I was actually surprised to see Ultima Online is still up and active recently. It must have a pretty decent sized population for EA not to shut down and repurpose the servers for Battlefield or something.
Used to work at Rebellion on their IT team. Genuinely a fantastic place to work and the owners seemed to always be super chill. Had a full suit of armour in one of their offices and so many weapons lying around (likely blunt replicas but still really cool).
I wasn’t on the game dev team so can’t speak for them but I was personally never pushed to work harder and often explicitly told to take breaks.
We also used to have large Unreal Tournament matches at lunch.
Just discovered that channel, and was like “how is this funded??” So I looked him up and what a pleasant surprise it was to see his place in the game industry!
So what I really want is a game that gives me a sense of achievement, and with the vaguest possibility that I actually might finish it. And so it’d be really interesting to know how many games are actually finished, and how many games are just abandoned by what proportion of people.
It can be fun to go to an achievement/trophy tracker and compare the numbers for the awards for first and last story missions.
I can’t imagine ever working on any project that large. Most of your people will essentially have zero communication with each other, and release a half-assed overbudgeted product as a result
But does the texture artist need to talk to the modelers? Of course. Do they need to talk to people in sound design? Maybe. What about game engine and programming? Maybe. What about writers? Maybe.
The fact is, you’d probably have a better product at the end of the day if everyone were able to coordinate their efforts.
Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.
Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.
Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.
I am not really interested in modern gaming, but I needed a 16GB NVidia GPU for the AI/ML course I’m currently doing. I wanted to get a 16GB 4060Ti, but they were out of stock literally everywhere. In the end I gave up and got a 12GB 3060. It’s not as good as what I wanted, but at least it was cheap and readily available.
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