Brian Mitsoda and Ka’ai Cluney leaves Bloodlines 2 developement team

I've never heard of a big budget game not having crunch. That's actually part of the problem: it's such a standard industry practice that it wasn't even questioned for a long time. Anyone who works within pretty much any industry could tell you certain unflattering truths about how things really go down.

But I think CDPR is a well run ship, for the most part, and they have the resources to compensate and communicate with their employees. Will there be crunch for CP2077? They've said as much. Again, it's a standard part of the development cycle. But I don't think it is particularly egegrious in their case, nor do I think it will hamper the game's quality.

I remember the leaks from Witcher III about developer crunch being bad, and a few articles exposed the practice. Yet CDPR was supposed to reduce crunch time for Cyberpunk 2077.

This still isn't making sense to me. The creativity part is mostly in the first half of development, isn't it? Don't game companies sometimes release the big dollar creative minds soon after release? Sure, this game has been delayed, but they have to have almost all of the big creativity decisions behind them. They can't be looking to save money, either, because they backfilled the position. Maybe some sort of personal vendetta?

Oh well, it's (literally) not our business. It doesn't bode well for the game but that hardly matters unless you're crazy enough to pre-order. All the good and the bad will be on display when (if?) it releases.

danutz_plusplus said:

It's frikkin hard to impossible to make estimates in software development. I only work in corporate-enterprise software development and see these kinds of issues constantly.

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It is absolutely possible to estimate pretty accurately if you've got right processes in place (research and hard problems first) and experienced people in charge. You're never spot on but being 2-3 years off like in the case of Bloodlines 2 is absolutely abysmal.

JFarrell71 said:

Makes me glad that CDPR is such a relatively well managed company, and one that is both developer and publisher.

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CDP canned their publishing business recently and there was a short period of time when ppl who preordered with CDP would get their game on launch (or at all). And it's not well managed. Crunch is omnipresent, there's a lot of tribalism and nepotism and people who complain can get fired easily. The only thing going for them is the fact that they are THE Polish game dev studio so they have a lot of klout with people who want to work in game dev.

CP2077 was in late stages of preproduction/early production in 2012. That's 8 years or development with at least one (probably two) hard resets, change in project leadership (original CP head was pulled from the project and became involved in TW3 and Gwent as priorities and tastes shifted) and company growing from, IDK, 400?, to around 1500 people.

JFarrell71 said:

I've never heard of a big budget game not having crunch.

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Pretty much everything by Insomniac Games or Iron Galaxy was crunch-less. Shell Games is also often cited as a no-crunch place.

DominikD said:

Pretty much everything by Insomniac Games or Iron Galaxy was crunch-less. Shell Games is also often cited as a no-crunch place.

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You must have read "games" and hustled to the keyboard. Insomniac is the only one of the three that makes big budget games or anything close to it. (I assume you mean "Schell" games, which I'd never heard of, because Shell games doesn't exist at all so far as I can tell)

JFarrell71 said:

You must have read "games" and hustled to the keyboard. Insomniac is the only one of the three that makes big budget games or anything close to it.

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IG did IK which is relatively big budget compared to other fighting games produced these days (other than NetherRealm nobody has greater bugdet than they had). The quality of their output varies (and they mostly port AAA titles) but review scores aren't tied to the budget. Schell Games (yes, that's a typo) does premium games in VR space so, again, what they do is bug budget in the space they work in.

But all that is irrelevant. Your assertion was that you've never heard of any big budget game without crunch. Marvel’s Spider-Man, Resistance 1-3, Ratchet & Clank series. Boom! Now you have.

I do think that making games is probably one of the hardest businesses to plan for. One of the difficulties is that it straddles the technical and creative realms. So, you have the question, "Is this working?", in a software development sense, but you also have to ask whether it's working as a creative experience, in the way a movie producer might do.

I think that's always likely to make for a somewhat chaotic and stressful process, that's hard to schedule with confidence. I'm sure some manage it better than others, though. Never underestimate how many businesses in general are run by people I wouldn't trust to organise a child's birthday party.

DominikD said:

IG did IK which is relatively big budget compared to other fighting games produced these days (other than NetherRealm nobody has greater bugdet than they had).

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KI. Killer Instinct. And they didn't make that game, they just took over for seasons 2 and 3, which is a very different thing. You're all over the place.

I looked around yesterday about Insomniac, and yeah, they have a rep for less crunch, especially in recent years. Not zero crunch. Their own CEO does not claim that they are "without crunch", just that they've priortized minimizing it. And again, not for their entire history, but as time has gone on.

It's not just the unpredictability of making something totally new (or, at least, largely new). It's also mixing it with things that can't be so flexible.

I normally like to blame marketing for this. If you want TV spots, you have to schedule well ahead of time. Same with print magazines or advertisements before movies. If you get all this marketing working together to come to a head on May 1 then you find out you've got a major issue and need to shove that back a couple of months, it's a Very Bad Thing for sales. I still think it would be nice if the big companies could actually get a game done THEN start the marketing.

Marketing isn't the only thing, though - employees need to be paid regularly and, if the bank account runs out of cash, you're going to need a loan fast or it's game over.

JFarrell71 said:

KI. Killer Instinct. And they didn't make that game, they just took over for seasons 2 and 3, which is a very different thing. You're all over the place.

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It's a GaaS title, and yes, they worked on S2 and S3+. They developed 20 out of 29 game characters, most of the locations and were responsible for majority of balancing. That's not small peanuts but that's also not that relevant.

And again, not for their entire history, but as time has gone on.

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You're shifting the goal post. Your claim wasn't that there's a company that never crunched but about no big budget games not having a crunch. From what I've heard from developers, ever since they got to be 2nd party developer for PS3 there's virtually no crunch in the company.

JFarrell71 said:

I've never heard of a big budget game not having crunch. That's actually part of the problem: it's such a standard industry practice that it wasn't even questioned for a long time. Anyone who works within pretty much any industry could tell you certain unflattering truths about how things really go down.

But I think CDPR is a well run ship, for the most part, and they have the resources to compensate and communicate with their employees. Will there be crunch for CP2077? They've said as much. Again, it's a standard part of the development cycle. But I don't think it is particularly egegrious in their case, nor do I think it will hamper the game's quality.

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Ehhh...

Apparently, crunch at CDPR is extreme even by industry standards.

I also would question how "well-run" they are when they've had a game in development intermittently for eight years and delayed it twice within just a few months, while overworking employees to the extent illustrated above.

Will any of that hamper the game's quality? Maybe, maybe not. But I would argue that's besides the point.

DominikD said:

You're shifting the goal post. Your claim wasn't that there's a company that never crunched but about no big budget games not having a crunch. From what I've heard from developers, ever since they got to be 2nd party developer for PS3 there's virtually no crunch in the company.

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No, I'm not. This is what I wrote: "I've never heard of a big budget game not having crunch."

Not "virtually" no crunch, or "only a little"crunch. I said that all big budget games, as far as I know, have crunch. You've said nothing to refute that. You're picking adjectives like "virtually" and figuring that should be good enough for me. I don't even know what you're trying to say with that second sentence. I never said otherwise. Throwing my own words back in my face like an ah-ha is just dumb when I haven't said anything that contradicts them. I'm sure there have been literally thousands of games without crunch that weren't big budget games.