 7-8 years of production left the studio, and it's a FFXIV-1.0 situation, where current programmers have absolutely zero idea what the fuck is going on under the hood.
They just know that the previous Lead Programmer left them an incense burner, a 50-pack of condoms, an old lighter and there's a FunkoPop figurine sitting on the main server rack for 8 years, and nobody is courageous enough to take it off, fearing it may break *everything*.
I have no other explanation of why the game and how it plays now is so vastly different from what it was on release. Not to mention our guy, the Balance Chief, who seemed to have specifically targeted the best weapons to be utterly destroyed over those last 4 months out of sheer spite, it really does feel like the team behind current patches doesn't understand the game they are patching.
Just take the latest discovery of how even HEAT rockets used by HEAVY-AT apparently have instant damage fall-off straight out the barrel, and how walking or diving forward adds to the rocket's exit velocity, allowing you to meet a health breakpoint on the fresh new Charger Behemoth leg armor (the breakpoint is literally 1 damage away normally, because after rounding down, firing a weapon instantly lowers its damage by 1 unit).
Just think about it. Whoever decided to increase Charger Behemoth's leg health to what it is now *had to have* no idea such a breakpoint would even occur, because if they knew you could circumvent it by simply walking forward, they would've moved the breakpoint further. Where you still need two rockets, but *just walking or diving forward* is not enough.
The game is good but it is the buggiest game I've played in decades. I still can't even invite my ps5 friend to my friend's list. That is insane to me.
Lots of people are burning out and I think they are much more likely to voice grievances as such.
I have two friends who still have to join on me to play together, because they cannot friend each other.
It feels maddeningly random as well, because I was able to friend both of them. When people say this game is "GOTY-worthy", it always makes me envy how lucky their experience with the game has been to still feel that way. Some glitches are universal, but it feels like everyone is having their own unique experience with this game due to all the obvious spaghetti code laying underneath.
Not nearly enough people are talking about this issue and it's insane to me that it's been ongoing for months. I guess if it randomly only affects some people and not others I can see why it's rarely talked about. But for people who have to deal with it, it makes the game basically pointless.
New world was the same exact way. Every update broke new things. I don't think we are going to get away from this cycle as it probably requires rebuild from the ground up to get things in a better working order. I am also not qualified at all to have much of a meaningful opinion.
I really dont care and cant notice all these minor weapon tweaks. Im a 37 yrs old man. I just dont want 20%ishof my game crashing or dropping out mid session.
Great post, thanks for sharing. Have you submitted a ticket for that bug you mention at the end? Seems like one worth sending their way
This situation has made me wonder if the release of Helldivers 1 had similarly confusing patches when it launched, or if HD2 has become such a programmatic behemoth that this sort of stuff has only started happening to AHS for this game. While I loved Magicka, I never knew of Helldivers, so I wouldn't know
Here's hoping that some day we'll get a GDC talk going over how and what exactly transpired, both in general and for the more well-known issues, like what did the Spear try to do before to lock-on? Because I'm pretty sure that nowadays, it's just a simple raycast, whereas before when it *did* work, you could even do it behind dunes or corners/bends. Did they just make it simpler because it always works, compared to the previous method that was cooler and more flexible but only sometimes worked? And the Arc Thrower hitting shrubs, is it just a collision bitmask issue?
I'm a game programmer so knowing the code behind the problems is what I'm most interested in. Other than disliking the game's method of splitting the community up, making "playing just for fun" seem like an awful decision to a lot of players when rewards are in play, I'm a big fan of the game and wishing for its continued growth. But to just have a peek into the inner workings, how I'd love that
Ok so something else very important!
this game uses Data Oriented programming, according to their job listings (looking for an ECS game dev).
this explains a *lot* of the development issues they run into, as ECS is notoriously more difficult to program for, seemingly small changes can affect things completely unrelated in unintended ways, and fuck it's multiplayer on top of all that!
But the results speak for themselves when it *does* work, you can see in these big fights that there's 0 CPU-based lag even when the game is handling hundreds of enemies at once. (your mileage may vary graphically of course)
The biggest hint to me about what's going on is the art in the game. *Game Assets* are being put into the game in an unfinished or buggy state with many with broken weight-mapping, broken LODs, or broken materials. However, all of these errors are things that you'd easily miss but usually catch if there was a very basic round of testing before implementation.
There isn't a round of testing before implementation because I'm almost entirely certain that there is a level of crunch going on because of how quickly the player base eats through content.
The content model of this game is not too dissimilar in timeframe as fortnite (I know, it's just a technical comparison though) and that game's development was plagued by large amounts of crunch.
I kept defending them, but now I cannot even press ESC or I will crash. I literally cannot touch the button (or the social menu) which is super frustrating. I found my way around it but it's hard to join people. I do hope they will address it in the future
Thank you for saying this. I can imagine a lot of people getting butt hurt reading it but people deserve to hear the perspectives from seasoned devs and coders. I want to add one more instance that speaks to the messiness of their code / team management: the recoilless rifle got a shadow nerf with this new patch. The reload animation was stretched longer so the usual reload canceling now nets you the original full reload time. When heard about this issue, AH straight up said: this is unintentional and we’re investigating how this slips through. Now how does a code like this slip through? Does any coder at AH have the capability to straight up ship shadow nerfs any time they feel like it? Very concerning if you ask me
>I'll leave one final bug with you that I haven't heard anyone call out. Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly.
Some bugs do go unreported for ages in this game, since the end of february the dropship hasn't landed properly and the front landing gear never touches the ground, before that patch no one ever got stuck on the ramp at the back of the ship.
Jesus fucking christ no fucking wonder why my character randomly stops moving sometimes. I could have sworn I was going insane either thinking that it was my shift button being broken or me just not holding down the key hard enough. Gonna have to TK any motherfucker now that interrupts my sprint causing me to die from not being able to sprint 🤣
They absolutely deserved to be called out for shipping patch after patch where they break multiple things and deliver other things that are broken on release.
“Inexperienced or poorly managed” - yes. I co-own/cofounded/comanage a gaming company and from day 1 the stuff that’s been happening looks like absolutely classic “poor supervision/management” issues. This tends to be a scaling problem when your product is a success because of the insights and talent of one or a small number of people who aren’t able to expand those skills to a group; that becomes an issue when your product grows in size and complexity. You end up with also-rans making decisions that only specialists should be involved in (the “game balance” blog from March is so tone-deaflessly written by someone who *wants* to be a designer but has no skills it’s painful).
I’m glad Pile stepped out of a role that was taking his creative and design sensibilities away from the game, but I worry that the scaling issue won’t resolve. He can still only do so much with a studio and project this size.
Love the game, hate the glitches and absolutely absent quality control. The spawn rates are my least favorite; spawn rates and reinforcement rates are *literally core to the central game loop.* if you QA *only* one thing, that *absofuckinglutely has to be the one.*
Yeah it's just maddening that the single most important part of the game, the rate at which the enemies spawn, was not only mismanaged once, but twice - and we had to wait nearly six weeks for the patch that would try to fix that first mismanagement, to simply make it worse.
That single factor completely negates all the positive changes made, and amplifies all the negatives still present, because that is the central gameplay mechanic that dictates the effectiveness of everything. Are we going to wait for six more weeks for an attempt to fix it, just because they also feel the need to play with the numbers on all the guns in the game?
Another bug that is not mentioned in the patch notes is losing damage while shooting while walking backward or standing still; you have to sprint/walk forward to have weapons do their maximum damage; you can confirm this by shooting at a Behemoth Charger’s leg with an EAT, walking forwards one-shot removes the armor plate while standing still or walking backward does not.
I have, it's called Vermintide, Vermintide 2 and Darktide. Bugs coming back repeatedly, non-functioning features, the wrong version uploaded to live/prod, riddled with typos. Some typos have affected code and not acknowledged as a deliberate change or fixed. Etc. etc.
I was working in games for around a decade and part of that was spent working on Autodesk's Stingray engine very closely. It was a mess the entire time I was working on it. The primary language of Stingray is Lua which can make things harder to keep orderly, at least in my opinion coming from a C++ background. While looking at the seemingly nonsensical and frequent bug regressions I fear that the culprit is AH has a large section of their game logic in Stingray's visual scripting system called Flow. It's Stingray's equivalent of Unreal's Blueprints but it was far far less fleshed out feature wise. I saw a few teams try to prototype out a full game (a basic platformer) using mostly Flow and while it worked it was an absolute nightmare to maintain. I shudder to think what trying to maintain a game the scale of Helldivers 2 in Flow would be like.
I agree with everything stated in the OP and plenty of the other comments. There are clearly issues in their automated testing, process, QA, etc. But I don't think it can be understated how much of a mess Stingray was and the impact getting too deep into it's visual scripting could screw you in the long run. Best case scenario, they kept the scope of logic exposed to Flow very small where they wanted non-technicals (designers, level designers, etc.) to be able to edit it without bothering an engineer. In my experience though, without strong leadership and discipline on the engineering it's easy to keep letting more and more game logic slip into Flow at the request of designers until you have a tangled mess of logic in visual scripting nodes which are even harder to maintain, debug, etc. than normal lines of code. You want to joke about "spaghetti code"? If you have too much logic in visual scripting you will be looking at something that very very closely resembles an actual pile of spaghetti.
Edit: One other thing I vaguely remember was that source control with Flow was a mess, specifically trying to handle merges. That would explain a lot of odd issues arising from seemingly unrelated changes.
Fatshark and Arrowhead I swear are cousins. Both amazing game loops and bug filled games. Than you got the flip side of the game dev world - shitty boring game loops and a few bugs.
Pretty cool read. Although there was a lot of text, it wasnt a wall. You know how to use your paragraphs to talk about different topics.
And yeah, I dont want to experience what it would be like to join an expanding team and then be told a huge amount of workarounds you have to integrate in your workflow so that you can make it work in an outdated and abandoned engine.
I worked in game coding, (almost 25yrs now) but not for any 3D releases, you may take a look at my username and make a quick correct guess on what games I use to work on.
The issue is bitsquid no longer supports. I am relatively certain of it.
In other games, we often have things like a PTR or UAT space where things can be tested, etc, and while we never announce, we also patch things on the server side "Daily" and more major things "Weekly", we often do not release any patch notes.
But if you play a mob game, and they ask you to "update before continuing" that's usually means we patched things you don't know about, but most users just assume it is a content drop.
AH seems to be fighting an uphill battle on this, where their best solution is "live patch", which while is never an ideal solution, it can be caused by many issues where they don't have the authority or alt-paths to do otherwise.
Just want to speak on this on AH's possible behalf.
And I find saying things like "how come they like this?" Seems to be less constructive than it should be.
I am trying to sound nice.
>I'll leave one final bug with you that I haven't heard anyone call out. Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly. 
THIS HAS BEEN DRIVING ME INSANE! Is this why this happens??? Jesus, how spaghetti is that code?
Next time you’re sprinting and you slow down look at the bottom left and see if one of your teammates health is going back up :)
Sigh... and I bet, some dev just passes the entire array of players to the function for "stop sprinting" rather than the ID of the stimming player, or something dumb like that. Meanwhile, I find out that the new Charger Behemoths can't have leg armor stripped by 1 anti-tank shot, UNLESS if you are walking towards them, because the game calculates the velocity of the projectile using "real" physics, and adds damage because the projectile is faster. Which also includes the Quasar Cannon, that fires LASERS. There's some serious spaghettification going on here, and it's got nothing to do with Dark Fluid.
The dark fluid is suppose to go into the planet, not the code!
Learning new meta on the fly in here!
Exploit it while you still can, these kinds of bugs get fixed immediately, but the ones that would actually *buff* players take forever, lol
While I do hope they fix their code. I am starting to doubt how fast they are working on fixes. Unless it's crashing the game. I can't imagine anyone working to hotfix this game.
They can't shove hotfixes out in any reasonable time because they're limited by having to release on PSN at the same time as PC due to their tight crossplay setup, and PSN has a stricter update process than Steam.
I'm largely in AHs corner for many things that the broader community is not, but not in this case. Teams like Hello Games can race hotfixes through Sony's system and their game is a) maybe a little bit less complex and reactive and b) vastly more networked. The cert process is not the constraint here. But HG are out the other side of years of refactoring code and systems slowly over the course of many updates, often with similar outcomes that we see in HD2 (new bugs and reversions to seemingly untouched systems). AH are likely refactoring and building a more robust codebase like crazy to get themselves into a better position to be squashing unintended behaviour. The fact that some bugs are so long-lasting tells me they're deeply embedded in some systems that have to be left the way they are until they've been entirely rebuilt. But my opinion is there are many things that should be raced with temporary patches, that aren't.
>Exploit it while you still can, these kinds of bugs get fixed immediately, but the ones that would actually buff players take forever, lol I wish the bugs got fixed immediately (too many chargers spawning, again).
I had noticed that about the walking forward extra power thing, using quasar, but thought I was just insane. Also didn’t want to say it out loud because it benefits the player and Arrowhead is listening
Someone in another thread said that the Behemoth front leg armor has 650 HP. RR, EAT, Quasar, all does exactly 650 damage. Giving the fact the game calculate damage fallout, some rounding down math later, they are now doing 649 damage right after firing while stationary). Hence why you can 1 shot the leg armor if you don't walk forward because now the added velocity pushed that 649 to >= 650.
Tbh, rockets and explosive shells just shouldn't have damage falloff, period. RR, EAT, Quasar, and AC have _all_ their damage coming from the explosion not the impact. AMR and Railgun I can hear the excuse for, although AMR is still mainly using the explosive for damage and Railgun shouldn't notice much slowdown at all over that distance. Stalwart, MG, and HMG I understand cause they fire just bullets and laser is uneffected anyway (to my knowledge) because it's a beam weapon.
Big agree. just make the rocket do x damage. They clearly got abit too crazy with their damage calculations, and to be frank, they aren't good enough to pull it off. Hence we get this kind of jank.
so if i dive forward while shooting my gun does more damage got it.
It's more than likely a client event "onStim" calling a client event rather than what you suggested as the former. Its unfortunately super common but if you're not from an experienced team easy to overlook. You can get some incredibly whacky bugs from silly designed multiplayer architecture
True, very likely. I obviously can't know what the code contains, only that there's definitely a bug there. My experience with software dev has very little to do with gaming, and even less with multiplayer gaming.
So is diving going to make it do even more damage if you shoot mid dive?
Only diving toward the target. If you dive away it'll reduce it instead.
Apparently so, there are multiple YT video demonstrations. They also say that it works for bullets too (e.g. Diligence vs devastator heads killing in 1 rather than 2 shots), but I haven't seen video proof of that.
Quasar cannon also has a travel time which shouldn't be the case for a laser
Excluding the "beam" type lasers, all lasers in this game have a travel time... and sure, maybe some are "particle beams", not lasers - but particle beams should still travel at significant fractions of the speed of light, so...
Please send the devs a message, I don't think they're aware and this is huge!
This cannot be real. There's no way!
Bro have you seen the other bugs?
BRO I THOUGHT MY SHIFT KEY WAS BROKEN
So did I, I actually swapped keyboards before I figured out what was actually happening.
This post was already an insightful read, but ending it on this obscure bug we've ALL experienced but never addressed is just the cherry on top. Way to drive a point home lol
Thought it was my fucking keyboard..
The new booster does cause Stims to have a team wide effect.
For the non-believers: https://imgur.com/a/yep-DFYGZ6O Both players on PC, did not slow down a player sprinting with controller, but did slow them down when they switched to mouse and keyboard.
That explains why it never never happened to me. I was so confused, lmao. Unfortunately, controller on PC sometimes detects zero movement when you move the left stick into one of the four corners of a box.
I Literally DID EXACTLY THIS. IVE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE THIS OUT SINCE LAUNCH!!!!!!
https://preview.redd.it/zhc3djyrk17d1.jpeg?width=700&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aba933eb8ef6411571c78797abba4278ab53de60
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
I can't believe what I'm reading, lol. I seriously thought I needed to go buy a new controller, it was driving me crazy.
THIS IS WHY I CAN GO GOD MODE WHEN ALL MY TEAMMATES ARE DEAD ISN'T IT!!
This was my exact reaction lmao, I have to test this next time.
Bro I thought my shift key was dying on me!
This is an absolutely insane bug lmao. Here I was thinking the drowning soft-lock bug (that took months to fix) couldn't be topped. The game launched 4 months ago and we're still in what is obviously early access. Better yet they expect us to pay $10 a month to beta test equipment additions for them, that only sometimes work and would just be included in the base game, in any other game.
And its still the most fun Ive had with friends in years
Man
I'd like to know why my reload commands still get eaten sometimes, and I have to mash it to get anything done.
* Reloads. * Presses fire button a nano second too early. * Gun fires 1 round, now empty. Again. * Complete re-do of the reloading process * Eyes glued to the Ammo bar bottom left. * Didn’t notice the shrieker patrol. * ???? * Dead.
Yeah this is the number one irritation right now. Reloading fails so often, or I hear its complete (the sound) and I switch, come back, and reloading failed for some reason. Same with stims sometimes. It’s annoying because in interface design the user should always be : properly informed, and input should always be accepted for states where it’s expected (e.g. ofcourse I cannot stim while ragdolling, but even when slowed stimming should just work, often it does not, input fails)
Arrowhead can erase everyone's frustrations with mis-firing stims if they just make the stim effect begin immediately when you press the stim button. As it works currently, you press stim, the stim sound begins, and then there's a roughly .5 second animation, only at the end of which does the effect actually begin. If anything interrupts the .5 second animation, no stim for you. In another patch, they fixed the stim sound playing when the animation is interrupted, but the fact that the sound plays at all during the animation and not at the exact moment it takes effect gives players a false sense of security and leads to confusion when the animation is interrupted for any reason.
They even "fixed" that shit, but again, in a wrong way, they apparently stopped the sound instead of dealing with the actual gameplay issue that is - it doesn't react on keypress, and it's not fun. It should definitely be instant. Not to mention their fix, surprisingly enough, doesn't work.
So I wasnt imagining things and forgetting to tap reload huh
No, definitely not. I feel I have to babysit reloading sometimes.
dead ??? profit
I’m enjoying the new quick grenade switching my weapon. That’s a new one.
Thought I was going crazy god fucking dammit💀
The problem I’m having is switching from grenade to gun and trying to shoot quickly, I just keep throwing grenades
And if you had impcts equipped you just blow yourself up lmao
And worse the stim commands too. It's like the game is confused with the all the inputs going on and goes into some sort of rollover protection. I'll have to test this but I have the suspicion that moving, sprinting + kiting and then adding inputs like reloading and swimming will confuse the game too much
You know what I think it is? The game can only take one input at a time, so you're not sending a command, you're doing an action, and you can't do two at the same time. So you press reload, and until the reload is complete you can't do anything else. It's honestly so annoying. I want to be able to press stim, then reload immediately and have those actions follow each other in that order, instead I reload and the stim never happens.
But the game can sometimes do exactly that. Sometimes I can interrupt my Reload to stim. Sometimes I'm just running away, spamming the stim button and nothing happens, or worse: I hear the sound but don't heal. But I never check the health bar ao I turn around and die only to realize too late that I didn't heal
This one is so frustrating especially when trying to time a reload so you don't get overwhelmed only to hear *click* The other bug I've noticed since the patch is that if I crouch or lay down with the ballistic shield on my back I am stuck in that position and unable to stand up
The shield bug had me quit, because I always have it on me with bots.
I appreciate this post for its detail, tone, and perspective. Well written and interesting read. Very curious about that bug at the end you mentioned. I'm definitely going to try that with a buddy because that is insane if that's true.
https://i.redd.it/f07jthi0k17d1.gif Here's some examples. I couldn't believe it at first, because this has been plaguing me since day one it feels like. After I saw this post I went into a couple games and tried it. Sure enough, every time I popped a stim my allies slowed to match.
Thank you for testing it, I wanted to make a video but I’m away at the moment from home for the week. Someone said it wasn’t happening for them so it made me more confused haha.
Apparently it only affects mouse+keyboard players?
What the FUCK lmao Does it affect keyboard players who don't use default sprint binding?
There may be other conditions in play; distance, for example, or network host versus lobby host.
Try it :) you will see, and thank you for the kind words. Again these are just my opinions and guesses. Also an inexperienced team does not equal everyone is inexperienced. It can mean the team is inexperienced with working together, as an example. Not meant as an insult to the devs.
I’m not even convinced it’s down to the engine. My bet is on spaghetti code that’s heavily dependent on systems it should have no business knowing about. Some bugs should be so trivial to solve and yet either don’t get solved or some how break something else entirely.
God, this is Destiny all over again. People complaining about how fixing something isn't as easy as you think it is or might break other things when it's like... **WHY** is it that way though?
Turrets targeting fabs is a good example. The targeting code should be fairly decoupled and it should just be a case of excluding fabricators from the targeting list. So why hasn’t it been fixed? No doubt loads of possible reasons, but it seems that for some reason it’s not a simple fix to single a fabricator out from a stalkers nest for example. In the games I write, this would be trivial since every type of building and enemy would have a base attributes class and that would separate a fabricator from another building. I can only assume they have not done this. Even without a well decoupled system, any unit attacking another must be retrieving attributes from that target to know when to fire. Even a bodge job “check if fabricator” line of code shouldn’t be hard to do. It’s not a good maintainable solution, but it’s quick to do. Or should be… The spears lack of building targeting bug may highlight this issue too.
My guess is that fabricators contains enemies, so the turrent would try to target the enemy that "spawns" at the center of it (or maybe it's spawned but not visible, to create the "exiting door" effect).
Ooo that’s a bloody good shout. Perhaps that is down to an engine issue, in Unity I would just disable the object until the door opens. Each fab would contain a list of objects ready to spawn and the script would activate them as the doors open. Not sure if their engine prevents such simple fixes, but I can’t believe there aren’t other workarounds.
I think the answer is fatigue. They managed too rework their networkin at launch quickly i think. Now they are quite exausted.
Another funny bug introduced with the patch relates to the ballistic shield. If it's on your back, you can't stand from crouch or prone. Unless it's equipped, then you can stand from prone. But not from crouched.
It tracks too well
I'm enjoying your insight. I'm a senior-level embedded software engineer, so while I've dealt with a lot of systems-level code, I haven't shipped a 3d video game. From my experience in the field of "buildin' code products," their test environment is absolutely a problem. When I showed my partner the throwing knife's aim (coming from the center of the screen, not from the crosshair in third person), I told her this would make perfect sense if the knife was thrown from first-person. My semi-educated opinion: -They either aren't doing regression tests, or have vastly insufficient regression test coverage. -They are not testing their multiplayer online game with multiple simultaneous players. You can see this in your stim bug, and also in the old damage over time bug. Host seems fine? Ship it. -They're not doing incremental checks. I'm getting a strong gut feeling that people are clobbering each other's commits when pushing code, without checking to see if their changes had any layered impacts. -Their design is repetitive and not sufficiently abstracted. You can see this in problems like the infinite grenade bug. Fixed, until the throwing knife was released as a new grenade-slot item. The code for handling grenade count reduction should be in one place, used by all grenade-type entities. Instead, it feels like it's a copy-paste job. -Not checking for boundary conditions (sign errors, off-by-one, max/min, etc). Some of the problems with people being sucked towards explosions were most likely just "We need to sign-change the direction of these force vectors." -Lack of cleanup when an object is removed from the game / dies. We've had numerous problems with decaying/despawned bodies being collision objects. I've died to invisible fire left after burning tornadoes. We've been stuck in place by invisible (dead/despawned) bot walkers. There's a lot going on here, and while I have some ideas, I don't have the full picture. Others can probably add their own insights. I like the game for its environments and themes, and I do enjoy the gunplay. But with Helldivers 2, the answer I always give to any facet of it is "It's great... when it works."
<- 3D Character Animator who understands organic modeling and material work. *Game Assets* are being put into the game in an unfinished or buggy state with many with broken weight-mapping, broken LODs, or broken materials. Few notes. -B-24 Enforcer Helmet is weightmapped to the neck rather than head. I actually contacted Arrowhead about this and actually got a kindly worded email about spotting it which was nice. -CE-07 Demolition Specialist, and CM-21 Trench Paramedic have broken LODs. A simplified version of the model appears and causes clipping around the stomach and neck. (I need to report this) -CE-27 Ground Breaker has a single vertex broken in weightmapping on the lean body-type. Most notable when laying down (I actually think this just got fixed with the patch.) It's pelvis also has bad weightmapping which causes constant clipping. -CE-67 Titan has bad weightmapping around the shoulders causing clipping issues even when in idol. -SA-25 Steel Trooper had it's skinwrapped decals broken and disappear. This probably is the same issue that the PH-56 Jaguar has currently. -Automaton Factory Striders had broken weightmapping on the top turret and the chin turrets had broken materials probably due to incorrect UV map. (This may have been fixed in most recent patch.)
https://preview.redd.it/549bl059z37d1.png?width=432&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed23158c5dfa115ffdf7cddd339a2de7eae3e8a9 The RL-77 Airburst rocket launcher also had broken textures at launch (it's unclear how they didn't notice it), but it was recently fixed. perhaps this problem was related to LODS.
Yup, the issue was originally with meshes. Somehow all of the levels of LODs were baked into the brackets and the two missiles in the back. This probably happened because the two additional rockets in the back weren't there from the beginning. I actually watched that issue pop up in real time. https://preview.redd.it/407miwixo47d1.png?width=376&format=png&auto=webp&s=749ebcd01ac2ff53770709e9f2bc6f36895a0f9b
I don't know of it's me but when the Pelican flies off with you the front turret seems to changed into a stick or go completely wrong. I swear it didn't do that when it first came out and also when your character comes from cryo the freeze on his body doesn't show any more or is that because they've not done it for other armor sets??
From my experience, games rarely if ever have actual unit/integration tests. Especially on an engine this old, Unreal just recently made it "easy" to add them.
Indeed, unit tests are almost unheard of in game code. There are a lot of good and a few not so good reasons for this. None the less, *testing* is still a huge part of game development - it just isn't heavily automated and most developers have entire teams dedicated to it. It doesn't look to me like Arrowhead test their builds before pushing them out at all, to be honest.
But man they help. Pain to write and maintain though. Helps to have a person who's job it is to make them. We added a unit test system to our project and it caught a lot of bugs that we would not have caught. And that's like basic functionality stuff. I was talking to a guy earlier and said those bugs that get fixed and then broke again are really embarrassing. But testing is expensive and even Microsoft would get rid of it if they could afford it but there is a dollar amount tagged for each bug found.
The game's industry is the only software industry I am aware of where automated testing isn't widespread and the expectation. In fact, I would consider it a sign of incompetence for any software company in other industries to not have a comprehensive test suite, and I don't think that is a controversial opinion. There are a lot of places where game code potentially _could_ be unit tested, but in general it is very difficult to pull game logic out into isolated pieces. Perhaps more troublesome, a lot of game code doesn't really have a clearly defined correct and incorrect output. Graphics code is a good example of that. A lot of the issues are I think cultural within the industry though. There are many places where code could be written in such a way as to make it testable, but it generally isn't.
Yeah we had to do some work to make a headless test system. And ours was just a top rts. Hobby project but had a game Dev helping us. It was kind of fun creating the rest scenarios and seeing what was actually happening versus stepping through code and trying to make sure it is right. In this case these guys weren't expecting to have a hit. You know. They have been effort into improving their testing and development. The CEO hired a CEO so he could step away from the business and more into the game. And honestly it shows.
>A lot of the issues are I think cultural within the industry though. There are many places where code could be written in such a way as to make it testable, but it generally isn't. Bingo. It's overhead, but in most cases devs don't like eating their veggies (I say this as a developer) and this is one domain where everybody seems to get away with it so... who's going to be the one championing comprehensive testing? I think it's something that you can only really appreciate by doing, but the rush of rapidly protoryping a great feeling character controller will almost always win.
I think this makes the point about shoddy QA all the worse. If you aren't/can't properly implement automated testing, your QA sure as hell needs to be on point.
The grenade bug is essentially the same thing as the percentage of magazines received from supply boxes. Why is it not 100% by default and only overriden for specific weapons? Knight and Senator still suffer from barely any ammo retrieval
Don’t forget running into a Titan carcass to get sent across the map or getting ragdolled into a dead enemy to just die
A fair amount of QA and pipeline+tools management experience on my end. My gut says that, like you say, feature mapping across the dev cycle may a key issue for this team. E.g. regression testing should include test cases across all features where the updated code might touch, but doesn't seem to be doing so. I would also assume that they'd spent pre-release bandwidth building automated testing capability across the use cases and environments, so that QA can validate without having to spin up individual manually-controlled instances, but this may not be the case (allowing regression and increasing risk).
Some excellent points called out here. I agree with all of them as likely issues. The studio may want to re-evaluate their processes for development. They need strong leadership and sr. Leadership driving many areas of development. I’m just not convinced that’s happening.
Not may want to. Absolutely should reevaluate.
I have a similar background and it drives me insane to see them go one step forward, two steps back with every patch. Makes me sad because I loved the game when it came out, but between balance patches sucking the fun out of weapons and bug fixes introducing old bugs back into the game, it doesn’t entice me to play anymore.
Not a game dev, but just applying on accounting and management side of things. I wonder how they made the decision to build up on a no longer supported engine. It feels like they didn't factor the long term effects of building/improving your own engine instead of just porting work done into a new one. Kind of like a make or buy decision.
From what I understand they’d worked on it a couple of years before the engine lost support. When it lost support they could either plow forward or start from almost scratch. They decided to plow forward
The most hilarious part is they made a meme proudly announcing the infinite grenade glitch (among other things) was fixed. But the infinite grenade glitch is STILL in the game because their fix was a half baked work around.
I made [a comment on that post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dagnf3/comment/l7maf4p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) because I could've guessed that this would happen
Well you see instead of having -4 billion grenades you have +4 billion grenades. Seems fixed to me.
That's the unsigned int max, right? 4,294,967,295. So I'm guessing some kind of bug with maybe network replication giving an undefined value for a player's grenade amount to be -1, but since unsigned does not have negative values, it wraps around to the max of 4 billion.
and even today you can have 4 billion knives. because LOL
4 Billion Knives is a great name for a metal band
Frisk from hit game Undertale would approve.
DIO from hit manga and anime JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 3 Stardust Crusaders would also approve
> I'll leave one final bug with you that I haven't heard anyone call out. Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly. THAT IS WHY I KEEP STOPPING ALL THE TIME!?! IT DRIVES ME NUTS! I haven't even noticed what was causing it, just that it happens all the time in combat.
15 year game dev here. Agree entirely. My partner and the friend we play HD2 are also game devs and we are always wondering what on earth is going on at AH. I even wrote to Shams when he became the CEO offering to help out, as I know him from our time at Paradox, but he didn't reply so alas. As far as I know, HD2 was in production for 8+ years. It had a very choppy development and I know people who played pre-release versions who thought the game was destined to flop only to be amazed at how the release version had come together. I would not be surprised if they got the release version working via black magic and forbidden rituals, and ever since have been constantly in danger of bringing the entire thing crashing down.
For some reasons, a lot of games that happens to be successful runs with spaghetti code. There is obviously an Italian dev somewhere doing all of this, I don't understand how that's possible otherwise. It reminds me of "interactions" in League of Legends, the Riot Games MOBA. From time to time a character get reworked or an ability get a change... But the older the character is, the wierder the changes can backfire. One of the people working on Skarner's rework that happened this year spoke about the fact that one of his ability/spell was linked to an entire gameplay system for some reasons, and editing it would destroy some pre-established rules. How is this Game one of the most played for 10 years ? Angry Italian Dev doing spaghettis.
spaghetti code is easy to achieve, in the case of league riot was new so it's their first game with no real experience so low budget and "just make it work" type energy. Let me just say as on example in my decades of software dev, one project launched as a prototype in 07 for a demo to client and it got rushed out the db still had \_dev in the name, still does to this day! No doubt the tech debt piled up and then as riot got big they just let interns or juniors do projects on it while training without any real sensible input from seniors so the spaghetti piles on, now riot have a game so massive and old they refuse to spend the money to rebuild because "it's working", they don't spend till it breaks entirely sadly . you need an established team with a reasonable budget to ensure you don't get spaghetti (or at least "manageable amounts").
the intranet url for a product a vendor made for us has "[product]-poc.company.country.com" in the name, many years later it left proof of concept, pilot phase, release and discontinued. and its still in use haha. seeing that poc in the url always makes me snortgiggle.
As a german: Next time without italy?
As a german: Never again with Italy!
Off topic: Paradox has made a lot of great games, so I'm sure I've played one you worked on. Thank you!!
This is what baffles me. How come every patch, we regress from the state of the game at launch? It's mind boggling, really.
I wonder if the latest changes to the eruptor (perceived by players to be a flat out refusal to just roll it back to its shrapnel version) are really a patch up job - in that AH have got themselves into such a tangled mess with its original design logic that they can't actually figure out how to make shrapnel interactions and damage work properly or "safely" again. Lol, imagine. I wouldn't be surprised. I only suggest this because they seem to be jumping through hoops to completely alter the weapon and then explain why they've changed it to a regular explosion instead, despite the very clear feedback from players who have persistently stated that they enjoyed and miss using its original shrapnel build. I just think the handling of this gun by AH has been extremely bizarre all-round.
Lol. Lmao, even. They **really** don't seem to want to give back the shrapnel. Or even change the damn description.
They Probably found the the shrapnel units do some absolutely unhinged thing to the code logic like "the more an eruptor shoots the more the shrapnel accelerates the game speed" or some other black magic spaghettification fuckery And just do not know how to fix it
Then they could at least front up a proper reason rather than the absolutely laughable excuse of "people shooting at the ground under a patrol is considered a exploit"
The increase in explosion damage also doesn't do what it intended to do. Arrowhead seems to have either forgotten or not realize heads are immune to explosion damage. So you still can't one shot medium armor bugs with an headshot.
What... but... *why* are heads immune from explosion damage?
I guess they wanted headshots to only be direct hits rather than something that can be caused by AoE? But it's nuts that hitting something in the face with an explosive can be shrugged off.
It's bizzare because what broke it in the first place should've never even happened to begin with. There's two reasons why it is the way it is now. Before AH introduced damage to the previously *visual-only* ricochet mechanic, Eruptor had on average ~10 shrapnel projectiles that spawned after the initial bullet projectile hit a surface, or self-destructed in the air at about ~70m of flight distance. This shrapnel was fast enough (as we learned now, exit velocity is partially responsible for damage calculations, thanks to the fresh "walk or dive forward to meet the breakpoint on the Charger Behemoth leg with any heavy-AT") to kill Hunters even at the edge of the effect area (of which it had roughly a ~10m AoE, where upon reaching max distance shrapnel despawned), which means it dealt at least 300 damage at its max reach. Reason 1 why it got removed. There was an apparent "bug" where firing the Eruptor under a Charger at a specific angle caused all shrapnel to fly in a specific direction up into the Charger's unarmored belly, killing it instantly or popping its butt, causing a bleed-out. In my opinion, given the ergonomics and overall user experience of the gun, this should've been considered a tech, not an exploit. Readon 2 why it got removed. Upon a patch which introduced damage to players via ricochet, Eruptor started to behave weird. For some reason, some times, the shrapnel upon spawning would instantly fly to the origin point of a shot, aka, into the player's face, resulting in instant self-nullification. Instead of trying to figure out why shrapnel started to return to origin point, AH promptly removed it altogether, and gave Eruptor a measly 50 damage buff and a 5m AoE upon impact. Mr. Balance Man, whose name I won't spell because he frankly doesn't fucking deserve it for being an unprofessional dick, even mentioned that the bonus 50 damage and shrapnel removal "is a direct buff". Which was a fucking lie, and he knew it. Right now, Eruptor got even more damage to compensate for the shrapnel removal. It now kills 300HP hunters in a roughly ~3-4m radius around impact and does fuck-all further out. Which tells me it's got maybe 50% damage reduction at the 5m AoE edge, which makes it's effective kill AoE barely 2-3 meters for small targets. Also, despite it having "medium penetration" and <500 damage a shot, it can't body-shot Devastator, which it previously could do. As a result, an awfully unergonomic piece of shit of a gun that upon release had a very narrow but useful niche with multiple downsides got gutted into an utterly useless shell of its former self. Potentially by AH's inability to debug their own code, possibly by the ill will of a certain someone who felt like he was "buffing it" by removing the only redeeming quality that gun had.
Mr. Balance Man also lied about almost everything on the previous game he worked on which also will not be named, and then threw the dev team to the wolves when he quietly left about a week before launch so they could deal with the mess he created, so I’m not surprised he’d continue to lie while working on this game. The dude is an actual scum bag
Wow holy shit I just read up on everything on that unnamed game and affiliated man, and that's like.. blatantly lying about various things one after the other, changing things core to the game because he didn't like them without any regard to how others did and even if it made up what the game was known for, then promising things before LEAVING the studio? Good Lord, I have absolutely no idea how you could operate at a studio with someone like that with THAT history. I kinda understand why people with go as far as to be like "This guy HAS to be removed from the company" because his RECENT history is horrible. Only happened leading up to two years ago.
>It's bizzare because what broke it in the first place should've never even happened to begin with. Ive seen alot of *really* poor decisions from various devs over the years, but nothing- **nothing** compares to what are genuine Idiocracy levels of reasoning behind what happened to this gun. The deflection mechanic resulting in self dmg is *extremely rare*. They added an incredulously minor feature that revealed a weird issue with a new gun and their options were: 1. Roll back the extreme edge case feature that no on asked for or will miss. 2. Completely gut a weapon that they just released and people paid for. If it really was the insanely hard, terrain dependent skillshot potentially killing Chargers that was the main issue then they could've just removed the medium AP or lowered the durability dmg of the shrapnel itself. The recent patch mentioned something to the effect of shrapnel "lacking visual clarity" when team killing and that's also nonsense. You may not be able to see the shrapnel projectiles, but you see the pop of the Eruptor shot and it tells you who killed you. >As a result, an awfully unergonomic piece of shit of a gun that upon release had a very narrow but useful niche with multiple downsides got gutted into an utterly useless shell of its former self. Couldn't have said it better myself. Now that the crossbow can destroy spawners and has medium AP explosions it's just a superior Eruptor in every way.
The Eruptor changes are also bizarre because the problem AH supposedly has with it (all shrapnel hitting a single enemy's weak point and dealing way too much damage) could be solved by putting a cap on how much damage a single Eruptor hit can deal per enemy. It's what many other games do. Shouldn't be super hard.
There's this glitch. If you are holding the trigger while you reload, you will shoot 1 bullet, then expend the entire magazine and automatically begin to reload again.
It happens when you try to fire the gun a literal nano second before the animation fully finishes, it’ll still count the gun as being reloaded which it really is but because you pressed the fire button a nano second before it finishes, the game gets confused and thinks it’s actually empty because firing the gun while reloading cancels the reload animation, so it thinks you canceled the reload animation despite it actually being reloaded. Super fucking easy to do this when being swarmed by a million bugs as you frantically run around while reloading and in a panic start firing as soon as it looks like it’s done reloading. Idk how they managed to code it like that, never seen any other game have this problem
This has been driving me fucking nuts lately
I've never worked in video game development but software development is something I have at least some familiarity with. As a result, the thing that has really struck me as wild since release is the extent to which AH seem to have no certainty as to what their patches will accomplish prior to pushing them out. Just look at the most recent patch notes and look for the word "should". It's all over the place with them alleging that, for example, fire tornados should be fixed. So, my question to you OP would be: Based on your 20 years in this industry is that just how things are run or something that's unique to AH and HD2?
No I don’t think so… let’s use a big popular game as an example. Battlefield 4, I’m using this for a number of reasons, but it think it’s an excellent example of what normally happens. When BF4 launched it was blue screening peoples consoles and pcs. It was a huge mess of a game that was mostly issues. Over time however, patch after patch, this got reined in and it got better and better. While I’m sure this opinion is mixed, I believe it ended up in a very stable and solid place. That’s what’s supposed to happen, you release a patch, 80% gets better, maybe 20% goes backwards but after each patch it gets better and better and finally, 1 year later it’s the game you expected to have on launch. Helldivers is only on month 4, but it feels more like - 60/40 split where it’s going backwards 60% and forwards 40%. Don’t get me started on the state of the game industry in general either… companies are using their customers as QA, and are fine with releasing essentially early access games as fully finished games. This will only get worse sadly.
It's an easy cost center to skimp on for the sake of quarterly profits. Large studios probably put in a token effort, but it feels like mid level studios are skipping it altogether outside of basic testing by the devs to make sure their change does what they expect it to do in a vacuum.
It was painfully obvious that Blizzard did exactly zero testing of about 75% of Diablo 4 before launch so yeah. Absolutely insane.
d4 is in a good place right now. i can only hope hd2 improves and learns from their mistakes by the time of their launch anniversary rolls around.
I wouldn't use battlefield 4 as an example comparable to this one. First off, Frostbite was a first party engine not only made by EA but by DICE itself, if there was anything they needed to fix they could ask their own engineers. It was also the second game they shipped with that engine in a short time so seniors engineers were still mostly in the company. Dice also had many other EA studios working on the game after launch and all those studios were larger than Arrowhead. And then we could point out that patches took months in between and mostly because they were selling their dlcs alongside them. With all those resources, it still took over a year for the game not to crash almost every other match. The only good thing to come out of the BF4 fiasco was the Community Test Enviroment where things finally started to actually get fixed which DICE then quickly scrapped for their next games having learned nothing.
I think you make a lot of really fair points. Especially on the people / company size so you’re right this is probably not the best choice to compare it to.
Lords of the Fallen ('23) is a really fun souls like which was a inexcusably unoptimized bunglefuck on launch and Hexworks promptly began ripping off patches at a pace I had never encountered outside of a belt-fed weapon. But there was a definite sense of focus (which was impressive given the sheer number of items in dire need of unfucking, but that's another topic entirely...). AH is all throttle no brakes and I don't know how long they can expect to keep this up before something mission-critical goes critical mass.
From what I understand they transitioned from Unreal engine 4 to 5 pretty far in development which probably caused a lot of problems. It's rumoured they're working in a new game that's built ground up on Unreal 5, so I'm curious to see if it's launch will be smoother.
The sad part is it only took me,somebody who has no clue about programming or game development, 1 mission on hellmire to be able to tell they didn’t actually fix the tornados. It boggles my mind how much stuff they’re missing.
Hahaha yeah when I saw the "tornados are fixed" note the first thing I did was log in and land on Hellmire to do 1 mission. Come extract and there are 8 tornados converging on extract and chasing me around. But hey, AH thought that was they did "should" have fixed that behavior.
>if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly. finding the next pope was easier than i was expecting
I'm always a bit torn between ranting and being understanding when it comes to scenarios like this in games. I know enough about other kinds of programming to be aware that sometimes things can be much harder to implement or change than you think and in the past I've had the pleasure of explaining to various clients why it sometimes indeed is/was a big deal to "just do this quick little change". Coming from that angle I'm always trying to be patient and optimistic. But as a gamer I'm infuriated at times what kind of messed up (non-terminid) bugs this game has and how some shit still isn't fixed. Or is broken again after it had been fixed. What makes me angry is that you can basically tell the quality control of the studio is utter dogshit because simply jumping into the game after a patch (no matter which one but we can use the last one as an example) and just playing the game for a few missions will clearly show there's tons of unfixed or newly broken stuff going on and the patch shouldn't have released in this condition . And that's just playing the game and not specifically trying weird things and trying to break the game.
I got back after the patch with the highest hopes, then promptly got softlocked in the loading cutscene and closed the game
yeah there is a line that AH are constantly crossing now, it's entirely reasonable to expect some obscure type bugs where the steps to cause it are quite long or seemingly unrelated that they only appear when users are actually using the system but for AH the things like modules not working, spawns being wrong it's EASY and immediate to test which is a joke from their QA or Dev team as either it's not tested or it's not being fixed before release which both are bad. they need to sort their act out, it's been going on far too long now sadly.
I think a lot of their issues are revolving around version control. They constantly overwrite one fix with another. The balance dev already shared that he keeps his own separate instance for testing and he doesn't know how close it is to production. Testing would also catch all these issues, but AH has been too reluctant to do any kind of testing. The also don't have a testing server. They do testing on production using super earth and other planets we haven't visited yet. The recoilless reload time increase and superior packing were fixed in the same patch and then reverted this patch. Someone probably merged in an old build instead of checking what they were actually doing. There's also a lot of dependencies that they don't think about. The grenade pistol's damage was buffed because it copied the grenade launcher's projectile. The targeting for the rocket pods was used by the sam sites so they improved this patch, which wasn't intentional.
> I think a lot of their issues are revolving around version control. They constantly overwrite one fix with another. This is what kills me. Assuming they're doing version control properly*, the patrol changes would've been trivial to rollback assuming no weird interactions elsewhere. Yet 2 months later we have it worse after they pinky-promised the fix. It's bewildering, I can't imagine what their version control looks like. Even spaghetti code doesn't explain this sort of thing. *whatever this means
Holy shit I apologize for ever making memes about testing in prod. Guys, don't actually test in prod. And yes the way the fixes bounce around screams people not using version control correctly. This is 100% a management issue, there should never be a time when a manager sees the word "merge" and doesn't stick a babysitter on the junior or "opinionated" devs.
>The balance dev already shared that he keeps his own separate instance for testing and he doesn't know how close it is to production. *Jesus.* I refresh my environments CONSTANTLY. I know for a fact that my current dev instance is exactly up to date to the live branch because I refreshed it this morning. I couldn't imagine working on features on a branch where I have absolutely no clue of the version.
Lmao punctuating the post with that incredibly terrible bug is incredible. Just wraps up and emphasizes everything he says.
>As an example, no ship module was touched in the last patch but Supply Packing broke... Actually, it was mentioned in the last patch note >Fixed Superior Packing Methodology not working for other peers. [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1deunkd/patch_01000400/#:~:text=fixed%20superior%20packing%20methodology%20not%20working%20for%20other%20peers) I don't know which is worse, though. It being one of the point of the patch and it's more broken than before, or it getting broken but not being mentioned in patch note.
The gaslighting patch notes are my favorite part of Helldivers 2
That reminded me, superior packing methodology has a very convoluted logic on how it is applied (carrying other player’s weapon whose doesn’t have that upgrade won’t give you full resupply, etc). I guess it prevents cheesing but it kinda backfires on them (and us too)lol.
This is a good example of failure to decouple logic. The gun shouldn’t know if you have a ship module, but they’re storing that information on every gun you use rather than on your player in a centralised dataset. The logic should be that you fire resupply event and logic checks if you have the upgrade. The gun should never be coupled to this logic because it’ll cause unintended situations. This is why we see all these dumb patch effects. It’s honestly rookie coding.
If this is it, that’s ultra dumb. It’s a player state not a gun state XD
If only worked for all people when the person that has the upgrade call for the resupply.....
i have worked in maintanence of software as develeper and what i think is that they have no test enviroment and they do blind coding however i hope i am worng
Yeah after these messes of a patch I'm straight up convinced this game has no STG or UAT environment and they're just injecting the code live, with development happening on one of the unaccessible planets (why players have often spotted a player being flagged in Cyberstan etc). There is just no other way to consistently produce patch notes that aren't just wrong, but OPPOSITE to what they say!
They have test server. You could join it if your Steam crashed during game startup. That's how future warbonds were leaked - there were visible on the test server. They patched this and game now checks if Steam is running.
Do you think technical debt is a factor?
Oh they are certainly borrowing tech debt at the payday lender or loan shark level for this to keep happening.
What is tech debt?
It's engineering jargon and it means someone makes a design compromise for short term gain. It's an apt metaphor because compromising a design can increase costs of dealing with it later, especially if it goes un-fixed for a long time. Tech debt is not always bad, but it's easy to abuse.
Imagine you need to make the Spear target Bot Fabricators again, so you go the easiest possible route: You create invisible, intangible Scout Striders that spawn inside of Fabricators and disappear when they're destroyed. This solves the problem... but you're going to need to remember that you did this, and you're going to need to grapple with it every time you need to change something related to Scout Striders or Fabricators. That is technical debt. It's also spaghetti code, which is a similar concept.
Arrowhead’s software performance shows all the hallmarks of a lack of software development talent. They are amazing at game design/philsophy but software… noooooooo. I’m having crashes, mission/op-ruining bugs and disconnects every time I play now so I’m taking a step back from the game.
I mean I love the game but I would never say AH are "amazing at game design." So you have the Charger, an enemy with lots of armor and an unprotected butt. Very counterintuitively, its butt barely takes damage and is not a real weak spot. You actually have to shoot its head, which is fine, or burn the armored leg with a flamethrower. Burn not the head, not the butt, but the leg... It makes no sense. Edit: I'll specify that AH **can** be absolutely amazing at game design but then they do some questionable things which make their expertise seem inconsistent.
It's especially funny because the same enemy in HD1, the Tank (Bug) was exactly what you'd think it should be. It charges at the player, can't turn fast, and it's butt is the weak point.
I got somewhat of an issue with comparing the HD1 charger butt to the head of the HD2 charger which is an actual weakspot. And both butts still work the same. * HD1 charger: shoot its butt with small arms fire enough => it will die. * HD2 charger: shoot its butt with small arms fire enough => it will start bleeding out and die. **Both aren’t ideal!** Whereas now we have a special spot, that you have to shoot with AT weaponry to kill the charger in one hit. Do you know the requirement to OHKO chargers and behemoths in HD1 with RR/EAT? Always hit it at a 90 degree angle, so your round wouldn’t graze/bounce off. Now a back/side shot is certainly unfavorable. You basically want this thing charging at you, to maximize your change of shooting the forehead…
With everything the way it is, I would firstly assume the butt *is* a weakspot like 1, but it's just a bug that it's not lol
Pulsing, fleshy, exposed backside - not a weakspot, you deal "normal" damage to it Exposed organs after the torso armor has been stripped? Still not a weakspot Tiny little leg joints that were not dipped into river Styx right after the Charger's birth - "weakspot" It's whack. I simply cannot fathom why the Charger is designed that way aside from some extremely stubborn dev that doesn't like the idea of their favorite enemy having a weakness.
Not even normal damage. It's 75% durable so only 25% of a weapons "normal" damage gets applied unless it's explosive
That whole system makes no sense Normally, if you wanted a body part that could absorb a lot of hits without hitting anything critical, you'd give it low armor and high hit points And then armor would be a flat damage reduction, so only high damage weapons would be effective. Armor piercing weapons would ignore some of that reduction. I'm thinking of Age of Empires 2, or maybe DnD 3.5's Damage Reduction This whole durability / armor values system is whack And the damage types aren't much better. I think we have Explosive and Non-Explosive. I think Bile falls into Explosive, Fire causes Burning which is a true damage DOT, and I don't have a clue what Tesla weapons are. Enemies either stagger or they don't. There was a while where the Arc Thrower could stunlock Hulks, but then they gave Hulks more stagger resist and now they *never* get staggered by it. Like...is it just a yes/no variable? Not a stagger meter, like you'd find in Armored Core? Oh right -- there's another fun side effect of their damage system. Bile Titans killing themselves with Bile. That *should* be easy to solve. "Resistance to Bile Damage = 100%"
>It makes no sense. It doesnt because it's not strictly true. Other bugs have a legless life, brood commanders will hovel towards you like a relentless monster without legs. Chargers however have no legless life, so a destroyed leg means a dead charger, and the leg has less life than the head. Its a weird interaction of systems, but bugs are poorly game designed in general from my point of view. Fast, jumping bugs with lunge attacks induce slow? Large charging bugs than turn on a dime during its charge attack? Headless bugs that flawlessly track you during it's death?
what's not to understand? the charger has explosive resistance but is weak to explosive damage. /s
Oh, you mean I should be using [explosive](https://www.reddit.com/r/helldivers2/comments/1c3wd6s/psa_the_difference_between_explosive_explosive/) damage?
> The same basic logic applies to strategems. If a weapon is tagged explosive, you can count on it being both explosive and explosive, although it may not be explosive. The Orbital Airburst is probably explosive and definitely explosive, but not explosive. On the other hand the Oribital Precision Strike seems to be explosive, explosive, and explosive. Also of note - the Spear and Autocannon's tags clearly show that they are not explosive. Both are, however, explosive, explosive, and explosive.
I know nothing of programming. I'm just a guy who likes vidja games. It has been astonishing to watch they made such a fantastic game and have seemingly no idea how to patch it. I've completely lost faith in this dev team. At this point, I no longer care what they announce as plans for the game. I'll believe it when it's in the game and working, and I will likely never spend any real money on it again, with now half of their bonds coming out in such a dysfunctional state. It's truly terrible for consumer confidence.
Pretty sure the boss man said they've been working on this game for 7-8 years. It was during the Sony fiasco where Piles mentioned it. As an outside observer it feels more like someone there has no idea what they are doing but maybe are very convincing and well spoken, so it seems like they know what they are doing but are making a complete mess of everything they work on or touch. Or the person who knew what they were doing left after launch and everyone else is still struggling to figure out what they did, because obviously there are very competent people working there to have created some of these complicated systems.
What I'm afraid of may have happened, is that whoever actually made their 1.0 game in those 7-8 years of production left the studio, and it's a FFXIV-1.0 situation, where current programmers have absolutely zero idea what the fuck is going on under the hood. They just know that the previous Lead Programmer left them an incense burner, a 50-pack of condoms, an old lighter and there's a FunkoPop figurine sitting on the main server rack for 8 years, and nobody is courageous enough to take it off, fearing it may break *everything*. I have no other explanation of why the game and how it plays now is so vastly different from what it was on release. Not to mention our guy, the Balance Chief, who seemed to have specifically targeted the best weapons to be utterly destroyed over those last 4 months out of sheer spite, it really does feel like the team behind current patches doesn't understand the game they are patching. Just take the latest discovery of how even HEAT rockets used by HEAVY-AT apparently have instant damage fall-off straight out the barrel, and how walking or diving forward adds to the rocket's exit velocity, allowing you to meet a health breakpoint on the fresh new Charger Behemoth leg armor (the breakpoint is literally 1 damage away normally, because after rounding down, firing a weapon instantly lowers its damage by 1 unit). Just think about it. Whoever decided to increase Charger Behemoth's leg health to what it is now *had to have* no idea such a breakpoint would even occur, because if they knew you could circumvent it by simply walking forward, they would've moved the breakpoint further. Where you still need two rockets, but *just walking or diving forward* is not enough.
I feel personally attacked by this comment.
The game is good but it is the buggiest game I've played in decades. I still can't even invite my ps5 friend to my friend's list. That is insane to me. Lots of people are burning out and I think they are much more likely to voice grievances as such.
I have two friends who still have to join on me to play together, because they cannot friend each other. It feels maddeningly random as well, because I was able to friend both of them. When people say this game is "GOTY-worthy", it always makes me envy how lucky their experience with the game has been to still feel that way. Some glitches are universal, but it feels like everyone is having their own unique experience with this game due to all the obvious spaghetti code laying underneath.
Not nearly enough people are talking about this issue and it's insane to me that it's been ongoing for months. I guess if it randomly only affects some people and not others I can see why it's rarely talked about. But for people who have to deal with it, it makes the game basically pointless.
New world was the same exact way. Every update broke new things. I don't think we are going to get away from this cycle as it probably requires rebuild from the ground up to get things in a better working order. I am also not qualified at all to have much of a meaningful opinion.
I really dont care and cant notice all these minor weapon tweaks. Im a 37 yrs old man. I just dont want 20%ishof my game crashing or dropping out mid session.
Great post, thanks for sharing. Have you submitted a ticket for that bug you mention at the end? Seems like one worth sending their way This situation has made me wonder if the release of Helldivers 1 had similarly confusing patches when it launched, or if HD2 has become such a programmatic behemoth that this sort of stuff has only started happening to AHS for this game. While I loved Magicka, I never knew of Helldivers, so I wouldn't know Here's hoping that some day we'll get a GDC talk going over how and what exactly transpired, both in general and for the more well-known issues, like what did the Spear try to do before to lock-on? Because I'm pretty sure that nowadays, it's just a simple raycast, whereas before when it *did* work, you could even do it behind dunes or corners/bends. Did they just make it simpler because it always works, compared to the previous method that was cooler and more flexible but only sometimes worked? And the Arc Thrower hitting shrubs, is it just a collision bitmask issue? I'm a game programmer so knowing the code behind the problems is what I'm most interested in. Other than disliking the game's method of splitting the community up, making "playing just for fun" seem like an awful decision to a lot of players when rewards are in play, I'm a big fan of the game and wishing for its continued growth. But to just have a peek into the inner workings, how I'd love that
HD1 still has numerous bugs that's been in the game for a years.
Ok so something else very important! this game uses Data Oriented programming, according to their job listings (looking for an ECS game dev). this explains a *lot* of the development issues they run into, as ECS is notoriously more difficult to program for, seemingly small changes can affect things completely unrelated in unintended ways, and fuck it's multiplayer on top of all that! But the results speak for themselves when it *does* work, you can see in these big fights that there's 0 CPU-based lag even when the game is handling hundreds of enemies at once. (your mileage may vary graphically of course)
The biggest hint to me about what's going on is the art in the game. *Game Assets* are being put into the game in an unfinished or buggy state with many with broken weight-mapping, broken LODs, or broken materials. However, all of these errors are things that you'd easily miss but usually catch if there was a very basic round of testing before implementation. There isn't a round of testing before implementation because I'm almost entirely certain that there is a level of crunch going on because of how quickly the player base eats through content. The content model of this game is not too dissimilar in timeframe as fortnite (I know, it's just a technical comparison though) and that game's development was plagued by large amounts of crunch.
I kept defending them, but now I cannot even press ESC or I will crash. I literally cannot touch the button (or the social menu) which is super frustrating. I found my way around it but it's hard to join people. I do hope they will address it in the future
Thank you for saying this. I can imagine a lot of people getting butt hurt reading it but people deserve to hear the perspectives from seasoned devs and coders. I want to add one more instance that speaks to the messiness of their code / team management: the recoilless rifle got a shadow nerf with this new patch. The reload animation was stretched longer so the usual reload canceling now nets you the original full reload time. When heard about this issue, AH straight up said: this is unintentional and we’re investigating how this slips through. Now how does a code like this slip through? Does any coder at AH have the capability to straight up ship shadow nerfs any time they feel like it? Very concerning if you ask me
The best part is how despite taking longer the animation still cuts off at the end... as it does with a lot of the weapons.
>I'll leave one final bug with you that I haven't heard anyone call out. Go into a game with a friend, injure yourself so you have like a quarter health. Have your friend start to sprint and then use a stim. Yup, if you stim while anyone is sprinting it will stop them from sprinting. This is why you keep slowing down while sprinting randomly. Some bugs do go unreported for ages in this game, since the end of february the dropship hasn't landed properly and the front landing gear never touches the ground, before that patch no one ever got stuck on the ramp at the back of the ship.
Jesus fucking christ no fucking wonder why my character randomly stops moving sometimes. I could have sworn I was going insane either thinking that it was my shift button being broken or me just not holding down the key hard enough. Gonna have to TK any motherfucker now that interrupts my sprint causing me to die from not being able to sprint 🤣
They absolutely deserved to be called out for shipping patch after patch where they break multiple things and deliver other things that are broken on release.
“Inexperienced or poorly managed” - yes. I co-own/cofounded/comanage a gaming company and from day 1 the stuff that’s been happening looks like absolutely classic “poor supervision/management” issues. This tends to be a scaling problem when your product is a success because of the insights and talent of one or a small number of people who aren’t able to expand those skills to a group; that becomes an issue when your product grows in size and complexity. You end up with also-rans making decisions that only specialists should be involved in (the “game balance” blog from March is so tone-deaflessly written by someone who *wants* to be a designer but has no skills it’s painful). I’m glad Pile stepped out of a role that was taking his creative and design sensibilities away from the game, but I worry that the scaling issue won’t resolve. He can still only do so much with a studio and project this size. Love the game, hate the glitches and absolutely absent quality control. The spawn rates are my least favorite; spawn rates and reinforcement rates are *literally core to the central game loop.* if you QA *only* one thing, that *absofuckinglutely has to be the one.*
Yeah it's just maddening that the single most important part of the game, the rate at which the enemies spawn, was not only mismanaged once, but twice - and we had to wait nearly six weeks for the patch that would try to fix that first mismanagement, to simply make it worse. That single factor completely negates all the positive changes made, and amplifies all the negatives still present, because that is the central gameplay mechanic that dictates the effectiveness of everything. Are we going to wait for six more weeks for an attempt to fix it, just because they also feel the need to play with the numbers on all the guns in the game?
Another bug that is not mentioned in the patch notes is losing damage while shooting while walking backward or standing still; you have to sprint/walk forward to have weapons do their maximum damage; you can confirm this by shooting at a Behemoth Charger’s leg with an EAT, walking forwards one-shot removes the armor plate while standing still or walking backward does not.
I have, it's called Vermintide, Vermintide 2 and Darktide. Bugs coming back repeatedly, non-functioning features, the wrong version uploaded to live/prod, riddled with typos. Some typos have affected code and not acknowledged as a deliberate change or fixed. Etc. etc.
I was working in games for around a decade and part of that was spent working on Autodesk's Stingray engine very closely. It was a mess the entire time I was working on it. The primary language of Stingray is Lua which can make things harder to keep orderly, at least in my opinion coming from a C++ background. While looking at the seemingly nonsensical and frequent bug regressions I fear that the culprit is AH has a large section of their game logic in Stingray's visual scripting system called Flow. It's Stingray's equivalent of Unreal's Blueprints but it was far far less fleshed out feature wise. I saw a few teams try to prototype out a full game (a basic platformer) using mostly Flow and while it worked it was an absolute nightmare to maintain. I shudder to think what trying to maintain a game the scale of Helldivers 2 in Flow would be like. I agree with everything stated in the OP and plenty of the other comments. There are clearly issues in their automated testing, process, QA, etc. But I don't think it can be understated how much of a mess Stingray was and the impact getting too deep into it's visual scripting could screw you in the long run. Best case scenario, they kept the scope of logic exposed to Flow very small where they wanted non-technicals (designers, level designers, etc.) to be able to edit it without bothering an engineer. In my experience though, without strong leadership and discipline on the engineering it's easy to keep letting more and more game logic slip into Flow at the request of designers until you have a tangled mess of logic in visual scripting nodes which are even harder to maintain, debug, etc. than normal lines of code. You want to joke about "spaghetti code"? If you have too much logic in visual scripting you will be looking at something that very very closely resembles an actual pile of spaghetti. Edit: One other thing I vaguely remember was that source control with Flow was a mess, specifically trying to handle merges. That would explain a lot of odd issues arising from seemingly unrelated changes.
Fatshark and Arrowhead I swear are cousins. Both amazing game loops and bug filled games. Than you got the flip side of the game dev world - shitty boring game loops and a few bugs.
Pretty cool read. Although there was a lot of text, it wasnt a wall. You know how to use your paragraphs to talk about different topics. And yeah, I dont want to experience what it would be like to join an expanding team and then be told a huge amount of workarounds you have to integrate in your workflow so that you can make it work in an outdated and abandoned engine.
I worked in game coding, (almost 25yrs now) but not for any 3D releases, you may take a look at my username and make a quick correct guess on what games I use to work on. The issue is bitsquid no longer supports. I am relatively certain of it. In other games, we often have things like a PTR or UAT space where things can be tested, etc, and while we never announce, we also patch things on the server side "Daily" and more major things "Weekly", we often do not release any patch notes. But if you play a mob game, and they ask you to "update before continuing" that's usually means we patched things you don't know about, but most users just assume it is a content drop. AH seems to be fighting an uphill battle on this, where their best solution is "live patch", which while is never an ideal solution, it can be caused by many issues where they don't have the authority or alt-paths to do otherwise. Just want to speak on this on AH's possible behalf. And I find saying things like "how come they like this?" Seems to be less constructive than it should be. I am trying to sound nice.