[2022] This is the most polished game I ever played

Deathworld \"starter\" base

I started a new Deathworld run after something like 3 years ( from version 0.17) and I'm absolutely impressed with the new releases.

The UI feels and looks great
Map creation with preview couldn't be better
All these quality of life features! Can't believe I can just CTRL+C / CTRL+V / CTRL+X blueprints.
The blueprints book system with nested books, is this real?!?
Balance is also great, I'm really struggling even in my late(ish) game.
Biters are a big threat now.
I rushed bots and almost lost this run because I didn't have the firepower to clear my first big iron deposit.
Biter nests look scary, and the noises those worms make are nightmare fuel!
I started a ninja mining operation just out of the range of some worms and they kept screaming at me. It was truly terrifying.
Graphics look amazing! This is not a game I played for the look, but you managed to make it so beautiful nevertheless.
Performance improved as well. I have slightly better hardware, but despite the amount of biters and stuff I have on my map, the constant 60 UPS didn't drop by a bit for the entire run so far.
Train limit on stations?!? I can't wait to start my megabase, this is just great.

I'm sure there is more I still have to experience. I also never really played around with the Spidertron, they look incredible but I still have to build one on this run.

Props to Wube software, this game is a true act of love.

Also I got the Lazy Bastard achievement just now :3

I can't be happier, thank you!

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Originally posted by DonnyTheWalrus

There's a core problem with software projects in that adding more manpower tends to result in a "combinatorial explosion" of complexity. The software dev way to say it is that project complexity tends to scale exponentially in the size of the team.

So just using fewer devs seems like a good solution - and it can be, in certain circumstances. Factorio certainly wouldn't have been made a better game if they'd hired an extra hundred people.

However, number of people still tends to be the limiting factor in terms of content. In order to make more content (graphics, story, levels, mechanics, etc) you kind of do need more people. Factorio is helped by being somewhat limited in content - I just mean the quantity, not how good it is or how many hours the average player gets out of it.

So if you want games like Elden Ring, GTA, Fallout, etc etc, you need to eat the cost in extra complexity because you need a big enough team to make the insane amount of content that a game like GTA requires.

This is one reason among a few why games made by larger teams tend to be buggier than smaller scoped games by small studios. It's not the only reason for poor quality - the insane working conditions are a big one given how exhausted they make people - but it's a big one for which there isn't a real solution.

Tldr, each piece of content in a game has to interact with every other piece of content, so games with more content have exponentially larger surface areas for bugs than smaller games.

The core of the problem is, that for some unknown reason, the bigger companies don't try to apply Test Driven development. Which is really weird, because this approach is even more useful with more people working on the project, as answering "will I break something by this change" is often basically impossible to answer in a bigger team when working without tests.

Open source teams are much more often using proper development practicies, that is why it probably isn't a problem in those situations.

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