This game is a buggy mess

[Franco]

I'm shocked that more people don't make note of and complain about how incompetent the programmers are at ArrowHead. The logic throughout this game is poorly implemented, from something as simple as an array that counts how many items are in a list, to something as severe as being unable to complete a mission because the game logic is poor. That's not including the other annoying things, such as the friend request system, how stims don't always work, or when you hit reload while not being attacked, but it does the animation and doesn't reload the weapon. They can't even logic check their weapons to make sure some of them aren't spammed. Why is such low-quality programming and how it negatively impacts the game accepted in this community?

[Franco]

Originally posted by Helldivers™ 2:

Originally posted by Franco:

Indeed. The irony is that he just said to me, "learn to take emotion out and stick to the facts." He's trying really hard to tone police me. I'm literally over here lolol.

If he wants facts, he should remember these guys tried to fix the infinite grenades 3 times, one of which they thought that making a 32 bit signed integer into unsigned would protect against it, but instead of -1 it became infinite, because the incompetents didnt know what underflow is. This passed QA and review.

There is no more proof needed after all this since release, these guys should be doing another job

Half-jokingly... is there QA and review?

[voidCaster]

Originally posted by Franco:

Originally posted by Helldivers™ 2:

If he wants facts, he should remember these guys tried to fix the infinite grenades 3 times, one of which they thought that making a 32 bit signed integer into unsigned would protect against it, but instead of -1 it became infinite, because the incompetents didnt know what underflow is. This passed QA and review.

There is no more proof needed after all this since release, these guys should be doing another job

Half-jokingly... is there QA and review?

I'm not sure how you reach these forums, but I go to steamcommunity.com and then I click Helldivers and Discussions... on the front page, the 3rd post is all about how all the OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE REVIEWS just up and disappeared one day, and then somehow were replaced by "Mostly Positive" reviews.

Sadly, I never noticed this until I had already bought the game, and even 10 days later, because I never would have come to the forums except after the "update" broke everything that worked fine.

So that's my QA segment.

[gothicpando]

I believe that AH themselves said that they didn't have a QA dept until very very recently? I could be misremembering. But if so...well.

[Mahjik]

Originally posted by gothicpando:

I believe that AH themselves said that they didn't have a QA dept until very very recently? I could be misremembering. But if so...well.

I think that message may have been misleading. I think they meant "external QA".

The reason external QA is important is that having those who develop the game also test it, they will test it the way they coded it. How you find problems is having someone who has no part of development test game as they will likely play it differently than the developers intended. That's how these odd things are found.

[Franco]

Originally posted by voidCaster:

Originally posted by Franco:

Half-jokingly... is there QA and review?

I'm not sure how you reach these forums, but I go to steamcommunity.com and then I click Helldivers and Discussions... on the front page, the 3rd post is all about how all the OVERWHELMINGLY NEGATIVE REVIEWS just up and disappeared one day, and then somehow were replaced by "Mostly Positive" reviews.

Sadly, I never noticed this until I had already bought the game, and even 10 days later, because I never would have come to the forums except after the "update" broke everything that worked fine.

So that's my QA segment.

I thought it was odd that this game has mostly positive reviews. I have a lot of hours played, but I mainly play with my partner. Otherwise, I’d uninstall it and probably wouldn’t touch it again for a long time. Yeah, the nerfs and buffs were worth complaining about, but spending 20 minutes in a mission only to realize it can’t be completed because of bad implementation is just unacceptable. This game didn’t just come out, yet so many things haven’t been fixed, which tells me they’re struggling over there at Arrowhead to collectively put their heads together and solve issues.

If they're just now getting QA...who the hell is managing things over there?

[PlazaLord]

My thoughts:
It's okay to be mad at the game, but one mission going wrong aint that bad. If a mission type if glitching on you normally, it is common sense to avoid it so you never have the issue until the bug is fixed. (I did this with the oil mission on release)

Unable to complete a mission(due to a bug) - yeah that's rough. Hasn't happened to me since 3 months from release. Although the hive bomb can get stuck, usually it loads properly for one of the players in the game.

Don't play with PSN people with invites so no comment there. (No experience with it, obviously with pc friends I've had no issues)

Stims? You got hit by an enemy. Clip it and rewatch. They don't make you invincible, health hits 0 - you die.

Reloading is janky for sure, but has felt better this update.
Also reload the weapon all the way before switching weapon in hand? Never had it not work this update. (although I'm sure experiences differ)

None of these are issues that won't get fixed so if it is such an issue maybe wait on the game a few months. Always better to ignore it than get mad at a video game like half the people on here.

Be glad you weren't watching arrowhead during the magicka days, literally gotta downgrade it to make it potentially playable.

There is nothing wrong with the positive reviews; the recent patch fixed a lot of my gripes with the game. Just because you decide a game is an "unplayable buggy mess" doesn't mean we won't keep opening it to have fun, and leaving good reviews along the way.

[Cregus]

What a great idea, "Ignore the issues and they will be fixed eventually". If the problems are ignored and no feedback is given how are they supposed to fix said issues? Just wait for them to find it themselves? They don't even play their own game, and I know this because the game director himself said he didn't even know that the automatons weapons weren't overheating as they were supposed to.

It's people like you that cause the game to stay in such a buggy and unfinished state, simply because you don't want to hurt the developers feelings. Obviously you can be nice and give constructive criticism, but when the developers are charging players 40$ and then nerfing older weapons and super credit spawns (I cannot prove this but it absolutely felt true a few months back). They have buffed the spawns since then as now I get 10-30 a mission, but back then I MAYBE got 10 in 3-5 missions. It's insanely hard to prove that, but back when there was a new battle-pass almost every month I couldn't keep up and wasn't able to finish the first free battle-pass (which I had just done recently btw.) So I was stuck with base game gear that was severely under-powered compared to the newer stuff, that is just unacceptable.

Democratic Detonation is when I stopped playing because the grind to get the other battlepasses just became so boring especially with how repetitive the game is, especially when I was stuck with the same limited selection of weaponry. It is also extremely scummy that they kept releasing new battlepasses and then nerfed the older weapons into the ground so they could incentivize us into spending money to get the new overpowered weapons. I refused and still refuse to give them any extra money as they have shown time and time again that they do not deserve it. Let's not forget as almost everything they have released post-launch has either been really buggy or just doesn't work as intended.

I went off on a tangent there and I apologize but it angers me so much that they believe they deserve extra cash when they don't even bother to fix their game. There are still issues that have been plaguing the game since launch, such as the broken friend list, players not able to be reinforced if they joined late, and so many other issues. So I believe they absolutely deserve the criticism they get and shouldn't be protected by us consumers. I also just don't understand why there are so many fanboys that rush to defend these guys, especially when they aren't our friends and they don't care about us so why should we be worried about being rude to them?

I don't like being mean or rude to others but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Arrowhead is ABSOLUTELY incompetent and need to do something about their dev team. There is so much more I could go over but just like how they don't care about fixing their game I don't care to keep ranting about this.

[Cregus]

Originally posted by PlazaLord:

My thoughts:
It's okay to be mad at the game, but one mission going wrong aint that bad. If a mission type if glitching on you normally, it is common sense to avoid it so you never have the issue until the bug is fixed. (I did this with the oil mission on release)

Unable to complete a mission(due to a bug) - yeah that's rough. Hasn't happened to me since 3 months from release. Although the hive bomb can get stuck, usually it loads properly for one of the players in the game.

Don't play with PSN people with invites so no comment there. (No experience with it, obviously with pc friends I've had no issues)

Stims? You got hit by an enemy. Clip it and rewatch. They don't make you invincible, health hits 0 - you die.

Reloading is janky for sure, but has felt better this update.
Also reload the weapon all the way before switching weapon in hand? Never had it not work this update. (although I'm sure experiences differ)

None of these are issues that won't get fixed so if it is such an issue maybe wait on the game a few months. Always better to ignore it than get mad at a video game like half the people on here.

Be glad you weren't watching arrowhead during the magicka days, literally gotta downgrade it to make it potentially playable.

There is nothing wrong with the positive reviews; the recent patch fixed a lot of my gripes with the game. Just because you decide a game is an "unplayable buggy mess" doesn't mean we won't keep opening it to have fun, and leaving good reviews along the way.

[voidCaster]

Originally posted by Cregus:

What a great idea, "Ignore the issues and they will be fixed eventually". If the problems are ignored and no feedback is given how are they supposed to fix said issues? Just wait for them to find it themselves? They don't even play their own game, and I know this because the game director himself said he didn't even know that the automatons weapons weren't overheating as they were supposed to.

Yeah, this is a common problem with pre-release games which rely solely on their own custom-hosted forums and/or a sycophantic Discord group for bug reports. Anyone who does join these phony "communities" to report bugs and gameplay problems will be trolled and harassed by the suck-ups, if not banned by one of the suckups who slimed their way into becoming a moderator.

[TheClosetSkeleton]

This game was made by 100 people on a dead engine, so if anything, it shows their competencies.

Also, small dev note, not every problem is fixable, so some feature, mainly physics related ones, will always have bugs, big and small.

It's a trade off. We got a very unique and interesting game, counterpart being that you have to live with some jank because programming isn't perfect, it's a bunch of smoke screen kept together with tape

[voidCaster]

Originally posted by TheClosetSkeleton:

This game was made by 100 people on a dead engine, so if anything, it shows their competencies.

Also, small dev note, not every problem is fixable, so some feature, mainly physics related ones, will always have bugs, big and small.

It's a trade off. We got a very unique and interesting game, counterpart being that you have to live with some jank because programming isn't perfect, it's a bunch of smoke screen kept together with tape

You're saying they have 100 programmers working on the game and none of them can figure out why everything is broken? Nobody ever heard the phrase "too many cooks?"

[W]

OK - A few bugs that are now more apparent after devs messed with things in the last few patches:

Spawns are STILL broken. As a gameplay loop, destruction of holes should result in less spawns. Currently, destroying holes have little to no effect on spawns. The game should be accountable for spawns, referencing number of nests left on the map, like for Stalkers.

Solo players should get disproportionately more lives.

The ragdolling is very much still broken and it is very apparent on maps like Turing where there is more uneven ground. You would run off a small rock, and suddenly be ragdolled. That does not make sense.

Chargers have been made more agile and that is poor game design. The entire point of chargers is that they charge. Over the last few patches, Chargers will now manouvre even when charging.

Devs want Helldivers to be glass cannons - fine, but that means they have to change how bugs attack. Right now, the bugs will hit you, stagger you, then hit you before you can react. That changes the game dramatically and is not what was intended. Maybe add a cool down for bug attacks so they dont combo you.

[Helldivers™ 2]

Originally posted by Franco:

Originally posted by Helldivers™ 2:

If he wants facts, he should remember these guys tried to fix the infinite grenades 3 times, one of which they thought that making a 32 bit signed integer into unsigned would protect against it, but instead of -1 it became infinite, because the incompetents didnt know what underflow is. This passed QA and review.

There is no more proof needed after all this since release, these guys should be doing another job

Half-jokingly... is there QA and review?

No. Serious. There have been many bugs released that would be caught with a single playtest without even looking for them. That means there was not even 1 test = no QA..

[TheClosetSkeleton]

Originally posted by voidCaster:

Originally posted by TheClosetSkeleton:

This game was made by 100 people on a dead engine, so if anything, it shows their competencies.

Also, small dev note, not every problem is fixable, so some feature, mainly physics related ones, will always have bugs, big and small.

It's a trade off. We got a very unique and interesting game, counterpart being that you have to live with some jank because programming isn't perfect, it's a bunch of smoke screen kept together with tape

You're saying they have 100 programmers working on the game and none of them can figure out why everything is broken? Nobody ever heard the phrase "too many cooks?"

People is not programmer, you have animation, rigging, terrain developper, game designer, tester and I'm skipping a lot.

Second, this is very small for a studio, most game of that scale are counting 300+ people across multiple studios

Third, as stated, autodesk abandonned the engine years ago, making it outdated and less flexible and feature complete than it could be

Fourth, just because you know where a bug is coming from doesn't mean you can fix it, think of terrain bugs, like getting flung off the map, that cannot be fixed without overhauling the generation all-together (stuff that isn't necessarly possible, especially since the ENGINE IS OUTDATED)

I recommend to not try to look like a smug bastard when you have a surface understanding of software and game developpement as a whole, let alone no information whatsoever on this specific game and thus cannot pin-point the problem yourself.

Looking at a crooked house and saying "fix it" isn't going to remove the "tear down the house first" step of the process, so some bugs are here to stay.

The glitch are minimal at a large scale, I encounter one every two mission, usually just texture streching, and sometimes the evac breaks, but that's about it, fairly small when considering what we have, and how worse it could have been.

I'm not saying don't report, just asking for an attitude fix for people that don't know how this ♥♥♥♥ works (or doesn't), and thus should not pose as an authority on the subject.

[voidCaster]

Originally posted by TheClosetSkeleton:

Originally posted by voidCaster:

You're saying they have 100 programmers working on the game and none of them can figure out why everything is broken? Nobody ever heard the phrase "too many cooks?"

People is not programmer, you have animation, rigging, terrain developper, game designer, tester and I'm skipping a lot.

Second, this is very small for a studio, most game of that scale are counting 300+ people across multiple studios

Third, as stated, autodesk abandonned the engine years ago, making it outdated and less flexible and feature complete than it could be

Fourth, just because you know where a bug is coming from doesn't mean you can fix it, think of terrain bugs, like getting flung off the map, that cannot be fixed without overhauling the generation all-together (stuff that isn't necessarly possible, especially since the ENGINE IS OUTDATED)

I recommend to not try to look like a smug bastard when you have a surface understanding of software and game developpement as a whole, let alone no information whatsoever on this specific game and thus cannot pin-point the problem yourself.

Looking at a crooked house and saying "fix it" isn't going to remove the "tear down the house first" step of the process, so some bugs are here to stay.

The glitch are minimal at a large scale, I encounter one every two mission, usually just texture streching, and sometimes the evac breaks, but that's about it, fairly small when considering what we have, and how worse it could have been.

I'm not saying don't report, just asking for an attitude fix for people that don't know how this ♥♥♥♥ works (or doesn't), and thus should not pose as an authority on the subject.

You should take your own advice vis a vis not being a smug bastard when you know nothing, and also vis a vis not putting yourself forward as an authority on a whole industry when you aren't.

You don't know me. You don't know my age or how many decades I was a gamer before I got into building games or how many decades I've been building games. You only know that you're a rabid fanboi with a nasty temper.