I’ll use a distinct instance to reply your query at present. There’s a well known long-running MMORPG known as Star Wars: The Previous Republic that was well-known for its companion characters as a serious recreation function.
The best way that the companion system was constructed for launch was designed round each class having an equal variety of companions throughout the information. Companions at launch had been mapped by class – each participant class had six totally different companions, every with a set position (melee tank, ranged tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, healer, ship droid) in a particular numbered slot. In all the code programs that had something to do with companions, the code wouldn’t ask for a particular companion by ID quantity, however relatively by the participant’s class and companion slot quantity. The system was constructed such that companion lookup couldn’t be sparse (that’s, you couldn’t have empty companion slots for any class), or programs like companion affection, gear, companion stats and stat scaling, many elements of fight, companion UI, sure cinematics, and so on. would fail in a cascade. Each class needed to have the identical variety of companions or all types of recreation programs would break. This additionally meant that there wasn’t simply two totally different faction ship droids, there have been eight (a distinct one for every class).
ALTIt was when the sport designers added the primary and second extra companions to the unique roster that they bumped into the wall. They couldn’t add simply one companion – they’d so as to add eight companions – a distinct model of the brand new companion for every class. The prices had been so nice that the management deemed it too costly to construct new companions after the primary two (HK-51 and Treek). It additionally meant that there was no means that they might reuse current companions for different courses – the Sith Warrior couldn’t ever recruit a companion character that was designed for the Imperial Agent, as a result of it wouldn’t be the identical companion, it’d must be a separate occasion of that previous companion information. New companion characters had been some of the extremely requested and fashionable options amongst gamers, however truly including them to the sport was a nightmare by way of the quantity of labor that wanted to be executed and complexity of information (since design quailed on the considered having to maintain monitor of as much as eight totally different variations of each new companion added to the sport). This downside was a steady thorn within the facet of the management too as a result of they knew this might open up large new alternatives – faction reward companions, microtransaction companions, non permanent companions that would truly die as a part of the story, totally different variations of companions, and so on. – however couldn’t feasibly do something about it because of the improvement value of getting to rebuild your entire system.
ALTFinally, circumstances granted the SWTOR staff extra headcount for a 12 months and the management properly tasked a strike staff of engineers and designers for practically your entire growth cycle to rebuild the companion system from the bottom up with a view to decouple the participant courses from their static companion slots. For the primary time, designers might set a listing of participant courses that the companion may very well be recruited by without having to create a replica of that companion’s information for every class. All courses might share the identical companion’s information, which meant that courses might recruit every others’ companions, and that new companions had been a lot, a lot simpler so as to add to the sport. Design would now not have to create eight totally different variations of the identical companion anymore.
ALTAs you will have surmised, the explanation that it was so costly so as to add unanticipated performance in later is as a result of lots of different essential programs had been constructed upon the assumptions made throughout that preliminary implementation. Altering the underlying system meant that all the different programs constructed on prime of it might both fail spectacularly, or would additionally have to be rebuilt to work with the brand new hotness. These recreation programs don’t exist in a vacuum – there are sometimes shockwaves that have an effect on different secondary programs which might set off their very own shockwaves to have an effect on tertiary programs, and so forth. It isn’t all the time as enormous a difficulty as SWTOR’s companion system, however it’s a actually good instance of dangerous assumptions made throughout preliminary improvement haunting the staff for years after launch.
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