Games

See, when I complained on Nightdive’s Discord server about map glitches that have not been rectified in twenty‐nine years, the excuse that somebody gave to me was that fixing those glitches would result in compatibility issues with other source ports (which would be especially noticeable if attempting multiplayer).

Here is what I wrote:

Is there something in the contract stating that the current designers aren’t allowed to fix old bugs that nobody—and I mean nobody—enjoys?

I mean, the wall running and the silent BFG trick, yeah, but… inaccessible secrets?

Here is the response that two official developers gave me:

So a chunk of the developers for this port are people who have been programming and modding Doom for 20+ years. As such, we tend to err on the side of caution on fixing specific behaviours because we know the knock on effects of trying to fix them, Technical debt is a problem we are trying to avoid, essentially.

If we change something, we have to maintain that change and all systems it affects.

and mod support is on the table, so anything we change has the potential to break 70000 mods[.] unfortunately Doom seems very much built on a table made out of very thin wafers

I replied that while I did not know if that was a sacrifice worth making, I could at least understand why they were making it. Somebody replied,

if it wasnt worth it, doom purists would just be playing (g)zdoom