How does a AAA developer fix a "death wall" that insta-kills NPCs? By "adding a bunch of boxes"
One patch note from the latest Hitman 3 update has sparked an enlightening and amusing conversation in the game dev community about the stubbornness of certain bugs and the laughably simple fixes that are sometimes required.
The new Hitman 3 update is mostly just a maintenance patch preparing for the August 25 physical launch of Hitman World of Assassination on PS5 as well as the return of the Sarajevo Six campaign and Trinity Pack, which will arrive as premium add-ons on August 17, but there's very silly note hiding in the bug fixes.
Over on Twitter, The Axis Unseen director and former Fallout 76 lead artist Nate Purkeypile flagged a specific note from the update and described it as "a microcosm of how all gamedev goes."
According to IO Interactive's patch notes, there was a wall in Hitman 3 that was killing NPCs that touched it, and after a few failed solutions, the developers simply added "a bunch of boxes and stuff right next to the wall" to keep the NPCs away.
LOL this Hitman patch note is a microcosm of how all gamedev goes."...Screw it. Put some boxes there."I can relate. pic.twitter.com/IXeSU7BoIWAugust 17, 2023
As someone who doesn't develop games for a living, it's hilarious to think of the great minds of a revered studio like IO Interactive resorting to chucking a Band-Aid made of in-game assets at an issue in the hopes of fixing it. And based on Purkeypile's tweet, this sort of fix isn't all that uncommon, although IO Interactive's box fix is definitely the most high-profile example I can think of right now.
This story reminds of an oldy but a goodie: This writeup from 2022 on the Psychonauts 2 bugs that were too funny for the devs to squash .
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