I'm really confused how a professional game company that has multiple previous titles under their belt and plenty of cash from top selling games can write such screwed up code needing complete refactor in the first place. I mean, its not like this is some amateur game design group project in college lol.
Really hope they can pull it together.
From what i understand, back in the many year long "absolutely no news what so ever" phase the game development went through, they effective made, and re-made the game 2 or 3 times. They got a new project lead and grew a ton in the process.
Plus, from what I undestand, Taleworlds ONLY makes Mount and Blade, which considering the first game and even the second...didnt need a huge team. And several of their spin-offs were in fact made by modding teams that managed to get a sales deal (Viking conquest was the Brytenwalda team for example).
But yea, you can see in the code where there were too many hands in the pot. A good example is character creation and how they store info, it's incredibly redundant and poorly executed because of it.
True, but only to a point. Changes that are literally one character removed from a line should not take months to fix.
Correct, the issue is that when you have a list hundreds of lines long of problems, the issue is often not "what's the fastest" to fix but "what's the most critical to fix" Part of that decision making process is not only on cleaning up bugs, bu if your development is on going for additional features (which we know it is for BL) then very often the bugs that get prioritized are the bugs that are blockers to the development of additional features so they dont keep paidd developers spinning their wheels (thats a money issue which cant be ignored)...and very often when you clean up one bug you discover three more which then need to be tackled as well to keep the blocker cleared.
Edit: In a way, the modders can help massively in this. For example, it helps them alot to be able to get a message from the forum from someoen saying "Bug A has fix B and here's the code that does it, tested and proven with thousands of downloads." which DOES allow the smaller stuff to get bumped up because frankly...they were given the answer. For example the traits creation bug from day 1 apparently was never even noticed until I hammered a forum mod about it "Why is it my mod that fixes it thats been out for 4 months on a bug that had a TON of discussion...hasnt gotten a fix for this?"
"Oh wait...there's a problem with traits?"
*insert facepalm here*
"yes...here's the problem (gives tons of forum links)...and here's the fix."
That does allow smaller stuff to get shot up in priority because the troubleshooting was already done, they just need to take the given code, make it fit their standards, and plug it in.