I get that you can leave a bunch of things unoptimized, as long as it works fine.
What I don't understand is - how did they not notice that the performances was horrible even high end hardware? How did they not decide to take the time to investigate the performances issues and find the causes we're talking about now?
So you know the saying “premature optimization is the root of all evil?” Producers love that statement because it removes half of the complaints around work being rushed.
Optimization is not done throughout the process and later there’s not enough time. Assets are made with bad topology and it would take time to redo them. Or it would take time to write a tool that retopologizes them automatically.
What I’m saying is by the time it’s “time” to optimize, there’s not enough time to optimize. It happens very commonly. But the alternative is taking development slower to do things right. And you simply don’t get investment for schedules like that in most companies. Not to mention that it’s goddamn hard to do when the execs lay off people, ask them to RTO, and induce serious attrition otherwise. Sometimes the team just can’t settle into a good process as people leave it too much. So you’re between a rock and a hard place — on the one hand: attrition and low morals, on the other hand: a tight schedule. This doesn’t apply to Colossal Order from my knowledge, but it does apply to many AAAs.
There is a problem at the root of this - extremely over-ambitious production schedules as norm. Most other things are symptoms. Most of what I described is a symptom.
Except there really isn’t a better product to back up these issues. There were some important improvements made to the gameplay, traffic system, certain things were reworked, nicer graphics etc. It feels like an iteration and not a ground-breaking game rhat would justify the performance issues we’re seeing.
The design was iterated, but the game assets are redone almost completely, and the systems appear largely reworked, too. This is evident when you play the game.
The scope of work done for this game was exceptionally large for a company with 40 employees, assuming it was done within the usual AAA timeframe.
They even posted on social media 1 week before launch warning people to expect lower than expected performance, and raised the system requirements.
If companies have to decide between prioritising features that they've advertised, show stopper bugs, and performance, guess which one always takes the back seat :)
What I don't understand is - how did they not notice that the performances was horrible even high end hardware? How did they not decide to take the time to investigate the performances issues and find the causes we're talking about now?