Play your own fucking games devs wtf, I have no respect for this.
It would be interesting to see the stats on the amount of time that is played by each department on their own products and then compare that to how it used to be.
The anecdotes i got is that they are not that much of nerds of playing their own games unless forced by the job anymore, rather they find other games they are not involved in.
It really is atrocious and I am thinking of two titles in particular Baldur's Gate 3 and Rogue Trader. It's extremely annoying because even the negative reviews don't really talk about any of this which is why letting normies into gaming was a mistake. There are some game breaking bugs in these games that are either incredibly annoying to the point it made me not want to go near it anymore or they break the game and mean you can't even progress anymore.
The modern corpo mantra is that the customer is the test base this is helped by the customer base is not getting refunds. Just look at the amount of refunds of cyberpunk 2077 and the people whom defend that mess even when it was at the worst. The customer is blamed for all the faults of the producer and trying to say enough is enough will get you banned on corp forums and the shills heckling you. Gaslighting is part of normal communication and has been for a long while, this leads to normal consumers breaking down a bit and accepting the state of the gaming industry.
In regards to the dev parts to some extent is the quality of coders going down the drain, the passions is no longer encouraged due to all the fun office politics and the deadline is always insane and if you can fix a bug you could instead create a new feature for the sales team or work on something else.
Owlcat is extra fun since they sold an alpha and beta of their games which intentionally limited the endgame part of the game which means that in theory they had free QA for the first parts and would just need to pay for the end part (although one can argue how good they handle the first part of their game)
This reminds me of when I was on the Public Test Realm for Naxxramas in vanilla WoW with my guild back in 2006 (I think).
We were about to pull an early boss when a "GM" spawned in front of us. He whispered our guild leader for our Ventrilo information, then hopped in our server to listen in on our comms. We struggled on a few pulls, but after each wipe the "GM" would mass res and mass buff us to save time. Then he would randomly whisper one of our guild members with a tip, e.g.: "Have you tried Mind Control? ;)"
After we killed the boss on the PTR, he congratulated and thanked us, then he told us... that he was Tigole. Tigole was the lead developer for World of Warcraft. We were playing at like 3 am on a weekday, and this guy was watching us goof our way through an encounter while responsible for developing content for millions of players. That was super cool.
It would be interesting to see the stats on the amount of time that is played by each department on their own products and then compare that to how it used to be.
I can say from being a WoW player over the years that game devs playing their own game does nothing to help make the game better in any way. Often times, it just makes them more certain in themselves that the player is wrong.
You are suggesting that the dev playing helps them reinforce a certain playstyle that they are used and then only using that as a standard in order to iterate? In which case yes that is certainly a case that can happen, it is also something that even QA might get stuck into.
But I do not agree that the devs playing their own game does nothing to help it.
The very first iterations of a prototype would be something that the devs themself played in order to have any idea if the game is even feasible or fun.
Later in the development process playing the game your self ensure that you can spot some obvious flaws (ofc with being human there will be blind spot which is why you bring in some other perspective to try new stuff)
Now with modern games being live service and such as your example were the iteration of endgame seems to be mostly in the balancing rather than trying more grand new features or other stuff or just removal of old stuff, I agree that the dev's own perspective starts being less useful.
Often times, it just makes them more certain in themselves that the player is wrong.
Is this not more the standard folly of man when they believe themself to be expert and loses all their humility? In which case i'm not sure that the devs playing the game itself is the flaw rather than the ego, they could just be declaring themself anointed without playing.
It would be interesting to see the stats on the amount of time that is played by each department on their own products and then compare that to how it used to be. The anecdotes i got is that they are not that much of nerds of playing their own games unless forced by the job anymore, rather they find other games they are not involved in.
The modern corpo mantra is that the customer is the test base this is helped by the customer base is not getting refunds. Just look at the amount of refunds of cyberpunk 2077 and the people whom defend that mess even when it was at the worst. The customer is blamed for all the faults of the producer and trying to say enough is enough will get you banned on corp forums and the shills heckling you. Gaslighting is part of normal communication and has been for a long while, this leads to normal consumers breaking down a bit and accepting the state of the gaming industry.
In regards to the dev parts to some extent is the quality of coders going down the drain, the passions is no longer encouraged due to all the fun office politics and the deadline is always insane and if you can fix a bug you could instead create a new feature for the sales team or work on something else.
Owlcat is extra fun since they sold an alpha and beta of their games which intentionally limited the endgame part of the game which means that in theory they had free QA for the first parts and would just need to pay for the end part (although one can argue how good they handle the first part of their game)
This reminds me of when I was on the Public Test Realm for Naxxramas in vanilla WoW with my guild back in 2006 (I think).
We were about to pull an early boss when a "GM" spawned in front of us. He whispered our guild leader for our Ventrilo information, then hopped in our server to listen in on our comms. We struggled on a few pulls, but after each wipe the "GM" would mass res and mass buff us to save time. Then he would randomly whisper one of our guild members with a tip, e.g.: "Have you tried Mind Control? ;)"
After we killed the boss on the PTR, he congratulated and thanked us, then he told us... that he was Tigole. Tigole was the lead developer for World of Warcraft. We were playing at like 3 am on a weekday, and this guy was watching us goof our way through an encounter while responsible for developing content for millions of players. That was super cool.
In some AAA companies that might be considered cruel and unusual torment xD
Double-jumpen Sie die Boxen or I vill shoost your whole family in front of you.
I can say from being a WoW player over the years that game devs playing their own game does nothing to help make the game better in any way. Often times, it just makes them more certain in themselves that the player is wrong.
You are suggesting that the dev playing helps them reinforce a certain playstyle that they are used and then only using that as a standard in order to iterate? In which case yes that is certainly a case that can happen, it is also something that even QA might get stuck into. But I do not agree that the devs playing their own game does nothing to help it. The very first iterations of a prototype would be something that the devs themself played in order to have any idea if the game is even feasible or fun. Later in the development process playing the game your self ensure that you can spot some obvious flaws (ofc with being human there will be blind spot which is why you bring in some other perspective to try new stuff)
Now with modern games being live service and such as your example were the iteration of endgame seems to be mostly in the balancing rather than trying more grand new features or other stuff or just removal of old stuff, I agree that the dev's own perspective starts being less useful.
Is this not more the standard folly of man when they believe themself to be expert and loses all their humility? In which case i'm not sure that the devs playing the game itself is the flaw rather than the ego, they could just be declaring themself anointed without playing.
Perhaps saying it does "nothing" was hasty. The better way to say my point was "no guarantee, and even risky to" finding issues or improving the game.
For example, Dead by Daylight