There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers.
You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally.
When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship.
I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.
The problem with having politicals in senior positions is that they will, by their nature, happily abandon honesty + humility - the two most important qualities required by devs/management for any software project to even have a chance of something approaching sane completion.
Unfortunately politics and honesty/humility are not compatible.
Luckily there are companies out there that 'get it', but depressingly few.
Part of the problem is that "release early, release often" is hard to do when it comes to entertainment products. MMOs & social games are starting to change that, but nothing close to the sort of pivoting you can do with, say, a productivity web app.
They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.
At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.
His reply - "I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."
I'm not into gaming so I don't really understand the drive. It seems to be very similar to the entertainment industry, except that employed game developers will never achieve the fame or riches of a well known actor or producer.
I'm all for being passionate about what you do as long as you know your value and don't let other people take advantage of it.
However, despite their size, large companies do generally seem to be quite uniform in their culture.
In my experience, this is passing the buck. Culture is not something dictated by management. Culture is something that every person in an organization takes part in. Anyone can change it any time they like. It just takes a little brass. Shutting up and doing what you're told is not good enough. I've seen it happen in most of the failed startups I've worked for (3-4). When people relinquish responsibility for the well-being of the company and the culture, everyone is the worse for it. It often takes hard work to have your voice heard.
I'm going through this now with a company I just joined that has kludged their codebase into a massive steaming pile of untestable horse shit. There's tons of bugs and development moves crazy slow. The tech lead/architect hasn't really done any architecture beside accepting product's piecemeal direction and submitting to design by accretion. I don't plan to accept things as they are and just keep my head down. I plan to make a difference.
Most people are more afraid of what they might become than what they might fail to become. Never back down.
I agree that corporate culture is dynamic and that you can make a difference, but you need to find if there is a group of people that is willing to change. Then you need to understand and put in concrete terms the vision that the group already have but does not quite understands. If there is not vision, the only option is to move on.
Over 250 people were laid off, including those working on a different game.
In respect to the RTW failure, senior dev Luke has a series of articles which explain it much more eloquently (and kindly) than I ever could.
http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/where-realtime...
My country is poor and lots of developers work in outsourcing firms from the first world. The funny thing is that a friend of mine does class assignments for kids in American universities, perpetuating the cycle of outsourcing need.
I see MBA students who would happily outsource their work and have no moral qualms about it. They will turn around and work for companies where they will outsource work because they are only thing about 1 thing - cost.
My wife's company is in the process of outsourcing their financial work. Utter failure. I can't even describe what a fucked up process it is with internal financial work being done in 2-3 developing countries. But why outsource it? So managers can cut costs enough to get their quarterly bonuses.
Replace "outsource" with "computerize" and you have a common complaint from 15 years ago, made by people ignorant to the possibilities of computers.
Outsourcing is not a silver bullet, and it's not easy. Does that mean that outsourcing is always a bad idea, and only ever decided by stupid managers? Of course not. Just like the fact that many software projects are failures doesn't make software a bad idea.
I could understand faulting Evans for not pushing back and saying "We can't release this, it it's not ready" But it's hard to see how inducing more people to experience a lousy product would have helped, given that the business case presumably lives or dies on recurring revenue.
Once you lose the player base it's a real uphill battle to retain them, if Age of Conan released in it's current state it would be a different story for them, would have kept a lot more people initially.
MMOs are a killer market. That's probably why it cost Bioware 300 million to get their MMO out.
* is Evony a clone of some other web game? I'm not familiar with the genre.
Evony also ripped a lot of art out of the first half of the Age of Empires series. I don't know how they haven't been sued.
It's unfortunate when developers are forced to release something that they feel isn't ready.
Poorly built, buggy, and not fun, unless waiting for an hour next to the mail box to get your mail is your definition of fun. The in-game bug report tool, which we were urged as beta testers to use to write bug reports along with steps to reproduce was limited to <256 characters! When I reported that as a bug, I was told it wasn't a bug.
But, I think it is wrong to put all the blame for the outcome on EA's execution. I think an additional problem is that Warhammer really wasn't that great an IP. Warhammer is a very dark place and an ugly place. I don't think that is what most people want in a fantasy world. That doesn't mean there wasn't a niche for Warhammer, but it's a smaller niche, and if you also alienate people with poor execution, maybe too small a niche for an MMO to be successful.
1 job I had, the company could not realize that monitors are important for developers.
The next job all managers from every department pointed fingers at other managers until the entire company went bankrupt. They had the best product on the market and the only reason why it would not sell insanely would have to be due to the sales team. They instead did not dogfood and paid a heavy price, when they tried to dogfood they realized too late that everyone is incompetent.
And now I have a very high-up manager shooting himself in the foot with a shotgun.
