I don’t quite like how this post at one hand claims to be constructive and at the other does such personal assumptions on how the working morale is and should be despite we having no insight in the development cycles besides the outcome.
Could be very well Hitman requires much manual testing to catch all kinds of bugs before the deployment and that this is simply missing and only the few remaining devs with limited time are onto fixing stuff.
In my project at work there are so many behavior details that are triggered by external data that we can only test them one by one in unit tests, maybe a handfull of example cases in an integration test. But in no way all possible combinations. Our customer’s product owner retests what we do and their own testing team tests what we do. It is unrealistic we developers could detect all things ourself when it comes to the combination of systems. Despite having hundreds of integration tests and thousands of unit tests. And I bet a video game that has to run on so many systems is several leagues above what I do.
Actual constructive criticism would be aimed at the decision makers to keep the whole required crew on Hitman to develop or at least to iron out the big remaining bugs before switching to a skeleton crew. That I don’t think deserves to be assumed to lack the required pride.
We’re not trying to find solutions. That’s not on us to do. We are expressing our frustrations and disappointments, detailing what caused them, and stating plainly the results we want to see. It is on IOI to figure out and implement the solutions to resolving the issues in a manner that provides the desired results. We can do nothing on that, it is entirely on them.
I’m not commenting on morale, I’m focused on the sense of ownership and the way I worded my statement was intended to make it clear it’s how it appears to me as an external observer, not that I know this to be empirically true.
I hope we can agree that on the spectrum of improvement to detriment, the latest patch has tipped the scales to being more negative than positive.
The bottom-line is that I wanted to communicate what I’m seeing and my interpretations that could have lead to this point - because I’ve seen and dealt with this same situation myself.
Perhaps it isn’t the case. Nonetheless, I stand by saying it because clearly something is wrong and IOI aren’t likely to tell us why. Sharing a view on how it looks externally is, if nothing else, a data point for them to chew on.
It is fine to speculate, it is just not nice you tie personal statements on such assumptions. That is the part I don’t think is constructive.
I think it worked well for quite some years. Whatever did change, it was not the fact the iterations are done internally.
Public branches require public code, so basically open-source the engine. You can guess how likely that is.
Public bug trackers like Minecraft does it can help for transparency, though I don’t see that becoming a thing that late in the game’s lifetime. There are also enough bugs tracked there that sit there for years. It does not feel better than radio silence.
Transparency could be done by the Community Manager. That makes much more sense - if it did happen.
Both Steam and Epic support switching to a different build. This has nothing to do with making code public. I won’t speak to console because I don’t play them, but the current class of bugs we’re all griping about aren’t platform-specific.
Putting a beta release on an opt-in branch that members of the community can play for a few weeks ahead of going GA is what I’m suggesting.
I am not picking on the devs, I’m picking on upper-management. None of my ire is directed at the people who caused these bugs - it is a failure of the organisation that they were able to break the game, not them personally.
Whether the current situation is lack of motivation, lack of resourcing or both, this falls on the shoulders of the “suits”. If you ever have the misfortune to work somewhere that blames developers for causing regressions, leave immediately.
Perhaps I should be kinder to those within IOI making these executive decisions. However, considering the existence of the Scamienza SKU on storefronts, I consider them fair game for some bluntness.
This went fully past me. When you said “I am a software engineer and we take pride in …” that did read like “so the software engineers at IO should…”. Sorry then. Not that I agree the higher-ups are fair game (depending on how far you would want to go), but surely they are the right ones to address.
They should take pride in the game - my post was directed at IOI who shouldn’t need this to be explained to them, but for the clarity of everyone else on this forum, I will elaborate:
If people are overworked, under-skilled or underpaid, it will cause the situation I outlined previously.
This is a failure of management. The buck stops with them and it needs to be addressed.
This is especially important because if IOI said they were sunsetting the game that’d be fine, but they keep saying it’s their flagship title but flagship titles tend to get tons of support
Well, I know IOI have acknowledged that support on Hitman WOA has started slowing down, but there’s still a team on hand to manage the updates and bug fixes etc, so I’m just hoping they get onto the Freelancer bug fixes ASAP
Also, there’s big anniversaries coming up with the 25th anniversary of the franchise in Autumn/Fall and the 10 year anniversary of the WOA trilogy in March next year, so I just hope the game gets all the attention it deserves with these massive milestones coming up
Erm, if we’re being honest, that might be for the best!
They frequently release updates that break suits, disguises and even more major features, that the community finds almost immediately and seem glaring from a regular player’s perspective, and it’s been this way for years let’s be honest so I’ve sort of given up on expecting anything else.
That doesn’t really help the situation. If they’re really catching that many that we don’t know about, and these ones that did get through are so obvious to be almost instantly spotted and called out, then they’re either just fulfilling a quota of fixes per patch and stopping there, or spending that time fixing inconsequential things to be able to say they fixed a lot.
It might not be the right analogy, but think of it as the police letting a dangerous person get away from them due to incompetence, and they try to point out how many other people they did catch; it’s all well and good, but the one they didn’t catch is the problem. The number of times someone does their job right doesn’t help much when a screwup is so glaring. The idea is, for most industries, if nobody is thinking about what what you do, then you’re doing your job right. This can be applied to IOI. If they were maintaining the game properly, we shouldn’t even notice it.
It is up to IOI to find solutions because they are the only ones with the visibility into what is going on internally and they control the company. If you think anyone on this forum (other than IOI employees) can and/or should provide solutions, you’re entertaining delusion.
What we can do is make the external optics of their actions clear to them in the hope that someone with the power to change course takes note and does something about it.
Well, I’m not one to throw around complaints without also giving recognition to positive action.
@Combatglue I have no idea if any of us here had an impact on the out-of-band patch happening, but either way, it’s great to see that the issues were taken seriously and addressed out-of-band from the usual schedule.
Please pass on my thanks to everyone involved in getting it done (not that I’m insinuating that I matter in any way), I hope the gesture is taken in the manner in which it is intended.
Hey Olipro,
I understand what you mean and thank you, I have passed it on to the team too.
I know the team was working on it, but it does not take away that the community and your voice matters, but its always a delicate topic on what we can communicate and not, since we do not want to promise something we cant deliver.
