no-crunch development (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, August 05, 2017, 01:00 (2755 days ago) @ Ragashingo

For those of you who don't know about the front page:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-08-04-bungies-13-year-battle-to-kill-crunch-culture

I know that Bungie has been trying to figure this out for a while, and it pleases me to no end that they have.

That's weird, Jason Schreier said that the Dark Below was a nine week crunch… Yet in the article Luke says the DLC was crunch free.

In the gamesindustry.biz article, Luke Timmins gave his definition of crunch:

whenever you're working at least 50 hours a week.

The Kotaku article says:

One person familiar with development says Bungie sequestered a team and had them crunch out Dark Below in just nine weeks, which may explain how insubstantial it was.

Nine weeks after Destiny’s troubled development may not have been enough time to make a good expansion, but if they released TDB without having to work too far past standard business hours then it wasn’t a crunch.

Or, Luke Timmins is just a liar... I guess?

Parsing words:

"Destiny 2 will actually be our fifth release - we've done all these DLCs - with no full, enforced crunch. We've very proud of that. It took us a long time to get there from the Halo 2 days."

This means partial enforced crunch or full voluntary crunch may both have been in play. It's not a crunch-free world they're in. Earlier, Timmons said:

Destiny was the last "department-wide crunch" for Bungie's engineers, Timmins said, but there was none at all on its various DLC releases.

Was TDB made with entire departments working on it? Certainly not. Maybe 1 engineer (if any). A small percentage of the story team. A small number of artists. But no whole departments, certainly. Which means mandatory crunch for the TDB team could have happened, and Timmons could be telling the truth. Because he's specifically talking about department-wide crunch.