4Game

Likely an unpopular opinion, but maybe it will open up some minds;

I see so many people complaining about bugs, features not being what they wanted, patches and updates being pushed back, etc., and then blame fdev for not caring, not trying, not listening to players.

As someone who works in IT and works closely with application developers I see how easily something that is working can become broken. Something so simple as an extra space in code can cause hours, days, weeks of headaches trying to figure it out. Sometimes it doesn't affect anything related to the code, but somehow causes issues in something completely unrelated. Often times your app is broken by something outside of your own programming. We see patches and updates weekly, daily, sometimes multiple times a day from other software developers, and we then have to fix our own code because their update broke something of ours. It is an ever-changing vicious revolving door of unknowns every day.

With a game, you don't have the luxury of designing something to run on one platform with one standard hardware build, you have to make it compatible with multiple platforms with countless hardware possibilities from other vendors. Most of these gaming systems are built by people who honestly have no idea what they are doing and just watched a YouTube video. Sometimes things just don't play well together. There are so many different ways to play E:D, with countless things that need to integrate together, paired with the sheer size of it all there are bound to be issues. This is not a one size fits all, one way to play, just follow the path set out in front of you which leaves one set of easy code type of game.

I get it, people are frustrated with update 14 being pushed back. Would you rather have it released on time with known bugs? Would you rather have it possibly break your game? Or would you rather keep playing as is for a few more days while the developers do their best to resolve issues before release? As far as I'm concerned fdev is doing alright, especially with a small crew. They are still supporting a near 10 year old game built on a 10 year old engine and trying to keep it running on current systems, while still providing new content and new gameplay. They could have just washed their hands of it and focused their efforts on new releases, which would probably net them far more money than they make from E:D.

Hate on me all you want, this is just one humble opinion from an IT professional that enjoys the game, even with a few bugs.