Found this on the Outriders Reddit (yes, Reddit, I know, but there is some good stuff there) and it makes a lot of sense. It echoes what devs have said to me and others.
Development is always a trade off. No, this is not an excuse 2077 ah, "interesting" AI. It does illustrate that it is always a challenge, and an expensive one in both time and money, even for big studios.
From user "neatchee" on this thread.
neatchee:
1 day ago
So, just to point it out since I'm in the industry:
tl;dr: making boss fights harder by making them 'smarter' is costly, and if you want that then you need to be okay with slimming back somewhere else in the game to cover the costs.
There is a (not very good) reason why devs don't do the things you recommended sometimes...it's easier and cheaper to add health than literally anything else.
I know it's easy to think of AAA game studios as having a giant vault of money, but in truth dev studios are often run very close to maximum budget, funded purely on capital they received from their publisher, and they have a time-limit. If the game doesn't release before the money runs out, that's it, the company is in big time trouble, loses a lot of money (due to obligations in their publisher contract, usually), and will never see a penny of any "performance-based" payout they might have had in their deal. Best they can do is ask for more money from the publisher. They're the ones who foot the bills upfront.
As for the specific recommendations you made:
So usually the best way to think about these problems is like this (because it very closely reflects how these decisions are actually made in a process called "triage"):
If you made it this far, I applaud you. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Development is always a trade off. No, this is not an excuse 2077 ah, "interesting" AI. It does illustrate that it is always a challenge, and an expensive one in both time and money, even for big studios.
From user "neatchee" on this thread.
neatchee:
1 day ago
So, just to point it out since I'm in the industry:
tl;dr: making boss fights harder by making them 'smarter' is costly, and if you want that then you need to be okay with slimming back somewhere else in the game to cover the costs.
There is a (not very good) reason why devs don't do the things you recommended sometimes...it's easier and cheaper to add health than literally anything else.
I know it's easy to think of AAA game studios as having a giant vault of money, but in truth dev studios are often run very close to maximum budget, funded purely on capital they received from their publisher, and they have a time-limit. If the game doesn't release before the money runs out, that's it, the company is in big time trouble, loses a lot of money (due to obligations in their publisher contract, usually), and will never see a penny of any "performance-based" payout they might have had in their deal. Best they can do is ask for more money from the publisher. They're the ones who foot the bills upfront.
As for the specific recommendations you made:
- Smarter AI - We'd all love smarter AI. But it is surprisingly difficult to walk the tightrope between "AI does dumb shit that is exploitable" and "AI is so good they're like aimbots and wreck your shit". If you want more complex/better AI, you have to pay for it.
- More enemies - Typically fights are designed with near the maximum amount of enemies on screen that the engine can handle. So you either wind up respawning the existing combatants more frequently - which is equally boring, having to deal with trash mobs too often - or making the adds themselves spongier which isn't great. Even if your PC or console is a beast, the game needs to run at a stable framerate on the lowest supported hardware. There are very real technical limits here.
- More elites - This one is viable but risky without significant playtesting and AI behavior tweaking. The big issue here is that adding more elites doesn't just add more damage targets and damage sources; it dramatically changes the encounter mechanics. Multiple big enemies that can deal significant damage create additional difficulty by reducing available angles of attack, increasing the threat of getting flanked unexpectedly or otherwise being attacked by an unseen foe, etc. I'm sure you know that feeling of "wtf, I can't keep track of this many targets at once, this is stupid, no matter where I try to go there's someone there to kick my ass."
So usually the best way to think about these problems is like this (because it very closely reflects how these decisions are actually made in a process called "triage"):
- If the new idea costs more design, dev, or test time than the current plan, what other idea/feature/bugfix are we going to cut to fund this new one?
- If we can find something to cut because this is more important, can we reallocate the resources without changing staffing? Cutting the number of weapon models down doesn't give AI programmers more time to make better AI.
- What's the RoI? Does this change align with other ongoing work, or is it a one-off? Will players experience this one bad thing and then move on, or will it keep being a problem throughout their time playing the game?
If you made it this far, I applaud you. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.