Schmooples' Den! The DA News Discussion Thread

Look... Thedas is a hostile place! If you're not fighting something... you're running from something.
(Mostly the latter.)

That world will keep you fit.  

Hafter's Wood alone is a power workout ... running for your life from all those bears.

Yes, but I meant within a race-class. Of course dwarves were shorter and Qunari or Brutes were taller, but all the human villagers in Redcliffe were the same height.

GamesIndustry @gibiz
CD Projekt Red wants to be "known for treating developers with respect," pushing "non-obligatory crunch"
www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-05-17-cd-projekt-red-wants-to-be-known-for-treating-developers-with-respect

David Gaider @davidgaider
With the caveat that I have no idea how CD Projekt actually functions, I will say that the majority of overtime I've worked in the industry has been "non-obligatory". As in "here's an unrealistic deadline - however you meet that deadline, it's up to you".

The consequences of NOT meeting said deadline, meanwhile, are likely that a ) the content you've become so attached to will get cut or reduced in scope, meaning MORE work for you, and b ) you're not the "team player" that Jimmy Who Worked Himself to the Bone over there is.

This is, in fact, a system I heartily participated in for a long time, to be honest. This was the way I started, it's what I expected from my team. Pushing back when asked to pitch in "for the project" ...just seemed unheard of? The first time it happened, I was astounded.

I'm not proud, especially once I started to see what this did to people with lives and families. It became a lot easier to see, however, how a company could both pat itself on its back for being "anti-crunch" ...and yet still have a lot of crunch embedded into its ecosystem.

Yeah, CDPR is well-known for being a crunch studio. This "change", which really isn't a change*, was almost undoubtedly prompted by the Kotaku articles on studio crunch. This is CPDR wanting to try and get out in front of any expose(s) on their own studio's practices.


* Jos Hendriks @sjosz
Non-obligatory crunch doesn't exist, which we all know. Either you meaningfully work towards making sure your workplace is a respectful and healthy one, or you don't. Do better.

Yyyyyeah... I'm not sure why CDPR is trying to make it seem like they're ahead of the curve when people heard long before Rockstar or Naughty Dog or Bioware or Epic Games or NetherRealm that working conditions in CDPR aren't ideal. I don't have any info myself, most of what I heard has been positive or neutral, but... this is Poland we're talking about. While this differs from business to business, overall good working standards aren't exactly our forte yet. So a lot of things that wouldn't fly farther to the West may be considered either normal or shrugged off for quite some time. It's only fairly recently that people have been talking about it more, mostly due to scandals in large, well-known organizations/businesses after a lot of workers have opened up about being destroyed by persistent mobbing and working themselves to the bone. Needles to say I think both gaming journalists and local journalists from serious newspapers are out there on the hunt, searching for meaty stories of this kind - makes me wonder whether someone may have picked up CDPR on the radar... The above may be a way to get ahead of an article that may be coming sometime in the future. I've seen this strategy deployed before multiple times in different places, regardless of its dubious effectiveness. Or it could simply be that people are becoming more aware that crunching (whether obligatory or not) is a big, industry-wide issue and enough people remembered news from a few years ago to set off alarms at PR department...

We do... in theory

I don't work in the games industry, I code web shops and similar stuff. Crunch is generally referred to as "over time" here (which intentionally sounds harmless, but at least it's not as cynical as "[insert company name] magic") and always gets ordered from above, usually by the people who caused it in the first place, which means that guilt wouldn't work very well anyway.

Considering that article on Rockstar kinda got ignored? I would be interesting indeed to see if enough people would be sensitive to issue of crunching for the general public to not let these things fly under the radar anymore.

I'm sure managerial mishaps and poor project development can foster this type of culture. However, I also think ever-increasing consumer demand of a particular product makes it much easier to justify these practices. Most of the general public won't care, or even take notice, of these issues so it gets swept under the rug after the initial controversy has subsided. At the very least, if you work overtime, you should be compensated as a result.

As I'm sure this will be of interest to some people here...

FrostbiteEngine @frostbiteengine
At Frostbite we love research and we are excited to share more of our work. To start, here's a sneak peek of the new hair system being developed by our Physics and Rendering teams:
www.ea.com/frostbite/news/frostbite-hair-rendering-and-simulation




- Well, it's good to see progress on this front. It's certainly getting better, but (like water behaviour) there's still a ways to go yet.