CDPR – Crunching Nightmares Continue
On the Wednesday, Jason Schreier confirmed his previous report regarding the crunch CDPR is requiring their employees for Cyberpunk 2077, by contacting a reddit user went into detail about the working conditions at the studio and confirmed they worked at CDPR and spoke with the ex-employee over the phone.
The ex-employee explained CDPR never had a conversation about the recent crunch story instead have been “non-stop crunching” since 2019. Another shocking revelation is management rarely communicated with the staff, the developers found out about the delays from Twitter before any internal communication. Management didn’t have a backup plan in regards to not meeting deadlines either.
It seems the MO for CDPR is spending several years in pre-production and crunching the remaining few years in production to release. “I personally had a blast working there until they decided the only way to finish the game was to do the death march,” this person told me. I’ve heard this sentiment from a few people. (I’ve also heard it said about Naughty Dog and a couple other game companies)
Jason Schreier – https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1316384882428440583?s=20
CDPR is getting a lot of heat because last year, while their developers were crunching, they told Jason they would avoid crunch.
Crunch is a real plague in this industry of bad management exploiting teams of people who studied to do what they love, in a bigger picture in the software industry. A lot of people work harder to meet deadlines but to continuously work overtime over a year is ridiculous no matter what.
There’s always talks about unionizing to put a stop to this practice and rolling layoffs.
Sega Celebrates 60th Anniversary with Golden Axe Prototype Turns Into Crunch Nightmare
Sega is celebrating their 60th anniversary big this year with sales and free games. They will be releasing a “vertical slice” to the cancelled Golden Axe reboot that was developed by Sega Studios Australia in 2012. It will be only be available on October 19.
Original developer Tim Dawson tweeted that knew nothing of the release and recounted, in great length, struggles he went through during production of the game.
His thread goes into detail of the crunching 7-days a week, 14 hour days, dealing with executives who didn’t know what they wanted. After his tweets went viral, Sega re-edited the Steam description, from an offensive joke towards the development teams efforts as if the game had low quality development.
Sega reached out to Eurogamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun and apologized for the treatment of announcing the demo.
“We certainly didn’t mean to dredge up painful memories for Mr. Dawson and his former colleagues or appear disrespectful,” Sega said. “We’ve removed the line from the Steam copy that could have been taken as a slur on the development and would like to reassure everyone that it was intended as a comment on the build we had ported to PC, not the quality of the original work.”
Sega claimed to have reached out to the original team but neither Dawson or Sanatana Mishra, who entirely programmed the game from the ground-up, were contacted.
PS5 User Interface Demoed
Gearing up to the launch of the PS5 Sony showed off the UI of the PS5 and what new features have been included to making gaming and sharing what you play seamless.
The Game is always in front
Once you start up the PS5 from rest mode it will continue where you left off on your game. The interface will be overlaid the game so you can check recent activity, message friends or share screenshots without leaving the game in the form of cards. Each card is each category.
A new card category is Activity, it plays similar to a quest log to track trophies and what is soon to be completed and what has been. You can also select a quest and the game will take to you to the activity for you complete the trophy. For say, you missed a target to collect in another level it can take you back to where you missed the goal. Depending on the game some cards will have walkthroughs for trophies so you won’t need to loock it up on a second screen and you can play the cards side-by-side wtih your game or keep it open as picture-in-picture.
With the picture-in-picture format you can also share your screen with a friend so you both can watch each other play separate games. Imagine a lot of friends helping each other with their own walkthroughs or an adventure game with two different perspectives for each player.
The Playstation Store is now baked in the OS and not a separate application for faster shopping and exploring.
blistergaming.com 