A complete lack of focus and direction from the c-level team. None of the leads appear to be on the same page, and the reviews are often vague or outright contradictory. Not only among directors, but even from the same person in the same conversation. There has been talk of trying to improve communication throughout the company, but even after two years, I still don't see any improvement.
Worse yet, no one seems to have a clear idea of how our engine or pipeline works, assigning bugs and tasks to people who have nothing to do with the problem at hand. The narrative team writes scenes that cannot be done with our technology and then complains when what they wrote isn't implemented exactly as they wanted or immediately after putting it in the script.
Overall, the quality of the work ranges from great to basic. There are often really basic mistakes, ranging from inconsistent shelf and table sizes to prop modeling errors. Even executives and leaders often give sloppy work, leaving their team to clean up everything after "tweaks". Design decisions often seem to be made without thinking, breaking a hundred other decisions made beforehand before being rolled back. Sometimes he decides to make these super destructive changes because one director has decided he really wants it, throwing weeks of work out of a whim.
Constantly rewriting and redesigning goes well beyond mere "re-iteration" and is nothing more than frantically grasping whatever corresponds to the frequently changing minds of those in charge. This completely destroys the motivation to spend a lot of time on anything, as everything is in constant danger of being completely removed from the game every day.
Instead of a marketing team serving the needs of the game, the people behind the game have to serve the needs of the marketing and money people, forced to bend to completely crazy and unrealistic deadlines and milestones. This is not optimism, it is childish and abusive to the creators. Pressure from management and the financial team falls on producers who are trying their best to please them while trying to slow down the constant stream of workers burning out or leaving the company in search of better options. Since no one has a clear picture of the game, all producers can do is rely on numbers and bug reports to try and track progress, leading to an absurd number of frivolous bug reports often attributed to the wrong people.
When it comes to office culture people are generally very nice and easy to work with, but the exceptions to the rule are very big and very loud. Homophobic insults and racist remarks are not common, but they are also not unexpected. The whole company has a decidedly boyish mentality, no matter what the PR department says.
I really wish it was different and I know others feel the same, but unfortunately this is a 30 year old company and I don't believe there is any chance of a change without completely replacing the management team. Change has to start at the top and I don't believe they see a need to improve themselves or their behavior. Therefore, the company will likely continue to operate as it does before, producing mediocre games while continually burning through talented developers who just wanted a chance to work in the gaming industry. I hope these words reach someone considering applying, that they save time and look elsewhere for opportunities.
