Skill trees are easy to implement, they don’t take much programming at all, and a competent developer team could have simple trees without new skills set up in a matter of months.
Gedonia is an RPG made by one person, it has about 10 skill trees. Deep Rock Galactic is made by a team of 25, only a few of them would work on the programming of the skill trees.
The only reason they were dropped is that adding skill trees wouldn’t make Bliz enough money. Unless they put some of the skills behind a paywall. It’s all about money, they decided to put their dev time into something that would make more money, like why make skill trees when you can make Mercy skins for $25?
I guess I need to clarify that my whole post was kind of an /s about the idea of actually using AI for serious development, but instead was showing my disdain for the lack of effort being put into making this “sequel” into a quality, polished game (like what I’m used to that Blizzard used to put out).
Overwatch’s direction has very much been going in the way of cutting costs and making both gameplay and Q/C sacrifices all seemingly to pump everything their in-game MTX system, which naturally works without issue, and when there is a problem, is quickly resolved, compared to problems that crop with the base game (even serious engine problems), which have taken weeks to fix, or better, more inspired handling of character design and balance. Meaning “at this point, why not go all the way and just let AI handle developing the game while Blizzard puts all their care into maintaining their shop and BP content?”
If you’re not considering the technical implementation then you might consider each developers own educational investment (school is expensive) and how the company is going to the compensate a dev that has to fit inside a large company structure.
The thing with team size seems to be the bigger the team gets, the more complicated and specialized the process becomes. I mean, if a company is big enough to use something like a market research team then you can only imagine the bureaucracy involved to get a character added. I think it becomes more about efficiency and return on the investment on a large scale $$$. (I know, cringe).
You have to make room for every specialized dev, artist, accountant, and janitor in their own separate team and/or department. A smaller studio might be more free in their own respective roles since they don’t need a research team to hand their research to a different departments director to interpret for their concept team that then hands down their concepts to another departments art director, et cetera.
A small hypothetical example: A single (not even talented) dev can make a skill tree system on their own given enough time. What if that dev doesn’t know how to make a 3D model? Do they hire someone to make a 3D model or do they need to save money and take time to learn how to do that themselves? A second job mayhaps?
I was just interested in this conversation since there’s another discussion on another site that relates to this topic but it’s with Bungie and how they don’t have new maps.
Edit: There’s also the discussion around Boulders Gate 3 and how it’s unlikely that other companies can match what they’ve done (if you’re inclined to compare apples to oranges) because Larian’s entire company structure is tailored for games like BG3. Which gave them the perfect storm. Overwatch is a PvP live service and it looks more and more like team 4 just didn’t have the faculties for talent trees. Which, I guess makes sense.
It’s sorta why people look at Redfall as a failure and ask why they had Arkane make a live service looter shooter when Arkane makes (maybe even specializes in) immersive sims.
they can’t even add another tab for stash in diablo 4 “because we load entire person inventory when u see it”.
what talent tree are we even talking about here. there would be another dumb reason for that.
I think it comes down to something as simple as “they can’t do it” and “they don’t have the ability because they aren’t great enough” as for as net worth goes, they are great; but as far as ability and drive? No they don’t have it. And we have to blame the developers or designers for higher up mistakes. Money hungry company for sure. Yup I play the games , but hate the company.
They will give broken promises forever, just to keep a player base in hopes they can be great again. Won’t happen. Blizz is truly a sad company.