4Game

Hi all,

Wanted to provide a little context to this community around how to estimate how long complex changes would actually take to implement for a large, complicated project like Tarkov. I'm no game dev, but I am a developer professionally and wanted to give some guidance to people when they make posts about fixes / changes / features / requests in tarkov.

Firstly, if you've never worked on a large application, it might feel easy to just assume all changes to a codebase are of equal complexity, but in reality this is almost never the case. I see posts here everyday that make the mistake of assuming that a change in user experience (for the player) takes an equivalent amount of development time.

An example that I see in the top posts currently:

"Revert the sound back to steam audio until the new system is more refined"

We know BSG is not developing the most cutting edge, highly-optimized, modular Unity code for their game. They're a small team and their features are far more likely to be highly coupled with other existing systems and components of the tarkov application – it is almost never so easy to make sweeping changing to complex, interdependent systems like this. There is very little chance the team could easily revert back to steam audio at this point. In all likelihood it would probably take just as much designing, development, and testing to go back to steam audio as it did to convert over to oculus audio in the first place. It might take a team of devs a month to do this and at the end of the day it makes no sense to throw all those dev hours away for that when The team has already decided to use oculus audio moving forward and that time could be better spent fixing more important issues.

On the flipside there are changes that are possible to implement very quickly. For example, we know things like ammo/gun/armor characteristics are controlled by a few fixed values used by the systems for recoil/damage/etc. It might take just a week for a single person at BSG to go through every single ammo and armor and then rebalance just by changing these values… resulting in significant impact to how the game plays, what the metas become, etc.

I suppose the summary of what I'm trying to say is this: it's generally straightforward to adjust values within existing systems ('tuning'), however changes that require completely or partially reworking core systems in an application are almost always more complex than you think. In my own opinion there are many systemic and tuning issues worth fixing in Tarkov, but from a return on time invested standpoint, a lot of community requests for changes completely fail to acknowledge one fix's development cost vs other high-priority items BSG has planned.