it takes one to know one! just saying...
How come a team of 10 devs can achieve something a team of 100 devs can't?
- Thread starter CMDR_LS
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It is obvious when developers are emotionally invested in the games they code for. Indeed NMS is cartoony in comparison to ED, but man it is obvious that Hello Games deeply care about NMS. Look at the guns and gameplay in any Borderlands game. Look at the story of the original Mass Effect trilogy. Those developers put their heart and soul into their coding.
If profit is the only motivation for a company, you will probably get the minimum viable product and a sterile game.
"For profit only" is fine for a grocery or hardware store. But not for art forms like video games.
are you serious? did you even play NMS?
Also, the "working galaxy" part, is very questionable right now. maybe after patch 10.0 or so
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They are static. There's no star for them to orbit around! It's not even close to a space simulation. It's a sci-fi arcade game with survival elements. I tried to play this game after the updates, but it is just so unrealistic. It's not my thing at all!
Find me a source that says the planets AREN'T static.
Planet rotation and orbit? :: No Man's Sky General Discussion
I know that the devs said repeatedly that this would be in the game. I also know that they said other games were cheating with the use of sky boxes. I also know that this was one of the things that led to the gamers of earth losing their ♥♥♥♥ when the game was released with sky boxes and a...
ok that's very different than saying "noting even moves" because if you land on a planet everything is pretty much alive and moves.
Yes, I agree, NMS is a cartoony sci-fi arcade , but really that wasn't the point of this thread. I am not comparing gameplay , just performance improvements.
We are at patch 2.0 and people still reporting terrible performance, yet NMS with a small dev team (fine, maybe not 10 devs, but that's besides the point) is already pushing updates with DLSS...
Sorry about that! Yes, the actual planets themselves are alive when you land. They are GORGEOUS and the performance is great. That much I can give to Hello Games!
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They are static. There's no star for them to orbit around! It's not even close to a space simulation. It's a sci-fi arcade game with survival elements. I tried to play this game after the updates, but it is just so unrealistic. It's not my thing at all!
Find me a source that says the planets AREN'T static.
Planet rotation and orbit? :: No Man's Sky General Discussion
I know that the devs said repeatedly that this would be in the game. I also know that they said other games were cheating with the use of sky boxes. I also know that this was one of the things that led to the gamers of earth losing their ♥♥♥♥ when the game was released with sky boxes and a...steamcommunity.com
The game literally has a thing called a terrain manipulator where you can modify the terrain, and it persists for everyone who comes to that planet. Planets have life forms, plant AND animal life. Do you know what the word static means? Also, 64 hours is pathetic. That's 64 hours over the last 5 years. So the answer to @CMDR_LS 's question is No, you haven't played the game, not really.
What is bothering me is people using a stylistic choice to then judge the game's "quality" of it's management and achievements by it's art style. this assumption that because it's cartoony means it's automatically inferior. Despite the fact that as it's been established, Hello Games has 1/24th the employees of Fdev, 1/10th the money, has put out feature expansion after feature expansion with more or less a consistent and qualitative experience but NO, none of that matters because it's "Cartoony". Meanwhile, Fdev has more money, more people, management that is a parody of itself, releasing disaster after disaster of releases over and over again and the only thing consistent has been their ability to eff things up and yet they get a pass because "It's realistic looking" and "It has 'physics'", whatever the f*** that's supposed to mean, Fdev essentially gets a free pass because of this.
You have got to be kidding me.
PS. Also you should read the reviews of Hello Games, they are in short, adorable.
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I play space games for realism! NMS is nowhere NEAR the heavy hitters when it comes to the space simulation genre. It's an arcade sci-fi exploration/survival game. Minecraft in space!
To be fair, you have to admit some stuff ED is doing is harder than NMS. ED have actual orbital mechanic, and an engine to simulate possible system. Down to the station and comets.
NMS have none of that.
It's easier to have random generation when you don't bother with realism. If you go that way, Empyrion galactic survival also randomize planets with outpost and stuff to fight on. But it's a very different feat.
As for money, NMS earned a lot when it sold. It was extremely well hyped.
Simple. It's not a like for like comparison. Not on any level which is meaningful.I just don't understand how a team of 10 devs can do that so amazingly well, yet a team of supposedly a 100 devs are still struggling
And preference is fine, but don't make claims are demonstrably untrue. It's fine you don't like the stylistic choice of no man sky. But at least acknowledge and admit the accomplishments of Sean Murray and his team.
To go from the catastrophic place they started to where they are now. Seriously, such catastrophic launches like that often bankrupt companies, the fact that they hung in there and went feature by feature adding things and doing it consistently with few bugs IS an achievement, especially with the gaming community and gaming press breathing over your shoulder waiting for you to fail.
If Fdev even had half of that kind of wherewithal, we wouldn't be here discussing this, we'd all be playing Elite: two expansions from now, right now.
They made a TON of money from the launch. They chose to improve the game and not run away with it, which is very honorable and should be respected for doing the "right thing", but it's not like they lost money. Quite the opposite actually. They were in no risk to go bankrupt.
Yes! I can give Hello Games their props for recovering from a disastrous launch. But comparing the two games is not even close. I can imagine working on a game like Elite Dangerous must be x10 harder than something NMS. They have an actual physictics that works on the Stellar Forge!
Either way, coding anything is hard. Hello Games has done a wonderful thing for the gaming community by adding all of these free DLCs. If they made a PAID DLC that revamped the planet generation and made them slightly more realistic, I'd probably buy it. Just to support an awesome developer like HG.
I get that, and I will give Fdev, the ORIGINAL Fdevs for creating stellar forge and the base game that modelled the Milky Way so well. But isn't that the rub though. Those Fdevs are gone, why, again, mismanagement and made to feel like they mean nothing. In fact I would guess, and this is just a guess mind you, but I would guess all the Fdevs responsible for the good parts of this game are gone and have been gone. My issue has always been with how management has misused that talent and in effect driving them away in favor of talent that was not nearly as good but brought in because it's cheaper. Where you have employees who's pay doesn't keep up with the cost of living increases of Cambridge, thus putting undue worry and stress on them, which in turn affects their productivity. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs man, a worker can't put the energy and passion into a higher level while a lower one is threatened.
It's not management that made stellar forge, it's not management that made the ships, the 'physics', the flight model, etc. It was management that, managed all of that, and that management has gone down the toilet. And take NMS completely out of the equation, let's just stop comparing. What we are seeing is, what is an otherwise talented group of people is producing things slowly, buggy and of inferior quality than we all KNOW they are capable of..
But that's the thing, I and people making the argument I'm making aren't comparing the two games we are comparing the two companies in how they are executing their respective visions, we're looking at management capability, Hello Games has figured out HOW to execute what they want to do in a consistent, efficient and timely manner and Fdev despite having more money, people and even time, has not. I'm sure there are plenty of Fdevs who read these forums and are like "yeah, those are good ideas let's do that." only to be shut down by management, since as the reviews say, rank and file developers have no say in what is scheduled, prioritized or even worked on. So some developer could read your suggestion, agree with you 100% and say, "yeah, that's awesome, let's do that" but it doesn't matter.
I am not criticizing the actual developers, but management. It's management's responsibility to devise a cohesive vision, figure out the talent, time and money required to execute that vision and do that presents a consistent experience to the end user. Elite Dangerous launched 6 years ago, you would expect these kinds of fumbles in the launch year, where the management or dev team haven't found their footing yet, but this is 6 years on man, 6 YEARS, they have this down pat, they should know when something is ready and when something needs more time. They should know when to crunch and when to relax. This is why people are calling this mismanagement because if the management was as talented at managing the project as those that executed the project, the disasters of launches wouldn't exist. We wouldn't have people saying "this is just the way launches go around here." and accepting the mediocrity.
When it comes to measuring how both companies manage themselves and execute their respective visions, yes you CAN compare that and it IS an apples-to-apples comparison.
Fun fact, that does only go for "our" Frontier, ie the one developing and managing ED.
Have a look over at the Planet Zoo forum to see how they can work:
Polar Bears and your Zoo 🐻❄️
Hayo Zookeepers! Today we’d like to give you an update on a topic we know the community has been asking about: Polar Bears! In a future update, we’ll be changing the requirements for Polar Bears, helping make these wonderful animals easier to include in your Zoos but still maintaining the...
Don't know why that is a difference like day and night
Imho it doesn't matter if you like nms or not or how you look at it.
Hello Games has provided a staggering amount of content to those who like their game and without a stacking amount of bugs.
When I compare this to Fdev then Hello Games is clearly the winner.
Hello Games has provided a staggering amount of content to those who like their game and without a stacking amount of bugs.
When I compare this to Fdev then Hello Games is clearly the winner.
Despite what some people have said, although many have made good points, there is no simple answer to this.
Many factors come into play, from the code base to the management to the staff to the requirements.
If i may indulge in a touch of whataboutism (while acknowledging the flaw in the argument) CIG has 600 employees and way more funding and yet produces even less.
And this may be part (but not all) of the reason.
The bigger the team, the more complex the codebase, the slower things go and the greater chance there is of things going wrong.
Brookes law is a well known paradigm in software development (and projects in general)
But it could be extended even further i feel, let's call it Agony's law, that adding more people to a project doesn't just not make it faster, it actually slows things down.
If i may take an experience of mine as an example. I worked for a medium sized company. We worked quite effectively. But once the company grew to a certain size, they needed to add extra roles. For example, a health and safety officer. I personally didn't need this health and safety officer. But every now and again he would swing by the office and ensure everyone was sitting correctly, their chairs were suitable, the desks were good, and overall, disrupt the office for an hour or so and stop us working.
Now, imagine the same in a software development company where you have managers and product directors and project mangers, all wanting to stick their oar in, prove their value, add their contributions, and let's not forget meetings. Lots of meetings. That will ensure everything goes just right!
It can become a case of too many chiefs, not enough indians.
So, if you are looking for reasons why a small lean, agile company can outperform a bigger company, there are many reasons why it can be, and some of those reasons at least are because the bigger companies are just that, bigger companies.
Bigger doesn't always mean better.
Many factors come into play, from the code base to the management to the staff to the requirements.
If i may indulge in a touch of whataboutism (while acknowledging the flaw in the argument) CIG has 600 employees and way more funding and yet produces even less.
And this may be part (but not all) of the reason.
The bigger the team, the more complex the codebase, the slower things go and the greater chance there is of things going wrong.
Brookes law is a well known paradigm in software development (and projects in general)
But it could be extended even further i feel, let's call it Agony's law, that adding more people to a project doesn't just not make it faster, it actually slows things down.
If i may take an experience of mine as an example. I worked for a medium sized company. We worked quite effectively. But once the company grew to a certain size, they needed to add extra roles. For example, a health and safety officer. I personally didn't need this health and safety officer. But every now and again he would swing by the office and ensure everyone was sitting correctly, their chairs were suitable, the desks were good, and overall, disrupt the office for an hour or so and stop us working.
Now, imagine the same in a software development company where you have managers and product directors and project mangers, all wanting to stick their oar in, prove their value, add their contributions, and let's not forget meetings. Lots of meetings. That will ensure everything goes just right!
It can become a case of too many chiefs, not enough indians.
So, if you are looking for reasons why a small lean, agile company can outperform a bigger company, there are many reasons why it can be, and some of those reasons at least are because the bigger companies are just that, bigger companies.
Bigger doesn't always mean better.
According to glassdoor reviews, nobody inside frontier like to work on Elite because of the engine. I guess it shows.Fun fact, that does only go for "our" Frontier, ie the one developing and managing ED.
Have a look over at the Planet Zoo forum to see how they can work:
Polar Bears and your Zoo 🐻❄️
Hayo Zookeepers! Today we’d like to give you an update on a topic we know the community has been asking about: Polar Bears! In a future update, we’ll be changing the requirements for Polar Bears, helping make these wonderful animals easier to include in your Zoos but still maintaining the...forums.frontier.co.uk
Don't know why that is a difference like day and night
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