It's amazing to think how far this game has come. The last picture really emphasizes this. It's also offensive to think that Vanilla, with how much content it contained and how detailed the spire and depths are, shipped with only 60 people. Now the team is double the size or more and we get WoD.
It just goes to show, once the passion and dedication are gone, and it's all about Activision's $$ now, how the results change,
That's how legacy code is and it's very common in any software project. The industry lingo for it is Technical Debt. The guys writing the code for the first time are focused on getting as much in as possible and as quickly as possible, and it's informal with a lot of single or duo ownership of components, all of which leads to a lack of unit testing, poor design, misc bugs, etc. Combine this with the fact that the community and management is always demanding more content, the devs never have time to go back and fix their shitty code (every developer has times when they write shitty code), so the code base just gets more and more poorly-done code and after 10 years, you're looking at something that would take a year or more just to straighten out.
This is a common problem in all software projects across all sectors of business - healthcare, banking, porn sites, gaming, etc. Management still thinks of coding as if it's done when functionality is working, but in reality, it needs healthy maintenance and regular code quality improvements. This is by no means a Blizz specific problem or a sign that their devs are bad, it's just a part of software development that doesn't get enough attention.
It just goes to show, once the passion and dedication are gone, and it's all about Activision's $$ now, how the results change,
That's how legacy code is and it's very common in any software project. The industry lingo for it is Technical Debt. The guys writing the code for the first time are focused on getting as much in as possible and as quickly as possible, and it's informal with a lot of single or duo ownership of components, all of which leads to a lack of unit testing, poor design, misc bugs, etc. Combine this with the fact that the community and management is always demanding more content, the devs never have time to go back and fix their shitty code (every developer has times when they write shitty code), so the code base just gets more and more poorly-done code and after 10 years, you're looking at something that would take a year or more just to straighten out.
This is a common problem in all software projects across all sectors of business - healthcare, banking, porn sites, gaming, etc. Management still thinks of coding as if it's done when functionality is working, but in reality, it needs healthy maintenance and regular code quality improvements. This is by no means a Blizz specific problem or a sign that their devs are bad, it's just a part of software development that doesn't get enough attention.
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