When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it's under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc...

When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:

The codebase is fucked
All resources are going to new features
Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc...)
Your current dev team is sub par

Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it "can't" be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.

[–] theblips@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago

The correlation between code quality and game quality is almost negative. When you're doing groundbreaking stuff or going for your own artistic vision it's tough to code well, even more so when you hit a jackpot and have to expand quickly (e.g. League spaghetti, Palworld)

[–] kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 hours ago

In the real world there is no entirely reasonable code base. There's always going to be some aspects of it that are kind of shit, because you intended to do X but then had to change to doing Y, and you have not had time or sufficient reason to properly rewrite everything to reflect that.

We tend to underestimate how long things will take, precisely because when we imagine someone doing them we think of the ideal case, where everything is reasonable and goes well. Which is pretty much guaranteed to not be the case whenever you do anything complex.

[–] DireTech@sh.itjust.works 3 points 18 hours ago

Can’t be done is usually shorthand for the cost massively outweighs the benefits. No different from remodeling a building. Like coding, literally anything is theoretically possible but sometimes you’d have to redo so much existing work it’s never going to be worth it.