I remember the hostile reaction to the reports of crunch at the studio. I was telling people it’s not a healthy work environment and there shouldn’t be strong-arming of people to work in such conditions.
Working longer hours doesn’t necessarily increase productivity. It definitely doesn’t improve creativity. All you’re doing is trying to reach deadlines as quickly as possible so naturally you’re going to cut corners and compromise quality as much as possible since the ultimate goal has changed from trying to create great finished product to just finish the product. Even the latter could not be accomplished in this case.
There should never have been a crunch. The game is still 1 year away from being complete. I can understand people who were defending CDPR last few months now excusing their defense on a lack of transparency – that they only defended it because it was based on the assumption the game was nearing true completion.
Well, here’s the thing. The fact crunch was planned at the last minute after delaying the game from an initial April release shows that there was a lot of uncertainty about the state of the game. The devs didn’t need to be put through insane work shifts to deliver a faulty final product. This has undoubtedly massively impacted morale at CDPR.
