I think 'embarrassing' is too strong a word. AAA game development is rushed; the pressure is to ship. Something has to give. This is a user facing issue, but one that doesn't actually affect the gameplay. Assuming they had -time- to profile the load process, given that low a priority, seems extremely optimistic.
>AAA game development is rushed; the pressure is to ship.
I'd be more understanding if GTA Online hadn't already shipped its first version in October of 2013. Surely there would've been some time after shipping the first version to profile the game.
But I should note that once you ship a product in this space there is a heavy emphasis on not breaking much. Changes are for the next milestone (seasons, service packs, new features). There's very rarely any emphasis on "fixing" something because it could introduce even more bugs and Producers prefer sitting on a stack of known issues than addressing them with more unknown ones. Since known issues have a known cost.
Until it gets so bad that you have to make health patches, we made such patches (and referred to them internally as "Sanity" patches)
Sure. I'd be embarrassed if they didn't have the issue on their backlog ("Load times are high"). But the priority seems low, and the actual effort and viability of a fix seems unknown. Speaking as an engineering manager, that is very much going to be a "if you have spare time" ticket. Now, I also try to ensure people have spare time to investigate stuff like that, but that's me, and I don't work in game dev. I can easily see another manager, especially one in game dev (where what keeps players coming back is new content and features, not reduced load times) prioritizing other tickets ahead.
(disclaimer: I'm not in game development and only read about this)
Usually different staff rolls on and off at different times of product development and post-release lifecycle. I understand that most programmers would have been rolled off a while before launch. You early on have people build or adjust the engine and tooling, but later on you don't need most of them anymore and things come down to creating content.
In other areas of software development are perpetual. You don't hit some milestone at which 90% of developers are moved to a different project or laid off and folks with a different skill set are added.
Usually in software development you have different people over time, because of individual churn, not because you are changing the role mix
Well, it doesn't affect the gameplay if the player starts the game once and never closes it. But for anybody who wants to hop on for a quick bit of fun, it's a notable barrier. There are definitely games I've stopped playing because it takes too much time to launch the thing.
I wouldn't have said anything if the game was released one month ago, but GTA V is almost 8 year old now and it's been ported to several generations of hardware (IIRC they've even announced "next gen" ports to release this year). The online function is still maintained and makes them a lot of money. I also do think that it affects the gameplay because these loading times are genuinely terrible. A 30second loading screen is a nuisance, a 5+ minute loading screen just makes me want not to play the game.
I think that Rockstar deserves some blame here, especially since this problem might well be a consequence of their notoriously bad development practices.
I tend to agree. When you are rushing things get missed. Also if it was a problem from the beginning you just might not think its an issue (its just how long it takes) .
One philosophy I heard in my days of programming (not sure how I remembered this but its still out there) :
Make it work, make it right, make it fast.
-- Kent Beck
Rockstar has virtually endless resources and the game has been out for many years. for years, they didn't reduce the extremely long load times? not only embarrassing, but shows deep incompetence and lack of respect for the craft and for end users.
