Maybe it's just because news spreads more quickly and easily these days, but it sure seems like the amount of talented, well-known developers leaving giant companies to start something on their own has skyrocketed the last few yeas. That's No Moon, Lighthouse Games, Wildlight Entertainment and so many other studios are examples of people behind some of the biggest games in the world wanting to try something new. That's why I just had to ask Bret Robbins', the creative director of Dead Space and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, about the matter when I visited Ascendant Studios to check out the studio's first game, Immortals of Aveum, last week. His answer wasn't exactly surprising:
"I think, there's certainly a personal motivation to start something on my own. Because, if I didn't do it now, I never would. I wasn't getting any younger. I'd been in the industry for 22 years when I founded Ascendant. For me, it felt like the next step that I wanted to take in my career. To run my own studio and make a game that I had created. After working on other peoples' franchises for a very long time. As far as the state of the industry, I think it's becoming more and more rare for big companies to take a risk on something because of the costs involved. How much money it costs to make a AAA game. So you see a lot of sequels, reboots and things that are using IP that have been well-established and people already love. And I have nothing against those games or the people who make those games, and I play those games. But the risks of making something new, that's the lifeblood of what we do. We need new ideas. We need new original IP out there, so if the only way I was gonna do that was starting my own company, that's what I had to do."
He also mentioned the studio's focus on the developers' health, being able to work remotely and avoiding prolonged crunch:
"I think projects can get into trouble when they have a lot of conflicting or changing visions. So, I had a pretty strong vision for what I wanted from day one, and if you read the design documents you'd see pretty much the game we've made. We didn't make a lot of left and right turns that really hurt the project in terms of time, resources and everything. And I think in that sense, I got lucky with that the vision held true and that it was a strong enough vision that it carried itself all the way through. That helps a lot. Secondly, because we started smaller, we're very agile. We're able to make decisions very quickly and not dwell on things. We can fail fast. We can probably move much faster than a larger organisation could have, so we were able to find the fun of the game quickly and understand what the core of the game was.
"I think as far as work/life-balance, I just made that a priority from the beginning because I've been in the industry a long time. I've worked on projects where I worked very, very hard and very long hours, and I didn't want to do it anymore. And I don't want to ask people to do something that I don't personally want to do. We've definitely had times where we had to work extra hours. That has certainly happened at times, but we've limited it as much as possible. Now that we're finishing the game at the home-stretch, we're working very hard, but I don't think it's anywhere close to the horror stories that we've all heard about crunching. I don't think it actually makes for a better game. You get more tired and make worse decisions. You have more inefficient work. You're less creative. All the things we don't want people to feel like. That's what crunch does to you, and that doesn't help the game at all in my opinion. You'll make a worse game if you make people crunch hard."