Expedition 33 seemed to have to recompile shaders regularly but never for 15 freaking minutes for things to take effect properly.

Most other games will just say something like:

"Some changes require a restart to take effect"

Maybe B4 tried something new where instead of a 2 minute restart, it fucks up your game for up to 15 minutes?

Like, shit is unusual, but I don't have the game, I'm just going off what I see in articles.

Yeah, tbf though I play through proton a lot, but any time I change resolution (like say, when I play through moonlight on my steamdeck) I get hit with a "compiling vulkan shaders" before the game actually launches on top of any compiling shaders in game. It's usually pretty fast but there's a few times it'll take a while, and it happens on windows too, my partner had a bunch of times this week where they hit extended load in times (BL4 in particular) because of it.

I want to say ME Legendary Edition had periods where it'd compile shaders, some others for sure I recall needing to as well, ME:A, DA:I and Veilguard for sure I recall having to wait a bit.

Fifteen minutes into your refund window.

They're hoping people will get sucked into the game, and stop caring the graphics suck.

If you jump straight from an optimized game to B4, it's going to suck. They want you to keep playing till your brain adjusts.

But if you're coming out of 120fps twitch shooter...

It's gonna take a lot longer than 15 minutes to get used to AI upscaled fake frame 60fps instead

It’s the JIT shader compilations that need to be rebuilt in the state cache, other games do the same thing it’s why there are tiny stutters the first time you see a new effect in some games.

People who spend every waking moment working on something end up caring about it. Being a game dev in the AAA industry is brutal. You only do it if you really like working on games. The pay sucks, the hours suck, and the benefits suck.

The only thing you really get to keep is the pride in your work when the game is released.

It's clear Randy did fuckall with this game, because he lacks any pride in what his devs have accomplished.

I think they do think that though. Companies seem to have realized they can make more money with less sales by pricing the lowest bidding consumer group out of the market.

Gearbox would be a much more beloved company if Randy Pitchford fucked off. He makes everything they do worse, like bragging about how terrible Duke Nukem Forever was like the company is proud of killing the franchise.