Well, at least according to those that worked on little things like The Last of Us Part 2, The Witcher 3, and Control.
A recent Twitter thread brought game devs together in their shared hatred for implementing doors and, honestly, I had no idea this was a thing.
Doors #gamedev pic.twitter.com/7CJgKin1dE
— Stephan Hövelbrinks (@talecrafter) March 9, 2021
The problem with doors lies in their potential. They’re dynamic objects that can be open/closed/locked/hiding enemies/destructible et cetera, et cetera. It’s just a lot of variables. Some games gave up on including doors altogether, unless they were being used as load screens to get to another section. And many developers agree that they’re a pain in the ass.
I don’t exactly know how many man-months went into the door system in Control, but more than most abilities and weapons, for sure.
— Sergey Mohov (@krides) March 9, 2021
Don’t know what everyone’s up in arms about. We added doors in combat to TLOU2, took like a day. Just gotta have good talent I gues… LOL JK IT WAS THE THING THAT TOOK THE LONGEST TO GET RIGHT WHAT WERE WE THINKING 1/100 https://t.co/oUmdRFmiGJ
— Kurt Margenau (@kurtmargenau) March 9, 2021
I know @fabiandoehla just treats this as some kind of SICK joke, but as I keep saying to you all: doors are serious business! 🚪 https://t.co/O10arT1rDH
— Miles Tost (@tostspender) March 9, 2021
Y’all when we made TWD:S&S we literally had a designer whose entire job was doors and we were still panicking about them pretty much all the way until ship 💀 https://t.co/cckgbZrsPE
— 罗薇 Ameorry Luo 🔪 (@dustandhalos) March 9, 2021
Moral of the story: if you want to trigger a bunch of game devs, mention doors. For more insight into what is involved when implementing doors in games, I direct you to a 2014 post by Ubisoft’s Liz England. Sadly, doors continue to plague her to this day.
Last night I died in Ark because a door closed on me. The moral here is do not put doors in your game.
— Liz England (@lizardengland) March 9, 2021
So, maybe appreciate all the doors you’ve come across in your many gaming experiences, like all those doors in Elder Scrolls games that only open one way and are locked at particular times of the day, when the homeowner is/isn’t home, but especially the ones that don’t randomly kill you for daring to stand near them (looking at you, Apex).
Via GameSpot.