If old overwatch code is incompatible with new overwatch code, then yeah, I get it. But that’s not what Jeph said. He said a lot of changes overwritten and not properly versioned off. Which is some monkey business if I ever heard.
Anyway, current Overwatch is about as buggy as Season 1. There were a few bugs they fixed, and a few bugs they added, and a lot of bugs that have just been around so long that we don’t even notice them any more. The only crazy bug that I really don’t miss is the one where Roadhog could hook you from another universe.
Again, this is just poor coding standards on blizzards employees. Sounds like they didnt close that branch properly. Hahahah! Or some idiot was working off Master instead of properly creating their own work branch or something.
In any case, if it cant be done, it cant be done. The reasoning is far too cringe but hey, whatever. I dont buy it anyways. Versioning is very easy to do and is an industry wide standard. People over there should know better. But we are humans so i dont really expect perfection
There could be many reasons.
How the game talks to BNet might have changed. Some remote assets might have been relocated in the meantime. Old codes could contain 3rd party library that is no longer supported or license-expired. It is also possible that OS/Device drivers no longer support some methods used by the game’s old client and/or server. Maybe rolling back re-introduces vulnerabilities they had quietly removed. ETC ETC
If they versioned correctly, none of this matters.
Code refractoring is done on a regular basis for any big software company (or in blizzard’s case, should be)
Code Integration shouldn’t require much overwritting (plus they would’ve had the added benefit of keeping the legacy code in their version repository) Even if, the integration team and testing teams should theoretically catch these big issues like os integration.
I dunno.
It’s all speculative anyways.
I make CMS programs not games. So what do i know about game developement.
I won’t speak for them since I don’t work there and obvious don’t know the specific details, but I can make some educated guesses.
Firstly, when talking about binary assets (not code/text), some source code repositories dont handle versioning very well, and as a result it can very quickly inflate to unmanageable sizes. While many games ship at what most would consider a reasonable size, you must understand that the shipping game is commonly only a fraction of the total assets they have. There can be hundreds or even thousands (or more) of unused art assets from development phases and prototyping that go unused. And these aren’t the nice compressed versions that ship with the game either. They are typically raw data formats, and corresponding data formats that go with various programs used to make them (e.g. PSD’s for photoshop).
Additionally, in addition to raw art assets he mentioned technical difficulties. Even if they were just doing a straight “revert code base to date 05/24/16” there are significant hurdles that they’d need to do, but that’s not even what they attempted to do. They were trying to version specific parts of the game to run on the latest version of the game in the arcade. A lot of stuff in the game no longer works the same way. The physics engine changed - along with movement mechanics for many heroes. The rendering system changed. And most importantly, the networking infrastructure probably changed substantially. Probably nearly every subsystem in the game has undergone a lot of changes and hooking them all together would not be simple.
Making these all work in the current version of the game is undoubtably quite a challenge itself. I Jeff’s brevity on the details probably stems from a combination of not knowing the exact details of all of the issues, and also not wanting to go into the detail for the majority of players who wouldnt even know what he’s talking about.
I have to assume you’ve never worked for a software company.
No, that’s pretty standard – you make major changes and if someone needs changes on a prior software release it’s significant effort. Sometimes just not even possible.
For people citing WoW classic – they basically redid the entire game from scratch with the same rulset. It wasn’t simply digging up old code.
They probably have all the code for old abilities saved elsewhere but its not attached to the current game code meaning they would have to go in and specifically re-create the character with their old abilities and that is only assuming they didn’t change the way they handle certain functions or maths meaning those would have to be redone for their new standards
