Comment by colechristensen
16 days ago
>But over 6x the size with so little benefit for such a small segment of the players is very frustrating. Why wasn't this caught earlier? Why didn't anyone test? Why didn't anyone weigh the pros and cons?
Have you never worked in an organization that made software?
Damn near everything can be 10x as fast and using 1/10th the resources if someone bothered to take the time to find the optimizations. RARE is it that something is even in the same order of magnitude as its optimum implementation.
But this isn't an optimization. The 150+GB size is the "optimization", one that never actually helped with anything. The whole news here is "Helldivers 2 stopped intentionally screwing its customers".
I don't see why it's a surprise that people react "negatively", in the sense of being mad that (a) Helldivers 2 was intentionally screwing the customers before, and (b) everyone else is still doing it.
> The whole news here is "Helldivers 2 stopped intentionally screwing its customers".
That is an extremely disingenuous way to frame the issue.
How so?
I think what makes this a bit different from the usual "time/value tradeoff" discussion is bloating the size by 6x-7x was the result of unnecessary work in the name of optimization instead of lack of cycles to spend on optimization.
Eh probably not, it's probably handled by some automated system when making release builds of the game. Sure, implementing that initially was probably some work (or maybe it was just checking a checkbox in some tool), but there's probably not much manual work involved anymore to keep it going.
Reverting it now though, when the game is out there on a million systems, requires significant investigation to ensure they're not making things significantly worse for anyone, plus a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't outright break stuff.
Reverting it now was certainly a pile of work, but that's neither here nor there for the portion of the story bothering people. It's like they threw rocks threw the windows years ago to make them slightly clearer to see through and now put a ton of work in to undo that because they discovered that made no sense in reality.
It's great they did all the work to fix it after the fact, but that doesn't justify why it was worth throwing rocks through the window in the first place (which is different than not doing optimizations).
This is not a reason for accepting it imo
Optimization takes up time, and often it takes up the time of an expert.
Given that, people need to accept higher costs, longer development times, or reduced scope if they want better optimized games.
But what is worse, is just trying to optimize software is not the same as successfully optimizing it. So time and money spent on optimization might yield no results because there might not be anymore efficiency to be gained, the person doing the work lacks the technical skill, the gains are part of a tradeoff that cannot be justified, or the person doing the work can't make a change (i.e., a 3rd party library is the problem).
The lack of technical skill is a big one, IMO. I'm personally terrible at optimizing code, but I'm pretty good at building functional software in a short amount of time. We have a person on our team who is really good at it and sometimes he'll come in after me to optimize work that I've done. But he'll spend several multiples of the time I took making it work and hammering out edge cases. Sometimes the savings is worth it.
> Given that, people need to accept higher costs, longer development times, or reduced scope if they want better optimized games.
God why can’t it just be longer development time. I’m sick of the premature fetuses of games.
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