I agree.
Crunch is a project management failure. This is my professional opinion as a tech lead at a mid sized gaming company.
When I saw all the praise the game received at release, the level of detail etc. My first thought was, so what was the cost on individuals?
Don’t get me wrong, this is an amazing game. But I worry that a lot of overtime went into this.
And other projects will be measured against that. This might set another very bad example.
People make fun of this, but AAA hasn’t been an indicator for the quality for a while, but rather the budget. Given Ubisoft worked on this for 10 years, I imagine it’s gotten stupidly expensive even for them. So, the term seems appropriate to use. We can of course still criticize that with that kind of budget, this is the best they could release to players after 10 years.
I’ve released a game on PC game pass (and Steam), and I can tell you that it’s painful for the devs too, before the players ever run into these issues.
One thing that was especially frustrating is that there is no way to automate the process of uploading a build. You have to drag and drop giant files (which you first had to get hold of from the build server in a usual setup). And click buttons and stuff. And wait a lot between steps.
When we mentioned the desire to automate this, so we could automatically deploy eg nightly builds, MS sounded like that was an interesting idea they hadn’t heard of before. WTF.
And stuff like that missing will automatically mean that the quality of the build on that platform is worse. No nightly build, but only build on demand requiring human work time and frustration means no frequent testing by QA on the platform, until they absolutely have to.
This was really interesting to read. Do you have some links where I can read more about what ChatGPT likely is and isn’t capable of?
Also, because they are so cheap they just throw them out when the battery is empty instead of replacing the battery. It’s great for the environment! /s