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Why Are Patches So Small If The Dev Team Is So Big?


Spindle99
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Maybe because they update AT LEAST once a week, have never ending bugs to fix, and content takes time. It still takes 40+ hours a week(for more than one week might I add) to concept a character then another 40+ hours a week to model him and another 40+ to animate him and then let's not forget sound guys, possible programming,voice acting, texture painting and a lot of other things. This extends to all things added to the game. A lot of stuff goes into EVERY little detail the fact that we get weapons amost every week on a less exciting week is pretty damn awesome, and at best we get more mods, new features and we always get tonnes of fixes. You also have to remember marketing has them hold certain stuff back for major updates too.

Edited by silkygoodness
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honestly i think de just has an issue with looking back, they like to keep pumping out new things and concepts with no regard to past efforts. as shown with the large number of neglected content in the game following their release. they give us something, polish it up a bit, and then leave it in the dust. which is a pretty ineffective mindset when it comes to the upkeep of quality content, since they always wind up just what they are with no growing potential/development. it takes a crap ton of effort from the community to get the de team to even consider relooking something that they've already done. 

They have all the numbers though. Perhaps some of these concepts didn't hit the player participation they were looking for. The forums are a bubble, many who liked and are vocal about a particular part of the game can be a minute blip in the game statistics overall. Or the reverse, what we think might be terrible still has a incredibly high play rate. The size of the pvp change shows the effort of change into a long standing mediocre section of the game. Small retooling over time was not going to get this same effects. Dojo might need a full refresh like pvp now that they have been experimenting with liset and relays.

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It takes a lot of people to develop a video game. Just look at the credits for Far Cry 3, or Super Smash Bros. The amount of people working on those games number in the thousands, yet the quality of the final product doesn't suffer due to communication errors or from similar problems. Why that is, I don't know.

 

However, what is important lies in the job composition of those 200+ people working on the game. For the sake of simplicity, let's split them into two categories: Artists and Programmers. Artists work on the visual aspect of the game (models, animations, maps, textures, UI, etc.), while Programmers make that stuff function. Due to the nature of video games today, Artists usually outnumber Programmers in a development team, simply because of what and how much needs to be done. Unfortunately, due to the imbalanced Artist/Programmer ratio, the former tend to have the largest sway in future development, in Digital Extremes' case. I made a post in a melee coptering thread that delved a bit deeper into the problem and its true source and cause:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the horrible world of ANIMATION BASED MOVEMENT.
 
Also known as what happens when artists (in this case, animators) attempt to do the job of programmers.
 
Artists and programmers have been "fighting", so to speak, over what will take precedent during moment-to-moment gameplay. In the old days of video games, there wasn't a lot of room on a cartridge or CD, leading to very simple animation systems. Thus, programmers had total control over the player and enemy movement. Artists then had to design around that. This is known as MOVEMENT BASED ANIMATION. It's a good development principle, which unfortunately gradually started loosing traction as time went by.
 
Let's look at today. Animation quality has gone up, but so have the artists' voices.
 
The artist makes a melee animation that took them 7 days to complete. It's really nice, but it's static, stiff, and blocks player input since it also moves the player entity. The programmer then needs to implement the animation with the artists breathing down their collective necks making sure the animator's hard work doesn't get "misrepresented" in the final product.
 
This is why coptering exists in the first place. The original aerial slide-attack animation moved the player entity a great distance, for some reason. The programmers, being understaffed and overworked, sloppily implemented the animation into the base movement system, resulting in the garbage momentum exploit we all know and love today. This is also evident in the aerial attack moves. If you aim toward the ground without triggering the slam, the attack animation must complete before control is handed back to the player once more. You end up swinging your weapon as if airborne, but you are on the ground, stuck until control is handed back to you at the end of the animation. The same can be said for Valkyr's Hysteria combos; you cannot change direction while performing them.
 
If I were to hazard a guess, I would put Digital Extreme's Warframe development staff to roughly 70% artists, 20% others, 10% programmers. Of course, this is all simply a hypothesis based upon the evidence present in Warframe's questionable design choices and severe lack of polish, plus Digital Extremes being an art-based studio. Don't get me wrong, most large studios have a surplus of artists to programmers, but the problems begin to surface when the artists take over the jobs of the programmers and designers.

Keep in mind, this is all speculation and hypothesizing, but it's what I am able to imply from Warframe's disjointed and inconsistent development. In short, Programmers number too few, and Artists end up doing the Programmer's job, which leads to broken systems, counter intuitive UI, off-the-wall imbalance, clunky movement, poor enemy design, and more bugs than Sonic Boom.

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