While i’m sure the devs know basically what i’m talking about, i’ll give a brief explanation. I used to do a little bit of work for a small, simple open-source game. Like many small projects, the game was very buggy, and new additions would often break or have unintended consequences. While major bugs were fixed quickly, small but not insignificant bugs would build in number over time. As more new content was added, more minor bugs would crop up, and the push to add content is stronger than the push to fix it.
The solution? A feature freeze, as it was called. A halt was placed on all new content being produced, while the coders worked on a backlog of balance and bug issues that had been put by the wayside in favor of new shiny stuff.
While it might sound silly from someone asking for new content just yesterday, I do think that the devs would greatly benefit from putting a temporary hold on new content, to try and sort out some major balance and bug issues that i’ve noticed. (long-distance turret graphics errors, optimization, AI behavior, and especially the many issues with vehicle damage models.
I really like the game, and certainly want to see more new content in the future, but maybe taking a break for bugfixes is the way forwards?
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yesss
Let me tell you a tale of a shut-down PS3 freemium shooter called Dust 514.
A ways into Dust’s development, most of the studio responsible for it was laid off. This forced a feature freeze as no more 3D modeling or anything was being done.
The result of this was the game actually improving dramatically because development got a lot cheaper and smarter.
For example, there was the question “how do we balance cloaking so that people can’t uncloak, instantly kill someone, then cloak back up?” which the full dev team couldn’t really solve even by throwing money at it.
The post-layoff skeleton crew’s solution was “what if we just slow the animation way down for swapping from a cloaking device to a weapon”, and it fixed the balance without overly convoluted methods.
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It’ll suck not being able to anticipate new content in a reasonable amount of time, but yeah I agree Enlisted could likely benefit from a feature freeze.
The thing about larger projects is, generally speaking, the staff that work on fixes and patches aren’t usually the same staff working on new content like guns and equipment. Gaijin have brought this up multiple times with War Thunder, and while I appreciate Enlisted isn’t at that scale yet, it’s quite a sizable undertaking.