I think it's actually realistic that civilians get into your line of sight. People don't notice everything or act foolish when they panic. I think it should be incumbent on the player to adapt to a chaotic situation instead of expecting the NPCs to make it easy for you.
@@traversingthedark Can you give an example of what you mean? I know they've added some content (that I haven't found the time to check out personally), but what features "bloat" the experience?
@@AnvilOfDoom If, 1/2 years after a game comes out, that game is still making me wait for 10GB updates every couple of months (and the game isn't an MMO) I would call that bloat, especially considering that the game was in EA for like 5 years. I am well aware that Larian studios are the current darlings of the RPG world. But we gotta call a spade a spade.
@@traversingthedark So it's not really any features you object to, but the download size of the updates? Just trying to understand what spade you are talking about.
Nevermind companions getting in your line of fire, or shooting you in the back, when you have companions snoring in the background, while you're trying to explain things.
Make player drop all non-timestamped items on the ground on game load 🙃 1. Forces player to pick up items and adds timestamps in the process 2. Makes player aware of a new feature 3. Funny
Such a cool conundrum pondering. Played plenty of games where the team feels like self-sabotaging but it can add some unintentional humor too, when it's not too severe. Now that I heard it with the headphones, I think I need the dog breathing ambiance from now on. So cozy.
I think he was speaking mainly of 'companion' NPCs that should at least act like they "know" better when, of course, they don't because...well, "artificial intelligence" itself is as much an oxymoron as "virtual reality." I do find that incredibly annoying along with NPCs that rush ahead just so they can set off traps in your character's face and so forth. Har-de-har-har? (Mods to the rescue!) But, yes, actual human beings should know better. So, I've never shed a lot of tears when a friend has run straight into my line of fire and vice versa, etc., in a video game. There's this little thing called situational awareness of which we should all be cognizant at all times. That's actually where MP challenge and skill come in, imo.
this reminds me to much of a recent project I had to do for my job. I work in a city government department as a programmer and I said yes to helping with a backlog project using Microsoft Access as a database. it was pitched to me as a simple table update, and now I have learned to read and write in visual basic, scripting a custom UI, as well as a lot of database management. it took me a month from knowing nothing to knowing more than I'll ever need.
Idea for the sort by pickup timestamp issue: On load populate all items that do not have timestamp with (now - seconds). Since we want to sort them just give each item (now -1*inventory_item_index_number) while iterating through the list of all inventory items. That way all the items will get a pickup time-stamp populated. So now new items that we pick up will show on top or bottom (depending on sort order) while old items will stay in place where they were at the moment of loading the game. That is similar functionality to what Elden Ring implemented in the DLC you have recently picked tab in inventory. My problem with that sorting is: what do we do with stacking items? If I pick a berry that stacks up to 99 do I change the picked up date on the stack? 😂
I think I've played both types of games. Some put that stack as a new item. Some just up the counter. Either way I prefer Tetris inventory and maybe autosort by type/value/condition/alphabet. Sorting items by date is just weird to me.
Yeah, just put in the patch notes about the feature "Items picked up before this patch may not sort properly by pickup time, but items picked up after this patch will" (or something to that effect). Set the time on items if not populated to the load time (or staggered as you said). So long as it's consistent, and works going forward from that point, it'll all work out.
After playing Helldivers 2, I’m convinced that friendly fire is inevitable. If another person is able to accidentally be killed by my target-lock only missile launcher, I have zero expectations for a companion ai do avoid anything.
Thank you for the practical, level-headed takes on game development. The practical discussions are more useful than half of my classes from business school.
A lot of these systems problems could be mitigated by design solutions, like respecting LoS and AI attacking in off-beat patterns, complementing the player's attack baseline. Seen it in some games and works well. In a scenario where the player doesn't get involved in combat, I'd imagine having team-based damage application would mitigate potential friendly mishaps.
You could always make the companion semi-transparent when looking down the sights/scope, and allow player attacks to pass through them. It wouldn't be as realistic, but it should cut down on player frustration.
Sometimes unrealistic features like that can prevent issues that only exist because (and call attention to the fact) you're playing a fake video game. In games, frustration can take you out of an experience like nothing else, though it doesn't necessarily. It doesn't help when the game doesn't incorporate failure into the narrative, loading a save isn't very immersive, and when you're doing it because it's the game's fault on top of that, it's even worse.
Fallout 76 actually implements some kind of "Sort by Recently Added", but it only accounts for items picked up within a certain timeframe (I believe the current game session) and then resets the next time you play. It doesn't account for all items in the inventory, but still lets players access their new items easily. But yeah I definitely see what you mean regarding simple ideas that can quickly become complex when they need to be fleshed out. Thanks for the video!
I'd say this is a great X Y problem. The problem is figuring out how to figure out where is a good place that is out of line of site is the problem and complaint Y. But it doesn't ask how can the player communicate where they want their NPCs to go, which is a solution closer to the problem X which is keep them out of my way. The PC prompt solution would add more code, but it wouldn't add as much to the game loop as the other options of guessing what the player wants. Second issue is communication. Hey guys, we haven't been tracking this information, so we will need to refactor several pieces of information to get this in. We'll see if we can prioritize or not. If there's a lot of communication with the players maybe there's already polls setup to gauge the importance of one feature vs another. If they voice what issues they'd face they could get feedback from players and maybe be able to determine a way to do this which meets most people's needs. Great talk though. Gives things to think about.
I'm thinking the best way to add 'sprt by newest item gained' would be to just add a time stamp when the old save is reloaded. The feature would be useless until the player gained some more items, becausr there wouldn't really be anything to sort. But as new items came in, and old ones filed out, the problem would rectify itself.
why does it have to be a "timestamp" specifically, in some cases the player's complaint might really be about 'I got new Thing, but I didn't check my inventory immediately because "reason", but now that I am checking my inventory I don't know what I picked up and what I have had before' in this situation it just needs a bool (ItemIsNewToInventory)
Just thinking about a solution for the 'don't get in my way' problem is.... wow. The type of processing cycles to dedicate to tracking and AI for that on multiple NPCs per tick as well as any trace tracking from the player is just... wow. But for the inventory one, knowing there was an update, I'd just assume the player knew something would change if they load an old savegame. I'd just set the old inventory items to have the same time stamp, which should default them to the normal sort order, and then any newly picked up items would be sorted by latest. The use case that I think would justify the 'sort by latest' filter is probably picking something up and then trying to find it in your inventory a short while later. In that case, this solution would be sufficient since they would be more concerned with items that they just picked up and items prior to the savegame load is probably not a concern.
When the player first selects Sort by recently added, just show a pop-up that says "This is a new feature and will apply only to newly picked up items." and a button that says "I understand" and if they complain, delete their system32 folder or something. Edit: show a pop-up if it detects a significant number of items with no valid timestamps.
This is why i love games that let you mod them. You can't expect developer's to do everything everyone wants. But given time lots of people can make different changes and each individual can pick the bits that fit them best. The game keeps engagement because people will try new things and devs can get on with DLC or a new game (hopefully).
It think the companion situation with getting in the way is a somewhat simple fix. (Within understanding that nothing is perfect) just move out of players line of sight when the player aims at them for longer than 1 second. With a 3-5 second cooldown. If they are melee, they will only move if they player actively cant shoot the enemy because of them. If they arent melee they are not likely to be infront of the player long enough for it to activate accidentally. They will dtill be in the way but not long enough to be annoying for most people
I keep thinking of BG3. I went into the game fairly unspoiled, but I was familiar with 5e. I noticed as I was playing that Dispel Magic wasn't available in the game. As I thought about the implications of the spell I understood why. It would probably require more time to work out Dispel Magic than all of the other spells combined
I do like how the inventory in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be sorted by Time, Type, and Alphabetical For NPCs getting in the way - for NPCs not engaging in combat they should treat all armed combatants as hostile and seek cover from all of them, including you!
I find it useful sometimes to go back to real-life principles. How would you avoid being in the line of fire of a friendly IRL? Normal people are not going to compute likely enemy positions, line of sights and ballistic trajectories. But I guess most of us would fall back on a reasonably good principle, which is "don't walk in front of anyone who is aiming a gun, stupid". And suddenly that becomes a lot easier to code. It will still fail sometimes, for instance if you do a 180 before firing, but it will fail in a way that feels realistic.
I think for the easiest solution to the issue of allies getting in the way of your shooting would be to just pick a 15 degree cone of your current direction and avoid moving through that cone. If the game has a "weapon drawn" and "weapon sheathed" state its even easier. It wouldnt be perfect but if you start aiming in a direction after afew secoinds youd be able to freely fire - it could be abit janky though.
For most games I don't like the idea of changing major features or game mechanics after launch. Sometimes it can lead to a better game, but it can also lead to a worse one. What if players liked the old feature, now they can't enjoy the game they actually payed for, and are stuck with something that can be drastically different. I've had quite a few games do this recently, and it's really frustrating. I wish they would at least let players opt in & out of build branches. I feel like a lot of devs are just throwing things at the wall to see if they stick, and using customers as beta testers.
I'm seeing this a lot in the alpha "testing" space, which can go on for years and years (and, even, decades) in some cases. :) Sometimes they get better; sometimes they get worse; sometimes they get way better; sometimes they get way worse. Hey, I'm a huge proponent of the "learn by doing" philosophy, so I'm willing to hang in there as some individuals and small teams take a kind of "learn as we go" approach to game development. (How else are they supposed to learn and gain experience outside the primary industry sphere?) But, there's a limit even to that, methinks.
Perhaps a bit of a different case, but Ghost Recon Breakpoint was fundamentally overhauled post-launch. I suppose because it was trying to be live-service? Either way, they were allowed to respond to much of the criticism at launch (of design ethos. the bugs, of course, were expected to be addressed), and it was almost like night and day. I only ever played the 'fixed' version, as the launch vision for the game was the opposite of what I wanted. To me, that's still my favourite example of post-launch additions/alterations. No Man's Sky was a bigger example, yes, but I've never been able to really connect with that game, so nothing it added or changed addressed my main issues. I remember certain recent Assassin's Creeds have done good quality of life additions, plus entire modes. For all Ubisoft's sins, they seem to have one of the best track records for substantive support post-launch. I suppose Cyberpunk 2077 might not really fall into this video's bracket? That might be the best example I've ever seen of a game pretty much admitting its whole skill system design sucked, and really cohering it in elective and fun ways. I didn't personally like how they incentivised certain loops (my character's whole playstyle was undone by 2.0), but I'd much rather see coherent, defined game design than the wasteful mess that was launch Cyberpunk. Witcher 3 was a very good game (I feel under-criticised), but its skill system was kinda shit, which further didn't really help the ho-hum combat. CDPR hadn't seemed to learn with 2077, but 2.0 demonstrated they could. I wonder why the launch skill design was so mediocre. Anyhoo, I'm currently going through DA Veilguard, and given they've apparently said no to DLC or expansions, I'm curious as to what BioWare might do post-launch. I've only seen one bug so far (in over 20hrs), but that leads to a repeatable crash, so it'll have bug fixes. But features, tweaks? I've no idea what they might do.
No DLC for DA:Veilguard because, apparently, all new work is going into the next Mass Effect - however surely there will be bug fixes for a reasonable amount of time from a skeleton crew
@@CainOnGames Just want to say I'm a huge long time fan. Still got my CDs of Fallout and Arcanum. Replayed Arcanum this year, Halfing with a looking glass rifle. I love looking through the Arcanum manual, it's huge. I try to support you. When Outer worlds was released I preordered 2 copies even though I only needed one. I hope we get more games with these ''vibes''. I'd love an Arcanum remake. or something similar at least.
This is something that, right now, is really troubling the Indie game and AA gaming industry and keeping them from competing with the AAA industry. Indie and AA games tend to focus on adding more and more features, and let, in some cases, game breaking bugs sit there un patched for months, sometimes years. A really bad game about this, that was still a notable success, was ARK: Survival Evolved. That game has had several expansion packs, and a full re-release, and it still has bugs that were present at launch.
Tim stop these propaganda videos; we both know this is about your refusal to add jorts to fallout 1. The jean shorts community deserves a full apology for this, not these in depth and helpful explanations of game development practices
A bit of a weird question perhaps, but what do you do to prep for long development/work sessions? Or what have you heard other people do or say they do? For example I grew up as an athlete as a kid up to adulthood that pivoted to programming and game development. But I have this overabundance of energy and habits that I can not focus or calm down unless I workout first. So before long days I have to wake up early and workout until physical exhaustion and my mind can finally be clear. On days I run out of time and can't workout my mind feels foggy and my productivity and mind work at like 10% efficiency and it's not an exaggeration. My Roommate though he only drinks coffee and has to play a game of Magic the Gathering then gets into the zone. One of my coworkers in the past has to be hungry. He can not work efficiently unless hes hungry. He says the carbs and digesting food just throws his entire mood off into being sluggish.
My best work sessions included bringing my dog to work. Every few hours, I’d get up and take him for a 15 minute walk, often with co-workers. We called it The Poop Posse.
Any time anyone asks "why don't you just do x" it becomes very apparent they have no idea what they're really asking. If anything was as easy as "just" doing the thing then it likely would have been done.
Making simple games in gamemaker humbled me to accept weird design decisions. I remember being floored by the very concept of needing to define "what is ground" to an enemy entity to get collision to work. My kid brain suddenly realized games are basically stacking illusions. That there is no ground, I am simply telling the baddie to pretend there is ground.
@CarelessOcelot I've never made a game. The closest I've come was messing around with the editors for Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. I've either been a chef or worked in steel shops. I just love how making is making. Everything Tim talks about are the same issues I've dealt with in my career. I don't know how many times something has come up short notice and I've been asked to "just make" something. I could absolutely make the thing. But I can't just materialize the product, it needs to be ordered first. I can't just find extra labor hours to allocate to this new thing. I can do something fast if needed. You're "just" going to have pay a lot more.
What if the recent items tab was empty when loading the save file for the first time after the patch? But it'll put in new items you pick up after that point. It would probably only be an inconvenience for the first hour while the player gathers new items.
I have a much better solution about the topic recently added sort function and old save games. I would do the following: 1. Give all items from the old save games the timestamp 0. 2. Mark all items with a timestamp of 0 in the inventory with a special background color. Now the user can do the following: 1. Go to the next crate in the area and drop all these items that have this background color from the own inventory to this crate. 2. Add all items in the crate back into your inventory. This gives each item a new timestamp, and the user can decide for himself what the adding order should be. Problem solved. In the changelog for the patch you can then mention that the user can pre-sort his items himself by doing it the way described above.
That's going around your elbow to get to your backside. Just add a time stamp the moment they load the save data to any item without a time stamp. If the player then wishes to reorganize, they can find a chest and play the put everything in then pull it out again game. Bonus: no need for a single use background color that will fall out of use within a week of the feature going live.
I like the coloured background idea, to indicate that they remain unsorted despite the player choosing a sort option Would make sense if this sorting was for the entire inventory - some people are talking about it just being for recent items
@@cavalieroutdoors6036 Your first sentence makes no sense to me. My native language is German. Your second sentence says exactly what I would do. Give every item that doesn't have a timestamp a timestamp. And that should apply to every item from this old save. The timestamp 0 is useful because it can then be easily evaluated for the background color function. I need the feature to give icons in the inventory a background color for quest items or items that the user is wearing anyway. So it would just be another use case. For example, you could use the alpha channel for this and change the transparency of the color effect. And in principle you can also turn this off using a key value pair in the config file. If you don't want that, set the key to False instead of True.
MW5: Mercenaries adjusted Squad made, and important NPC, combat AI so they were less likely to get in your line of fire. Now I end up getting shot in the back. Curse you Duncan Fisher and your PPC-X
Man the saves should always have the game version it was saved as and any new version should recognise when legacy saves are loaded and convert them to new format as well as using the timestamp of when the save was made. All that before saving anything that was in old save. Also possibly don't overwrite the old saves just make new ones to avoid irreversible corruption incidents. Worst case new save will have extra field for save version as well as timeseamp for each item.
@@ashuggtube As an extremely pedantic clairvoyant, unless they're extremely pedantic clairvoyants, they shouldn't be developers. And obviously it is nigh impossible to design everything as futureproof, but it is possible to design changes and improvements in the future, that are 'historyproof', meaning non-destructive. If one has had an oversight in the past, making a novel mistake to fix the disease with a worse cure, does not make one worth their salt.
I often dislike features added after launch (including DLCs and expansions) for two reasons: 1. Many times I either need to wait, sometimes years, before the game is in a "fully finished" state or I play it early and then I get bummed out that I didn't play with some of the new features (since I often don't feel like replaying, especially narrative games). 2. On the other hand, many times I feel that the game was launched with the "right" amount of complexity (since having to launch forces the devs to edit their work) and then the expanded version feels bloated. I find both of these to be fairly common in the types of games that I play, and it's hard to know which is true for a game in advance. So I sometimes wish more games had just launched and moved on (barring important fixes and such).
Fallout 76 actually did add the recent items sorting, but they did it by only showing recent items from the current seasion and they show in their own tab automatically sorted (in addition to being shown in the normal inventory). Previous items are untouched, and when you end the session it doesn't save the recent list.
Hey Tim, you've talked about why you don't review/ critique games before but would you be open to more of a game analysis. Similar to a film class. Just because you didn't make the game, doesn't mean you don't have a pretty good understanding about why certain design choices would've been made. I remember you talked about the outer worlds (a game you designed admittedly), but it not only gave me a newfound appreciation for that game, it made me look at other rpgs in a whole new light. Plus you were a professor before I believe. I'm sure you'd be great at making a short form lecture style video on the analysis of certain aspects of a game. Just food for thought. The content you're making is already tremendous!
@ashuggtube sort of. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a breakdown of a game. It could be a certain level or layout he thinks is clever and explains what makes it clever to him. He's definitely talked about clever choices in other games before
What about Early Access? I know EA is kind of seen as a small developer or indie thing but BG3 was a big developer and had the game in EA for a year (and it seemed to pay off for them).
Ok, so I'm not a programmer, but surely there's a better solution to the problem @ 10:00 than randomising or trying to analyse old saves? Could you not set a default date for all items that don't already have one (January 1, 1970 or some such) and then have a fallback order? Like if you organise items by quantity, and several different items have the same quantity, typically a game would fall back to a different sort order (typically alphabetical) Sure, those legacy players will have a big clump of pre-update items sorted alphabetically at the bottom of their inventory, but it seems like the most practical way to address that issue? It'd be a known bug that would steadily clean itself up over time. (Plus I can imagine that a player could fix it manually by dropping the item and picking it back up if they really needed to)
You can and long term it'd work, but because of that fact, there'd be players complaining because it's an imperfect solution. Which is half of Cain's point, I think. Plus who knows what weird bug you might encounter
What bugs me that A LOT of sometimes very requested features that devs can't/won't add for reasons listed in this video, are quite often easyly provided by mods. I get it, modders operate without deadlines presure and corporate overlords meddeling, but they also almost never have dev tools, source code or work full time just for that mod.
There were two things I missed in the game Morrowind. 1. First, I could lose my quest items by dropping them or selling them. There was no special marking for them either. This should have been patched so that they were at least highlighted or could not be removed from the inventory. 2. There was no quest book. There was a diary that wrote everything down, but reading it after not playing for weeks was very tiring. It was therefore very easy to lose track of your quests in Morrowind. Beteshda tried to improve this with an add-on, but the implementation was rather poor. That is why Morrowind is one of the games that I have not finished. And that is probably not going to change. Maybe one day I will buy Skyrim and then play Morrowind with the Skywind mod. But at the moment I lack the time and interest for this. So this is just a theoretical idea of how I could play through it again. Instead of a medieval fantasy world like Skyrim or Morrowind, I actually prefer a post-apocalyptic world like Fallout or a science-fiction world like Mass Effect. So if I had time, I would first play Fallout 4 and the Fallout London mod.
Funnily enough quest items that you absolutely cannot get rid of no matter how hard you try to is a common complaint ( or bug, in the semi-frequent case where the quest script forgets to unmark them) with both Oblivion and Skyrim. I think the best option is probably to mark them/ensure they don't despawn but let you store them away if you want to. Though keeping containers alive _is_ somewhat of a challenge at that world scale, mayhaps having a fallback implemented for recovering "lost" items at a central location would be wise.
@@RandomlyAwesomeGamer In Fallout 3, you had special crates in this case cabinets in your house that didn't lose their items. Something like that could be useful. But marking the quest items would be mandatory. And maybe you could make it so that you can only put the quest items in such crates, but can't get rid of them in any other way apart from the quest. That way they won't get lost somewhere in the world, nor will they be sold as diving goods or trade goods. I could have used a fallback function like this in Morrowind. Maybe I can get the lost quest items back using the debug console function, I haven't tried it yet. An alternative solution for marking quest items would be a separate inventory view for quest items. The quest items would then no longer appear in the normal inventory view. This means that they would not have to be visually highlighted in the inventory. BTW In Fallout 3, most quest items had no weight or no significant weight. So it didn't matter. But you couldn't get rid of them outside of the quest either.
You'll probably never read this Tim but I would be very curious as a game developers perspective on From softwares Games Dark Souls Elden ring bloodborne and Sekiro
i'd expect timestamps for items right from the start in any rpg published in the last 20 years tbh. and the problem with most companions running into your line of fire is that they run in AFTER you started shooting already and immediately get hit. not to mention that most enemies aren't even smart enough to evade anyway. they're just standing there. meaning you shoot at a (near) static target (maybe a short bunny hop to the left and right if the devs feel like it) and the companions could tackle it from literally any angle, but choose the direct way where you are standing and firing. and THAT is frustrating. if the situation were as complex as you make it out to be, then i'd have less of an issue with this tbh. and i'd never expect companions to avoid your line of fire by a 120° angle, just don't rush into the DIRECT line of fire - like literally a 5 or 10° angle. that would be an amazing improvement for 99 % of the games out there.
so there is a tactical genre of games that has had a major rise in popularity, technically they are tactical games but I like to call them Xcom-likes. Now would you say it would be easy to make scripts from someone to follow along with to beat the first mission of Xcom 1 without losing more than 1 person? that game was made 11 years ago for reference.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 i was talking action rpgs (or looter shooters as you may call some of them). meaning you fire and don't leave it up to chance to hit. i could never bring myself to play a 3d dice roller tbh.
@@galdersrontgorrth im just try to express how much thought actually goes into scripting NPCs. If you are frustrated reacting towards friendly NPCs then how would a programmer feel having to script those NPCs years before it even gets in your hands.
Well if you're on console Microsoft has very strict rules for patches. And that's not even getting into the contracts that the developers have with publishers.
First, agreed that is a lot of work. About the line of sight AI. Is way more simple to implement a comand prompt that the player can do for asking the allies to duck or get out of the way. The worst part about companion fights is that you cannot, as you should be able to, ask them do certain things. A good example is FF XII Zodiac with a flow chart configurable by the player. Good example of this is D&D, when you're playing ranged you can ask your allies to open way so you can shoot without Disavantage or you must find a Vantage point to shoot.
FF12 was ahead of its time. I didn't appreciate the gambit system at the time but now I wish we had that sort of fine tuning available in a lot of real-time companion games.
I mean, sort by time stamp of picked up. You could tell the players that obviously the game won't know a time stamp in previous save games. Players could also just drop and pick back up an item they want higher in the list. And players might already have other sorting options any ways.
Hi Tim, why not implement only companions to not get in your line of fire? The others are not that important. As for melee, the companions could be impeached from running to your target. Would it be possible and how complicated would it be ?
The code itself is the hard part. Adding it to companions only or all NPCs is trivial, except for the increase in computing resources required for each NPC the code is added to. The increase in computing resources is significant enough to even have to think about meeting frame rate requirements.
Because devs then have to code them not being in front of you only in combat, otherwise the player could never looks at them. Then if (like in some games) the player needs to toggle the companion to attack a specific enemy, the player cannot address then while in combat due to the companion move out of sight.
Atleast in the 2000's the shovelware was easily identifiable packages no one cared about sitting on game store walls. In 2024 the triple AAA sector is the shovelware for the first 2-3 years of its life until "playability" is patched in. Don't forget the 40 dollars day 1 DLC and the extra egregious play 3 day early bonus were seeing now
Only 17 seconds in I realized it's not "Adding New Features after LUNCH"
It's hard to code in a food coma...
Yummy features!
Me too 😂
same... same... 😅
you're hungry
The dog snoring in the background is my favorite
The real MVP
I think it's actually realistic that civilians get into your line of sight. People don't notice everything or act foolish when they panic. I think it should be incumbent on the player to adapt to a chaotic situation instead of expecting the NPCs to make it easy for you.
I've just understood why companions getting in your line of sight is Tims main example...
Ian...
GODDAMN IAN.
Also BG3 is one of the worst offenders for adding so many unnecessary features post launch that it just bloats an already lengthy experience.
@@traversingthedark Can you give an example of what you mean? I know they've added some content (that I haven't found the time to check out personally), but what features "bloat" the experience?
RIP Ian
You can take his cool jacket though
@@AnvilOfDoom If, 1/2 years after a game comes out, that game is still making me wait for 10GB updates every couple of months (and the game isn't an MMO) I would call that bloat, especially considering that the game was in EA for like 5 years.
I am well aware that Larian studios are the current darlings of the RPG world. But we gotta call a spade a spade.
@@traversingthedark So it's not really any features you object to, but the download size of the updates? Just trying to understand what spade you are talking about.
Nevermind companions getting in your line of fire, or shooting you in the back, when you have companions snoring in the background, while you're trying to explain things.
5:30 Now I just want to see an ARPG game where the enemy tries to use panicking civilians as cover from the player
07:55 Ian was very polite that way he wouldn't yell at you or anything he'd just shoot a whole burst of SMG in your neck 😁
Ouch, that hurts! 😂
Ian is nothing, Marcus in F2 could gleefully empty minigun or gatling laser into your back. Rule of thumb is, never give him burts-capable weapons.
Make player drop all non-timestamped items on the ground on game load 🙃
1. Forces player to pick up items and adds timestamps in the process
2. Makes player aware of a new feature
3. Funny
Extra points for funny
Such a cool conundrum pondering. Played plenty of games where the team feels like self-sabotaging but it can add some unintentional humor too, when it's not too severe.
Now that I heard it with the headphones, I think I need the dog breathing ambiance from now on. So cozy.
I think he was speaking mainly of 'companion' NPCs that should at least act like they "know" better when, of course, they don't because...well, "artificial intelligence" itself is as much an oxymoron as "virtual reality." I do find that incredibly annoying along with NPCs that rush ahead just so they can set off traps in your character's face and so forth. Har-de-har-har? (Mods to the rescue!)
But, yes, actual human beings should know better. So, I've never shed a lot of tears when a friend has run straight into my line of fire and vice versa, etc., in a video game. There's this little thing called situational awareness of which we should all be cognizant at all times. That's actually where MP challenge and skill come in, imo.
@@lrinfi Oh, yeah by team I meant the AI-controlled NPCs.
this reminds me to much of a recent project I had to do for my job. I work in a city government department as a programmer and I said yes to helping with a backlog project using Microsoft Access as a database. it was pitched to me as a simple table update, and now I have learned to read and write in visual basic, scripting a custom UI, as well as a lot of database management. it took me a month from knowing nothing to knowing more than I'll ever need.
Oh heck. "Simple table update" my butt.
Idea for the sort by pickup timestamp issue:
On load populate all items that do not have timestamp with (now - seconds). Since we want to sort them just give each item (now -1*inventory_item_index_number) while iterating through the list of all inventory items. That way all the items will get a pickup time-stamp populated. So now new items that we pick up will show on top or bottom (depending on sort order) while old items will stay in place where they were at the moment of loading the game.
That is similar functionality to what Elden Ring implemented in the DLC you have recently picked tab in inventory.
My problem with that sorting is: what do we do with stacking items? If I pick a berry that stacks up to 99 do I change the picked up date on the stack? 😂
I think I've played both types of games. Some put that stack as a new item. Some just up the counter.
Either way I prefer Tetris inventory and maybe autosort by type/value/condition/alphabet. Sorting items by date is just weird to me.
Yeah, just put in the patch notes about the feature "Items picked up before this patch may not sort properly by pickup time, but items picked up after this patch will" (or something to that effect). Set the time on items if not populated to the load time (or staggered as you said). So long as it's consistent, and works going forward from that point, it'll all work out.
After playing Helldivers 2, I’m convinced that friendly fire is inevitable. If another person is able to accidentally be killed by my target-lock only missile launcher, I have zero expectations for a companion ai do avoid anything.
Friendly fire _is_ inevitable, and a really common problem. Just look at any wars or conflicts in the whole history of combat.
Thank you for the practical, level-headed takes on game development. The practical discussions are more useful than half of my classes from business school.
A lot of these systems problems could be mitigated by design solutions, like respecting LoS and AI attacking in off-beat patterns, complementing the player's attack baseline. Seen it in some games and works well. In a scenario where the player doesn't get involved in combat, I'd imagine having team-based damage application would mitigate potential friendly mishaps.
Adding new features after launch is the Paradox whole business model!:D
You could always make the companion semi-transparent when looking down the sights/scope, and allow player attacks to pass through them. It wouldn't be as realistic, but it should cut down on player frustration.
Sometimes unrealistic features like that can prevent issues that only exist because (and call attention to the fact) you're playing a fake video game.
In games, frustration can take you out of an experience like nothing else, though it doesn't necessarily. It doesn't help when the game doesn't incorporate failure into the narrative, loading a save isn't very immersive, and when you're doing it because it's the game's fault on top of that, it's even worse.
Fallout 76 actually implements some kind of "Sort by Recently Added", but it only accounts for items picked up within a certain timeframe (I believe the current game session) and then resets the next time you play.
It doesn't account for all items in the inventory, but still lets players access their new items easily.
But yeah I definitely see what you mean regarding simple ideas that can quickly become complex when they need to be fleshed out.
Thanks for the video!
I'd say this is a great X Y problem. The problem is figuring out how to figure out where is a good place that is out of line of site is the problem and complaint Y. But it doesn't ask how can the player communicate where they want their NPCs to go, which is a solution closer to the problem X which is keep them out of my way. The PC prompt solution would add more code, but it wouldn't add as much to the game loop as the other options of guessing what the player wants.
Second issue is communication. Hey guys, we haven't been tracking this information, so we will need to refactor several pieces of information to get this in. We'll see if we can prioritize or not. If there's a lot of communication with the players maybe there's already polls setup to gauge the importance of one feature vs another. If they voice what issues they'd face they could get feedback from players and maybe be able to determine a way to do this which meets most people's needs.
Great talk though. Gives things to think about.
I'm thinking the best way to add 'sprt by newest item gained' would be to just add a time stamp when the old save is reloaded. The feature would be useless until the player gained some more items, becausr there wouldn't really be anything to sort. But as new items came in, and old ones filed out, the problem would rectify itself.
why does it have to be a "timestamp" specifically, in some cases the player's complaint might really be about 'I got new Thing, but I didn't check my inventory immediately because "reason", but now that I am checking my inventory I don't know what I picked up and what I have had before' in this situation it just needs a bool (ItemIsNewToInventory)
Just thinking about a solution for the 'don't get in my way' problem is.... wow. The type of processing cycles to dedicate to tracking and AI for that on multiple NPCs per tick as well as any trace tracking from the player is just... wow.
But for the inventory one, knowing there was an update, I'd just assume the player knew something would change if they load an old savegame. I'd just set the old inventory items to have the same time stamp, which should default them to the normal sort order, and then any newly picked up items would be sorted by latest.
The use case that I think would justify the 'sort by latest' filter is probably picking something up and then trying to find it in your inventory a short while later. In that case, this solution would be sufficient since they would be more concerned with items that they just picked up and items prior to the savegame load is probably not a concern.
The alternative of "magical plot armour" and friendly NPCs not taking damage from player fire is also a common choice
When the player first selects Sort by recently added, just show a pop-up that says "This is a new feature and will apply only to newly picked up items." and a button that says "I understand" and if they complain, delete their system32 folder or something.
Edit: show a pop-up if it detects a significant number of items with no valid timestamps.
I second the idea of deleting those users' system32 folders who sign the TOS and then go bitching about useless things.
This is why i love games that let you mod them. You can't expect developer's to do everything everyone wants. But given time lots of people can make different changes and each individual can pick the bits that fit them best. The game keeps engagement because people will try new things and devs can get on with DLC or a new game (hopefully).
At least some devs have implemented this concept correctly. Most publishers charge you for new features!
It think the companion situation with getting in the way is a somewhat simple fix. (Within understanding that nothing is perfect) just move out of players line of sight when the player aims at them for longer than 1 second. With a 3-5 second cooldown. If they are melee, they will only move if they player actively cant shoot the enemy because of them. If they arent melee they are not likely to be infront of the player long enough for it to activate accidentally. They will dtill be in the way but not long enough to be annoying for most people
I keep thinking of BG3. I went into the game fairly unspoiled, but I was familiar with 5e. I noticed as I was playing that Dispel Magic wasn't available in the game. As I thought about the implications of the spell I understood why. It would probably require more time to work out Dispel Magic than all of the other spells combined
Was listening on headset, turned around in shock thinking who the f is sleeping in my house lol
You said you play action RPGs. What games have you been playing lately?
Modders will fix it.
The Skyrim inventory screen, and Fallout 4 building menus.
Thank you modders.
I do like how the inventory in Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be sorted by Time, Type, and Alphabetical
For NPCs getting in the way - for NPCs not engaging in combat they should treat all armed combatants as hostile and seek cover from all of them, including you!
I find it useful sometimes to go back to real-life principles. How would you avoid being in the line of fire of a friendly IRL?
Normal people are not going to compute likely enemy positions, line of sights and ballistic trajectories. But I guess most of us would fall back on a reasonably good principle, which is "don't walk in front of anyone who is aiming a gun, stupid".
And suddenly that becomes a lot easier to code. It will still fail sometimes, for instance if you do a 180 before firing, but it will fail in a way that feels realistic.
I think for the easiest solution to the issue of allies getting in the way of your shooting would be to just pick a 15 degree cone of your current direction and avoid moving through that cone. If the game has a "weapon drawn" and "weapon sheathed" state its even easier. It wouldnt be perfect but if you start aiming in a direction after afew secoinds youd be able to freely fire - it could be abit janky though.
For most games I don't like the idea of changing major features or game mechanics after launch. Sometimes it can lead to a better game, but it can also lead to a worse one. What if players liked the old feature, now they can't enjoy the game they actually payed for, and are stuck with something that can be drastically different. I've had quite a few games do this recently, and it's really frustrating. I wish they would at least let players opt in & out of build branches. I feel like a lot of devs are just throwing things at the wall to see if they stick, and using customers as beta testers.
I'm seeing this a lot in the alpha "testing" space, which can go on for years and years (and, even, decades) in some cases. :) Sometimes they get better; sometimes they get worse; sometimes they get way better; sometimes they get way worse.
Hey, I'm a huge proponent of the "learn by doing" philosophy, so I'm willing to hang in there as some individuals and small teams take a kind of "learn as we go" approach to game development. (How else are they supposed to learn and gain experience outside the primary industry sphere?) But, there's a limit even to that, methinks.
In the gaming industry, is this scenario known as a Reverse Ian?
Perhaps a bit of a different case, but Ghost Recon Breakpoint was fundamentally overhauled post-launch. I suppose because it was trying to be live-service?
Either way, they were allowed to respond to much of the criticism at launch (of design ethos. the bugs, of course, were expected to be addressed), and it was almost like night and day. I only ever played the 'fixed' version, as the launch vision for the game was the opposite of what I wanted.
To me, that's still my favourite example of post-launch additions/alterations. No Man's Sky was a bigger example, yes, but I've never been able to really connect with that game, so nothing it added or changed addressed my main issues.
I remember certain recent Assassin's Creeds have done good quality of life additions, plus entire modes. For all Ubisoft's sins, they seem to have one of the best track records for substantive support post-launch.
I suppose Cyberpunk 2077 might not really fall into this video's bracket? That might be the best example I've ever seen of a game pretty much admitting its whole skill system design sucked, and really cohering it in elective and fun ways. I didn't personally like how they incentivised certain loops (my character's whole playstyle was undone by 2.0), but I'd much rather see coherent, defined game design than the wasteful mess that was launch Cyberpunk.
Witcher 3 was a very good game (I feel under-criticised), but its skill system was kinda shit, which further didn't really help the ho-hum combat. CDPR hadn't seemed to learn with 2077, but 2.0 demonstrated they could. I wonder why the launch skill design was so mediocre.
Anyhoo, I'm currently going through DA Veilguard, and given they've apparently said no to DLC or expansions, I'm curious as to what BioWare might do post-launch. I've only seen one bug so far (in over 20hrs), but that leads to a repeatable crash, so it'll have bug fixes. But features, tweaks? I've no idea what they might do.
No DLC for DA:Veilguard because, apparently, all new work is going into the next Mass Effect - however surely there will be bug fixes for a reasonable amount of time from a skeleton crew
9:00 one of the craziest things I've ever seen in patching history was seeing Elden Ring do exactly this
The amount of times Ian killed me. XD
Bullets are Ian's love language. Unfortunately they are also his hate language.
@@CainOnGames Just want to say I'm a huge long time fan. Still got my CDs of Fallout and Arcanum. Replayed Arcanum this year, Halfing with a looking glass rifle. I love looking through the Arcanum manual, it's huge.
I try to support you. When Outer worlds was released I preordered 2 copies even though I only needed one.
I hope we get more games with these ''vibes''. I'd love an Arcanum remake. or something similar at least.
@malango255 Thank you. I think about it too.
Thoughts On An Arcanum Remake
ruclips.net/video/pgn2sQ4vAkU/видео.html
This is something that, right now, is really troubling the Indie game and AA gaming industry and keeping them from competing with the AAA industry. Indie and AA games tend to focus on adding more and more features, and let, in some cases, game breaking bugs sit there un patched for months, sometimes years. A really bad game about this, that was still a notable success, was ARK: Survival Evolved. That game has had several expansion packs, and a full re-release, and it still has bugs that were present at launch.
Tim stop these propaganda videos; we both know this is about your refusal to add jorts to fallout 1. The jean shorts community deserves a full apology for this, not these in depth and helpful explanations of game development practices
#nevernude lol
Based take. It's about time to give Fallout 1 some love and new features in the shape of jorts.
A bit of a weird question perhaps, but what do you do to prep for long development/work sessions? Or what have you heard other people do or say they do?
For example I grew up as an athlete as a kid up to adulthood that pivoted to programming and game development. But I have this overabundance of energy and habits that I can not focus or calm down unless I workout first. So before long days I have to wake up early and workout until physical exhaustion and my mind can finally be clear. On days I run out of time and can't workout my mind feels foggy and my productivity and mind work at like 10% efficiency and it's not an exaggeration.
My Roommate though he only drinks coffee and has to play a game of Magic the Gathering then gets into the zone. One of my coworkers in the past has to be hungry. He can not work efficiently unless hes hungry. He says the carbs and digesting food just throws his entire mood off into being sluggish.
My best work sessions included bringing my dog to work. Every few hours, I’d get up and take him for a 15 minute walk, often with co-workers. We called it The Poop Posse.
Any time anyone asks "why don't you just do x" it becomes very apparent they have no idea what they're really asking. If anything was as easy as "just" doing the thing then it likely would have been done.
Are you implying that converting a 2D game into 3D is just a matter of increasing the dimensions by 50%??
@@Ms.Pronounced_Nameare you telling me it isn't!? My whole life is a lie...
Making simple games in gamemaker humbled me to accept weird design decisions. I remember being floored by the very concept of needing to define "what is ground" to an enemy entity to get collision to work. My kid brain suddenly realized games are basically stacking illusions. That there is no ground, I am simply telling the baddie to pretend there is ground.
@@CarelessOcelot Yep. And that idea goes on, and on, and on...
@CarelessOcelot I've never made a game. The closest I've come was messing around with the editors for Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. I've either been a chef or worked in steel shops.
I just love how making is making. Everything Tim talks about are the same issues I've dealt with in my career. I don't know how many times something has come up short notice and I've been asked to "just make" something. I could absolutely make the thing. But I can't just materialize the product, it needs to be ordered first. I can't just find extra labor hours to allocate to this new thing.
I can do something fast if needed. You're "just" going to have pay a lot more.
What is that sound of labored inhaling coming from, it doesn't seem to be from Tim but I distinctly hear it.
It's his dog.
have you made a video about cutting out features?
Design Fallbacks
ruclips.net/video/T7ToTnHj-CI/видео.html
What if the recent items tab was empty when loading the save file for the first time after the patch? But it'll put in new items you pick up after that point. It would probably only be an inconvenience for the first hour while the player gathers new items.
I have a much better solution about the topic recently added sort function and old save games.
I would do the following:
1. Give all items from the old save games the timestamp 0.
2. Mark all items with a timestamp of 0 in the inventory with a special background color.
Now the user can do the following:
1. Go to the next crate in the area and drop all these items that have this background color from the own inventory to this crate.
2. Add all items in the crate back into your inventory. This gives each item a new timestamp, and the user can decide for himself what the adding order should be.
Problem solved. In the changelog for the patch you can then mention that the user can pre-sort his items himself by doing it the way described above.
That's going around your elbow to get to your backside. Just add a time stamp the moment they load the save data to any item without a time stamp. If the player then wishes to reorganize, they can find a chest and play the put everything in then pull it out again game. Bonus: no need for a single use background color that will fall out of use within a week of the feature going live.
I like the coloured background idea, to indicate that they remain unsorted despite the player choosing a sort option
Would make sense if this sorting was for the entire inventory - some people are talking about it just being for recent items
@@cavalieroutdoors6036 Your first sentence makes no sense to me. My native language is German.
Your second sentence says exactly what I would do. Give every item that doesn't have a timestamp a timestamp. And that should apply to every item from this old save. The timestamp 0 is useful because it can then be easily evaluated for the background color function.
I need the feature to give icons in the inventory a background color for quest items or items that the user is wearing anyway. So it would just be another use case. For example, you could use the alpha channel for this and change the transparency of the color effect. And in principle you can also turn this off using a key value pair in the config file. If you don't want that, set the key to False instead of True.
MW5: Mercenaries adjusted Squad made, and important NPC, combat AI so they were less likely to get in your line of fire. Now I end up getting shot in the back. Curse you Duncan Fisher and your PPC-X
Man the saves should always have the game version it was saved as and any new version should recognise when legacy saves are loaded and convert them to new format as well as using the timestamp of when the save was made. All that before saving anything that was in old save. Also possibly don't overwrite the old saves just make new ones to avoid irreversible corruption incidents. Worst case new save will have extra field for save version as well as timeseamp for each item.
If the developers weren't clairvoyant (or extremely pedantic) programming futureproofness can be pretty difficult
@@ashuggtube As an extremely pedantic clairvoyant, unless they're extremely pedantic clairvoyants, they shouldn't be developers. And obviously it is nigh impossible to design everything as futureproof, but it is possible to design changes and improvements in the future, that are 'historyproof', meaning non-destructive. If one has had an oversight in the past, making a novel mistake to fix the disease with a worse cure, does not make one worth their salt.
I often dislike features added after launch (including DLCs and expansions) for two reasons:
1. Many times I either need to wait, sometimes years, before the game is in a "fully finished" state or I play it early and then I get bummed out that I didn't play with some of the new features (since I often don't feel like replaying, especially narrative games).
2. On the other hand, many times I feel that the game was launched with the "right" amount of complexity (since having to launch forces the devs to edit their work) and then the expanded version feels bloated.
I find both of these to be fairly common in the types of games that I play, and it's hard to know which is true for a game in advance. So I sometimes wish more games had just launched and moved on (barring important fixes and such).
Fallout 76 actually did add the recent items sorting, but they did it by only showing recent items from the current seasion and they show in their own tab automatically sorted (in addition to being shown in the normal inventory). Previous items are untouched, and when you end the session it doesn't save the recent list.
Hey Tim, you've talked about why you don't review/ critique games before but would you be open to more of a game analysis. Similar to a film class. Just because you didn't make the game, doesn't mean you don't have a pretty good understanding about why certain design choices would've been made. I remember you talked about the outer worlds (a game you designed admittedly), but it not only gave me a newfound appreciation for that game, it made me look at other rpgs in a whole new light.
Plus you were a professor before I believe. I'm sure you'd be great at making a short form lecture style video on the analysis of certain aspects of a game.
Just food for thought. The content you're making is already tremendous!
Like a breakdown of a game with "lots of people like X - but why?"
@ashuggtube sort of. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a breakdown of a game. It could be a certain level or layout he thinks is clever and explains what makes it clever to him. He's definitely talked about clever choices in other games before
@ yeah agreed
What about Early Access? I know EA is kind of seen as a small developer or indie thing but BG3 was a big developer and had the game in EA for a year (and it seemed to pay off for them).
Ok, so I'm not a programmer, but surely there's a better solution to the problem @ 10:00 than randomising or trying to analyse old saves? Could you not set a default date for all items that don't already have one (January 1, 1970 or some such) and then have a fallback order?
Like if you organise items by quantity, and several different items have the same quantity, typically a game would fall back to a different sort order (typically alphabetical)
Sure, those legacy players will have a big clump of pre-update items sorted alphabetically at the bottom of their inventory, but it seems like the most practical way to address that issue? It'd be a known bug that would steadily clean itself up over time. (Plus I can imagine that a player could fix it manually by dropping the item and picking it back up if they really needed to)
You can and long term it'd work, but because of that fact, there'd be players complaining because it's an imperfect solution. Which is half of Cain's point, I think. Plus who knows what weird bug you might encounter
What bugs me that A LOT of sometimes very requested features that devs can't/won't add for reasons listed in this video, are quite often easyly provided by mods. I get it, modders operate without deadlines presure and corporate overlords meddeling, but they also almost never have dev tools, source code or work full time just for that mod.
There were two things I missed in the game Morrowind.
1. First, I could lose my quest items by dropping them or selling them. There was no special marking for them either. This should have been patched so that they were at least highlighted or could not be removed from the inventory.
2. There was no quest book. There was a diary that wrote everything down, but reading it after not playing for weeks was very tiring. It was therefore very easy to lose track of your quests in Morrowind. Beteshda tried to improve this with an add-on, but the implementation was rather poor. That is why Morrowind is one of the games that I have not finished. And that is probably not going to change. Maybe one day I will buy Skyrim and then play Morrowind with the Skywind mod. But at the moment I lack the time and interest for this. So this is just a theoretical idea of how I could play through it again. Instead of a medieval fantasy world like Skyrim or Morrowind, I actually prefer a post-apocalyptic world like Fallout or a science-fiction world like Mass Effect. So if I had time, I would first play Fallout 4 and the Fallout London mod.
Funnily enough quest items that you absolutely cannot get rid of no matter how hard you try to is a common complaint ( or bug, in the semi-frequent case where the quest script forgets to unmark them) with both Oblivion and Skyrim. I think the best option is probably to mark them/ensure they don't despawn but let you store them away if you want to. Though keeping containers alive _is_ somewhat of a challenge at that world scale, mayhaps having a fallback implemented for recovering "lost" items at a central location would be wise.
@@RandomlyAwesomeGamer In Fallout 3, you had special crates in this case cabinets in your house that didn't lose their items. Something like that could be useful. But marking the quest items would be mandatory. And maybe you could make it so that you can only put the quest items in such crates, but can't get rid of them in any other way apart from the quest. That way they won't get lost somewhere in the world, nor will they be sold as diving goods or trade goods.
I could have used a fallback function like this in Morrowind. Maybe I can get the lost quest items back using the debug console function, I haven't tried it yet.
An alternative solution for marking quest items would be a separate inventory view for quest items. The quest items would then no longer appear in the normal inventory view. This means that they would not have to be visually highlighted in the inventory.
BTW In Fallout 3, most quest items had no weight or no significant weight. So it didn't matter. But you couldn't get rid of them outside of the quest either.
You'll probably never read this Tim but I would be very curious as a game developers perspective on From softwares Games Dark Souls Elden ring bloodborne and Sekiro
Elden Ring and EverQuest
ruclips.net/video/OoOH4qYCMto/видео.html
i'd expect timestamps for items right from the start in any rpg published in the last 20 years tbh.
and the problem with most companions running into your line of fire is that they run in AFTER you started shooting already and immediately get hit. not to mention that most enemies aren't even smart enough to evade anyway. they're just standing there. meaning you shoot at a (near) static target (maybe a short bunny hop to the left and right if the devs feel like it) and the companions could tackle it from literally any angle, but choose the direct way where you are standing and firing. and THAT is frustrating. if the situation were as complex as you make it out to be, then i'd have less of an issue with this tbh. and i'd never expect companions to avoid your line of fire by a 120° angle, just don't rush into the DIRECT line of fire - like literally a 5 or 10° angle. that would be an amazing improvement for 99 % of the games out there.
so there is a tactical genre of games that has had a major rise in popularity, technically they are tactical games but I like to call them Xcom-likes. Now would you say it would be easy to make scripts from someone to follow along with to beat the first mission of Xcom 1 without losing more than 1 person? that game was made 11 years ago for reference.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 i was talking action rpgs (or looter shooters as you may call some of them). meaning you fire and don't leave it up to chance to hit. i could never bring myself to play a 3d dice roller tbh.
@@galdersrontgorrth Wow, no offense but you're calling yourself out. Those games are amazing.
@@galdersrontgorrth im just try to express how much thought actually goes into scripting NPCs. If you are frustrated reacting towards friendly NPCs then how would a programmer feel having to script those NPCs years before it even gets in your hands.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 and i'm just trying to express that i would have agreed in the past, but nowadays not so much.
Well if you're on console Microsoft has very strict rules for patches. And that's not even getting into the contracts that the developers have with publishers.
Order by drop loot zone descending
you missed the 3rd reason:
player: "This is so easy to do why isn't it in the game"
Dev: "you think that is 'easy'.... HAHAHAHA"
First, agreed that is a lot of work.
About the line of sight AI. Is way more simple to implement a comand prompt that the player can do for asking the allies to duck or get out of the way. The worst part about companion fights is that you cannot, as you should be able to, ask them do certain things. A good example is FF XII Zodiac with a flow chart configurable by the player.
Good example of this is D&D, when you're playing ranged you can ask your allies to open way so you can shoot without Disavantage or you must find a Vantage point to shoot.
FF12 was ahead of its time. I didn't appreciate the gambit system at the time but now I wish we had that sort of fine tuning available in a lot of real-time companion games.
another way to sort by recent if there is no data would be to create a dictionary of item acquisition order in regard to progress and sort by it.
Do you mean something like "this item can only be acquired at point X"? If so, what if your game allows sequence breaking?
@@trabnas then you perform a subsort by sequence, given there is a way to query which sequence was started earlier from the game's state somehow
@@bratttn well with that data it just sounds like you implemented sort by most recent 🤷
I mean, sort by time stamp of picked up.
You could tell the players that obviously the game won't know a time stamp in previous save games.
Players could also just drop and pick back up an item they want higher in the list.
And players might already have other sorting options any ways.
Hi Tim, why not implement only companions to not get in your line of fire? The others are not that important. As for melee, the companions could be impeached from running to your target. Would it be possible and how complicated would it be ?
The code itself is the hard part. Adding it to companions only or all NPCs is trivial, except for the increase in computing resources required for each NPC the code is added to.
The increase in computing resources is significant enough to even have to think about meeting frame rate requirements.
Because devs then have to code them not being in front of you only in combat, otherwise the player could never looks at them. Then if (like in some games) the player needs to toggle the companion to attack a specific enemy, the player cannot address then while in combat due to the companion move out of sight.
Who’s snorting in the background😂
The dog 🥰
Doesn't new content count as a new feature?
It can, if the game wasn’t designed to get new content added to it.
Atleast in the 2000's the shovelware was easily identifiable packages no one cared about sitting on game store walls. In 2024 the triple AAA sector is the shovelware for the first 2-3 years of its life until "playability" is patched in. Don't forget the 40 dollars day 1 DLC and the extra egregious play 3 day early bonus were seeing now