Feature Creep - Give us some of the worst examples of feature creep you've seen. I'm working on some projects and I wanna see what I need to steer clear of.

[Chaos Theorist]

Retroarch comes to mind as the posterchild for feature creep. It tries to be a one-stop-shop for all things emulation, but it just doesn't do anything well. There are tons of options in the menus that most people will never use, burying important ones like setting up your controls, and plenty that are buggy in one way or another. It's very easy to accidentally toggle something and mess it up badly enough to where you have to reinstall, too.

Retroarch doesn't need a built-in music/picture/video player. It doesn't need to ask me which of 50 different emulation cores I wanna use when I go to play a SNES game. I never even figured out the esoteric shit like its support for source ports that always just seems to crash when I try to load one. Things like ScummVM that never, ever use gamepads shouldn't even be a part of Retroarch when they have their own reasonably good UI that handles every setting and feature of a Scumm game.

So much of Retroarch needs to be reined the hell in. All of this work, so much support for so many different games and platforms, and yet it's still a journey just to find where to swap what X and O do in the labyrinth that is the settings menu.

This is why I use Bizhawk. The Swiss Army Knife of emulation.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Original Prey is a funny example. The 90's version of Prey got a lot of attention because of the portals and non-euclidean space, something that had never been seen before. It actually became such a vaporware marvel that other companies/engines that were up for licensing started implementing them to keep up with Prey, Unreal 1 had them and Quake 3 had a very, very basic version. Quake 3 like Unreal 1 also had NURBS, sort of, a thing that Starbreeze threatened with Sorcery.

"Portals" came from a misunderstanding. A new game designer or producer(I don't remember) thought that what they described as a fast spatial occlusion tech was something else and pushed for them to make all these crazy things. Then Prey got cancelled because that is some hard shit to figure out.

Sweeney got it working though. Play Unreal 1 and check out either the beta or a couple of the multiplayer levels. To give some perspective: DirectX 5 was just released at that time and absolute garbage so they can't use the hardware trickery that Portal used, plus they supported all the IHV APIs of the time. And this is amazing, portals work in software rendering.

 

[FriendlyPrimarina]

Retroarch comes to mind as the posterchild for feature creep. It tries to be a one-stop-shop for all things emulation, but it just doesn't do anything well. There are tons of options in the menus that most people will never use, burying important ones like setting up your controls, and plenty that are buggy in one way or another. It's very easy to accidentally toggle something and mess it up badly enough to where you have to reinstall, too.

Retroarch doesn't need a built-in music/picture/video player. It doesn't need to ask me which of 50 different emulation cores I wanna use when I go to play a SNES game. I never even figured out the esoteric shit like its support for source ports that always just seems to crash when I try to load one. Things like ScummVM that never, ever use gamepads shouldn't even be a part of Retroarch when they have their own reasonably good UI that handles every setting and feature of a Scumm game.

So much of Retroarch needs to be reined the hell in. All of this work, so much support for so many different games and platforms, and yet it's still a journey just to find where to swap what X and O do in the labyrinth that is the settings menu.

The only reason I still use RA is because of RetroAchievements. If more standalone emulators supported those I would kick RA to the curb without a second thought.

 

[gooseberry-picker]

Never forget Zawinski's Law.

I feel like that law can be retired now. I definitely think that if you placed email with the document object model (aka. the DOM), you might be onto something, though.

Think of how many apps and GUI toolkits now have embedded web browsers in them.

 

[Flabba_Wabba_Jabba_Noonga]

I feel like that law can be retired now. I definitely think that if you placed email with the document object model (aka. the DOM), you might be onto something, though.

Think of how many apps and GUI toolkits now have embedded web browsers in them.

Think of how many desktop applications are converting to Electron...

 

[instythot]

Are they personal software projects? In my experience, those are damn near the only software projects that don't end up dead by feature creep. A good manager will never let a software project go unmolested.

I may have been asked to make a database produces one report that provides everything that everyone in an organization would ever need, and may have got shot down when responding to that with "I'm not sure that's a great idea, most users will find that it's mostly full of stuff that's irrelevant to them. How about maybe 6 or 8 well designed and focused reports?"

And that's more or less how you get any good product that does what it's supposed to do bloated and clogged with shit

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Star Citizen.

The game was asking for $500k in 2013 to produce a game about space combat and space economies, similar to the old freespace games. It would receive $2.1 million, and was supposed to be out in 2015.

Today in 2021 Scam Citizen is still in alpha. It has now consumed more then $260 million, making it the single most expensive game ever made, more then GTA V's development and marketing budgets combined. The list of features in that game have encompassed entire genres not originally covered by the kickstarter. A fully voiced wing commander love letter, a persistent MMO universe, property management, ships you can walk through, FPS combat, ece. Much of the original list of features is still MIA.

No matter what chris roberts pulls off, it will never live up to the insane hype, and the game has received a LOT of heat for broken promises. Chris himself has managed to burn through $260 million with a microscopic team compared to rockstar with incredibly slow progress. He has also acquired a million dollar house and multiple supercars. The videos made on the game's inevitable collapse are going to be legendary.