Oh is he a Youtuber ? Makes sense. That's Youtube in a nutshell for you, same goes for reddit aswell. " i have my sources " yeah bud, you just read a thread.
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Are TaleWorlds bad at programming?
- Thread starter Stratattack
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Oh is he a Youtuber ? Makes sense. That's Youtube in a nutshell for you, same goes for reddit aswell. " i have my sources " yeah bud, you just read a thread.
KEYFEKEDER
Veteran
they have a horrible vision and taste then
Theyve literally made infinite money from Bannerlord sales, money should be the least concern
That game looks pretty badass -love the visuals and gritty sense of explosions + propulsion
Marajah
Regular
the complicated part is probably how they manage their thing, instead of simple programming. It was made clear throughout early access there's no cohesive line of thought. They pump archers up, then nerf then, then pump them up again. They tune cavalry behavior, then decide that's not how they want it. Make a whole patch fixing formations, then decide to make adjustments that break the whole thing. Tune some armor values, then change it again.
There's so much back and forth and mismanaged workforce it's comprehensible the game got minor quality of life changes since it came out and I don't think we should expect any different in the future
granitestone
Recruit
I'm a veteran (30 years) game programmer. I've never worked on anything as complex as Bannerlord, and my opinion is still just conjecture, with no visibility into TW. That said, I rate them just average. Bad developers couldn't create Bannerlord even if they took a century. But they're obviously no Rockstar (the word or the company) either. However their productivity is pretty obviously far below average, especially for a company that size. Studios have done more, in less time, with less people. Whether that is because the developers are actually below average, or as others have suggested above, because of bad management or planning or something not related to skillz, I couldn't possibly guess.
Whatever the case, I wish I could give this game to Wube to finish.
Whatever the case, I wish I could give this game to Wube to finish.
You should revisit this old Dev Blog that breaks down TW's 2017 workforce, to understand how they work. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/261550/view/2882822940995504341
IIRC they went on a massive recruitment drive to expand their workforce around 2016 presumably after they had reworked Bannerlord's underlying engine. As far as I can tell the current workforce is a similar size and composition to that in 2017 although a few of the faces will have changed.
I swear, small, good developers seem to always turn into trash when they expand significantly and become more like a corporation. Something just goes wrong, whether that's the new stature being overwhelming, greed, power getting to management's heads, or the crushing boots from publishing overlords, I don't know. An example that comes to mind is Prison Architect, great game, great developers, then Paradox bought them, and the game turned into a ****show. Curiously enough, TW separated from Paradox with Bannerlord, which I would consider a good thing, but there is still something rotten in TW offices.
...if we're talking shop, the TW that I've watched is just green, and teaching themselves how to be a software company without any prior structure in place as to an example of "what works".
Money from early access doesn't make you lean and hungry, if you want something short.
Did he say anything else about how thing were at TW? I'm curios now
And I take it you worked on HOI 4? One of my favourite games !
The keyword here is "former".
I believe that the game cannot be perfect to everybody (even to one person, there is always something they would like to change). I feel like some parts of the base game are really well done. A lot of other things could be implemented in mods (even though the more complicated mods can get really fragile, when you have no clue on what they are going to change next). I know for sure they cannot make it fit me perfectly.
What I saw of the code is readable, and I appreciate that a high level language was used. Makes it way easier to get into modding.
Being able to hook into the e.g. mission event loop and just do new stuff is great. Adding items also seems quite simple.
But then some other things seem really weird, like hardcoded multiplier values for onCombatHit xp gains... Ideally, things like multipliers that could (and should) eventually be tuned should be easy to reach and change. Here they are not even assigned a variable, there are instead like three values hardcoded in two lines of code. I would expect to be able to tune such things by just changing a constant (if other types of configuration via files/options is not available). It doesn't look modder friendly at all in this particular situation.
It is what it is
What I saw of the code is readable, and I appreciate that a high level language was used. Makes it way easier to get into modding.
Being able to hook into the e.g. mission event loop and just do new stuff is great. Adding items also seems quite simple.
But then some other things seem really weird, like hardcoded multiplier values for onCombatHit xp gains... Ideally, things like multipliers that could (and should) eventually be tuned should be easy to reach and change. Here they are not even assigned a variable, there are instead like three values hardcoded in two lines of code. I would expect to be able to tune such things by just changing a constant (if other types of configuration via files/options is not available). It doesn't look modder friendly at all in this particular situation.
It is what it is
It was a video where a youtuber close to the company said that DDRJake (When he was game director in 2018 or therabouts) was absolutely staunch about mana points for EU4, because it fed into a fast dopamine release cycle. Johan was also a big mana guy but for different reasons, and also mentioned some of this in the aftermath of Imperator Rome.
More colloquially, DDRjake is often referred to as the guy who ruined EU4. He was adamant about adding more abstract currencies to give the player more stuff to interact with in dry spots, even when it made the game far less dynamic. Youtubers and speedrunners complained about him and his posts a lot, and towards the end he was actually pretty arrogant about himself in a weird nerdy way.
What a douchebag. He seems exactly the kind of man journalists love to call a brilliant entrepreneurial innovative business-mind focused genius individual. In any field.
Regarding the topic at hand: I am clueless, but I'd say they're not bad programmers. I will basically repeat what others have said before. What seems to be the biggest problem is: bad management. They had this abstract idea of what the game should be, so they set about doing it. Thinking what to add and what to do along the way. Instead of a clear-cut schedule and overall design, they legged it as they went along. Instead of having teams focusing on trading, siege AI, campaign AI and AI reasoning, they kind of went "you do what you want, let him do that, and maybe that dude will do armors? Yes, let's do that this month". Not having a set desired outcome led them do going about however they could, doing what they should. It was very inefficient, if not at all a bad workplace.
It seems as individuals, everyone involved seemed pretty decent, the whole project, however, was pretty much what I have as a doctorate project in my head: an abstract idea that I will go along with every once in a while trying to figure out what the hell I will do. Which works alright for me, a single person, but maybe not so well for a game dev co. Then again, they might have made fat profits, so there's that.
If it was at all good or bad is highly subjective, it all has to do with the metrics you use: are the workers happy? Was it a toxic environment? Was it a 'whatever' situation? Did the game come on schedule? Did it leak? Did it break? Did it produce profits? Was it successful? Is it well reviewed? Etc.
Think of it this way: a certain Asian nation with over a billion human beings within it is the biggest industry in the world, essentially. It has the biggest infrastructure, the biggest industry chains, entire economies rely on its capacity of maximum output of products. All fine aspects of it, no doubt. However, how are the workers treated? How is the worker culture? How free is its freedom? It produces trillions of dollars every bimester, nice, yet, do people eat money? When the only metric you use is profits alone, the US and China are the "most successful" countries, yet... look at their societies... Very undesirable for anyone well-informed and desiring a comfortable and healthy life.
Victoria 3 changed the metrics to include the well-being of the population of countries, and suddenly, communism becomes a good meta.
For us consoomers, the game was delayed, broken, is yet unfinished and we have countless topics of certain "upset subsets of players" wanting different or new features, so TW's efficiency was awful, probably because of bad management, as I conjectured above, yet it might have produced mind-bogging profits, given the size of the company, so there's that... IF they actually managed to have good profits, which considering the money spent over the decade long development history... might not be that big of a profit.
What metric you use is up to you. What metric TW uses is up to them. Hence we are where we are.
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