Everything post start of the Pandemic.
Can only imagine how much harder it is to work from home, not just from Code perspective, but just randomly throwing ideas out and talking to colleagues, or seeing over their shoulder and commenting on stuff.
The crunch must be hard too, all these deadlines to hit due to marketing... It sucks for Developers, they aren't the ones who set the dates... but unfortunately games that have had their lifecycle through the pandemic are not going to be really up to the quality we were used to pre 2019.
I know majority of us here know this, but good god is communication key. Moving from solely internal communication to external communication is going to be rough as hell on everything and everyone. At the last studio I worked at we grew exponentially and needed to get other spaces to house our growth. I pushed to not separate QA from the other devs, but then that eventually happened. With that move came all kinds of miscommunications and fumbles. It eventually kind of ironed out because the teams were forced to work around it, but when the teams moved back into one building, things immediately got better than they had been for a year or two at that point. I can't imagine how it for people to work at home, especially those that may not have the best communication skills, or don't work well at home, haha.
Crunch ain't easy, but it's most certainly harder on some than others. I actually enjoyed all the times I crunched. But then again, I've crunched so much in my experience that I found ways to make it feel better.
Yeah it's getting kinda scary. Maybe they should stop with the "let's make every game as big as we can", and just downscale and focus on the fun factor.
Wholeheartedly agree. At this point we deserve more polished titles, period. Especially from AAA studios. I mean, how can you expect to do well when your project performs the way it does and you're asking for consumers to pay $60-$70. It's insane.