I don’t deny that adding brand new content (new weapons, gearset storage, heck even new maps) takes a different type of mindset and resources. Whats extremely frustrating is why its taking so long to tune EXISTING items in the game to improve the user experience. And I did not hear any explanation (excuse) as to why it is taking them oh so long to tune clearly broken aspects of today’s game.
2 examples:
1.) Weapon Balancing. This isn’t new development, this is simply someone editing the giant table/database of weapon/ability damages and perks. They should be able to iterate on this quickly, and I’d love to see balance patches every 2 weeks or 1mo (even if not perfect at least start moving things in the right direction). Obviously some problems in the game related to balance can’t fit into this category (ex: delete/rework musket, delete/rework defy death perk, etc etc), but you could at least make an attempt at balancing by dropping the time of defy death or changing it from immunity to damage to 75% damage reduction within the current framework…Or on the musket change base damage if damage fallout vs. distance isn’t something in the code today. Something…Anything would be better than the 4mo broken pvp balance we still have right now…
2.) Colored AOE abilities. This will probably be a controversial opinion, but don’t try to tell me that this required a ton of brand new development. Obviously the system already knows which spells are friendly and which are enemy based on whether you get healing/damage or you don’t…So lets not pretend that some huge effort needed to be done to figure out which spells were your team vs the other team. And the game already graphically displays spells that overlap (just look at two sacreds and how they overlay today). I’m truly perplexed how this took 1 year. I mean friendly spell = #00FF00 and enemy spell = #FF0000. Done, boom, lets go (OK OK i’m sure its a little harder than this…but its not “total new development”)
After listening to this video it just seems that the devs are caught up / prioritizing total new development (New backend / engine optimizations for upcoming features, bigger new content or systems like gearset storage or completely redoing the influence game).
My personal opinion is AGS would benefit greatly from creating a separate “tuning” team, whose sole focus is optimizing the game within the current framework (at the bare minimum balancing pvp or gathering/crafting/loot by tuning existing knobs (tables) within the current game elements & infrastructure). Then, let there be a separate total new content (ground up team) that works on conceptually new ideas and brings them from scratch into the game. They don’t seem to be able to do both in parallel at the same time, and in my line of work there’s a reason we separate development engineering from sustaining/manufacturing engineering (organizationally). Otherwise its too easy to get sucked too far into the vortex of one vs. the other. They’ve even mentioned in the past no one wants to work on fixing bugs in one of the dev blog videos, but people work on that then move into developing new content again. I guess tuning/fixing up the existing game systems to make a product your customers enjoy is too basic/boring of a task, and everyone in the dev team wants to work on the sexy new ground up work… Sadly there’s so much bang for the buck (developer hours) that could be attained from working on the little things.
If there were ongoing balance tweaks on a regular basis, I think the community would cut the Devs a lot more slack…compared to us all sitting here whining as the game becomes stale for months on end.
End of the day it comes down to priorities like others said, and they’re just doing a piss poor job of picking and choosing where to spend their limited developer’s hours…