Death March: The Long and Painful Way Homefront

From translator

The original of this article came out on the first of November of last year. In less than a week, the THQ publisher lost half of its capitalization , and by the Christmas holidays it had declared bankruptcy altogether. Why? Well, maybe there is a part of the answer here. So, friends, a sad and scary story about AAA gamedev and those who cook in his cauldron. I hope you will like it.

Like poor management, incompetence and pride killed THQ Kaos Studios.

This happened at a Christmas party, although it could hardly have been called joyful by at least one of the Kaos developers or their colleagues. The end of December 2010 turned out to be a passing respite in the midst of a cruel crunch, during which the studio desperately tried to finish Homefront, the most ambitious attempt by the publisher THQ to snatch its piece from the seductively lucrative market for AAA-class military shooters.

The work schedule was so all-consuming that one of the employees compared it to Siberian penal servitude, and relations inside the studio (and outside it too) literally burst at the seams under such pressure. Now, on a festive party, all these people and the tension between them were gathered under one roof in order to spend the frankly lousy past year and prepare for the uncertainties of the next.


The traditions are such that the head of the studio should give a speech and a toast at a corporate celebration, and creative / CEO Dave Votypka faced a difficult task. Many employees believed that it was the Kaos managers who were to blame for the nightmare development cycle, and regardless of whether they personally blamed Votypku or not, that New York night he was a management representative.

Hoe entered the room and looked at the crowd. He was quite popular at Kaos before becoming the head of the studio. Typical honesty, with a colorless sense of humor and a cold, sardonic mind. That evening, he decided to allow himself some black humor.

“You know, if Homefront shoots, we may be able to save work and not have to work hard like that the next time!”

No one even smiled. One of the workers recalls: "After these words, our second half literally cursed Votypka, because now it was he who seemed guilty of swearing their closest people."

Which was very close to the truth. Votypka and Kaos worked day and night on a franchise, in the competitiveness of which only a few people believed. THQ seemed less and less interested in Kaos and shifted its focus to friendly Montreal. The developers gave Homefront all their strength, so they had no desire to listen to jokes about this. Against the background of the general bullying and leakage of talented personnel from the studio, they already realized that good days were no longer expected.

Crisis of continuity

Kaos has always been Frank DeLise's studio, even long after his departure. “DeLiz was a bulldog, he knew how to take by the balls and did not tolerate bullshit from anyone,” says one of the game designers. DeLiz created the Kaos inner culture, gave the studio a name and made sure that its veterans were protected decisively from everything. Kaos could be considered a professional studio owned by THQ, but there was still a lot left in it from the simple Battlefield modders team, which it was originally.

DeLiz turned the modder group into Trauma Studios thanks to work on the Desert Combat modification for Battlefield 1942, a modern military remake that has become very popular in the Battlefield community.

This mod attracted the attention of guys from EA; Trauma became a division of EA and collaborated with DICE. In 2006, when EA closed Trauma, the studio was reorganized under the wing of THQ under the name Kaos Studios and began work on Frontlines: Fuel of War.

It is known that modder teams are very difficult to manage. They have much less professionalism and hierarchy than the usual development team, and regardless of the level of professional skills of modders. Mod projects need leaders and structure, but absolutely no one wants to do this; modders buy an interesting idea and work tirelessly to implement it to your taste. In addition, such teams tend to be isolated when everyone works independently of the others. The leader of the modder group needs to use all his skill to collect these pieces in a good game.

DeLiz had a talent. During the development of Frontlines, the studio was, according to one of the designers, “like a red-hot pressure cooker. But Frank DeLiz was watching her, and he could keep everything under control. When we launched Frontlines, we were ready to die in order to make the game great, because we really believed in it. ”

However, this style of management and development has some negative aspects. “It was not a very friendly environment. She seemed to reflect the bulldog himself, Frank. Everything worked well while he was with us, because he could give an answer to any question that we had. But when Frank left, this culture began to rot. ”

The departure of DeLiz after the release of Frontlines in 2008 created a crisis of continuity in the studio. One high-level source said that the biggest problem in finding Frank's successor was choosing someone whose candidacy would suit everyone.

“David Schulman did not work for Kaos as long as some of the other directors, but given all his personal relationships and the situation in the studio in general, he was the best candidate for this role.”

All the creative was supposed to come from the new creative director of the studio, Dave Votypka, who served as director of design at DeLise and was one of the studio’s main veterans. Hopper was very much appreciated as a soft and talented designer. “He wanted everyone to be happy at the end of the day,” recalls Dave’s colleague.

Looking back, it is obvious that the THQ decision to upgrade one of the employees was a missed opportunity to bring the much-needed changes to the studio. Shulman and Votypka were chosen because they could replace DeLisa without violating the Kaos corporate culture, but the Homefront project was almost doomed to change this culture, regardless of who was at the helm.

One of the studio’s employees notes: “We were extremely concerned about preserving our internal culture. What for? I have no idea. When I was working on Frontlines, we experienced a lot of problems from being too similar to a small team of fashion designers, and not to a large AAA-class studio. ”

However, THQ may have had another reason not to spend a lot of effort searching for a more experienced chapter for Kaos: there were too many chances that the studio would be closed before she could make the next game.

Steaming

В 2008 и начале 2009 все разговоры в геймдеве велись исключительно о спаде рынка. Оптимизм и спокойствие ушли из отрасли, а их место заняли опасения, что каждый висит на волоске и рецессия вряд ли закончится в ближайшее время.

THQ пыталось адаптироваться к новым условиям, выискивая места для сокращения бюджета, и все знали, что Kaos является огромным пятном на счетах издательства. Kaos была большой студией с до слёз дорогим офисом в Манхеттене, платившей сотрудникам значительно выше среднего по индустрии, чтобы компенсировать стоимость проживания в Нью-Йорке. Короче, в условиях общего спада сотрудники Kaos жили словно с мишенью, нарисованной на спине.

«Когда они привлекли Шульмана, — говорит один из работников, — ему пришлось вникать в ситуацию. Это чем-то похоже на президентские выборы: больше не имеет значения, что ты говорил во время предвыборной гонки, и только когда входишь в кабинет, начинаешь понимать, что же на самом деле происходит. Я думаю, он довольно быстро сообразил, что у Kaos не было ещё одной игры, которую можно показать THQ. Студия банально не была готова делать хоть что-то, однако нам срочно требовалось предоставить издательству видение того, каким будет следующий проект. И мы действительно должны были презентовать нечто потрясающее».

The first business action of Shulman and Wotipka was the search for something, anything that would be approved by the publisher. The easiest and most reasonable option was to develop a continuation of Frontlines. But before embarking on the game, it was necessary to go through the “green light” issuing procedure just introduced in THQ.

To understand why Homefront had so many development issues, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the order in which THQ gave the studios a green light and the context in which it happened. This new procedure for the publisher, though quite common in game dev, was a multi-step process designed so that studios could work on games without THQ intervention right up to preparation for the release. The publisher had to collect studio proposals, express their opinions, periodically watch prototypes and give (or not give) the go-ahead for the development of the idea. After several iterations, the decision was made whether to send the game to development at full power or close it.

Unusual in this process was that THQ introduced it at a time when everyone knew that cuts were inevitable. With rates at a cost of life, the new selection process has turned into endless pairing.

“We (Kaos) were at risk of death after the release of Frontlines, and Shulman realized that we really needed to sell something to the publisher,” says one employee. “So we squeezed out all the juices to make candy for THQ. We plowed so that, I think, our sweetie can be a measure of how other studios should work if they want to sell their crap. And Dave was a great seller, he managed to convince the publishing house of our abilities, and, returning from them, simply said: 'Guys, there are no restrictions. Add more chips and make everything great. Let's cram on the back side of the box as many killer features as fit there. ”

Lost Plus Red Dawn

From the very beginning, there was no clarity about what the next Kaos game is being thought of. The studio specialized in multi-player shooters, and THQ and most of the Kaos developers wanted to start work on Frontlines 2 equally. However, the fact that THQ wanted Kaos to focus on Frontlines 2 did not mean that the publisher would approve the development of the project. In truth, Frontlines didn’t bring anything but mediocre reviews and sales, and that was a good reason to expect THQ to reject the idea of ​​another Kaos multiplayer shooter.

In Kaos itself, many developers were at the same time pragmatic about the prospects of the studio on the one hand and wished to have a hand in creating an advanced shooter on the other. The head of one of the departments described it this way: “When someone gives you money to maintain a game studio in downtown Manhattan, and the studio scatters it left and right in the blind hope of success, it’s very scary, even at the highest level. To succeed, you need to achieve your goal with a complete lack of experience in creating single-player games. And even more so the experience of creating cinematic blockbusters in the style of Michael Bay. ”

One of the designers spoke about the day when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare got into the office.

“Remember, you start the game and it starts from that scene in the car? I remember how we all sat in front of the TV and were just shocked! We wanted to do something like that for Homefront. ”

The main screenwriter of the project said that another thing that had a great influence on the brainstorm of the next studio game was Lost. The team liked the style of the pilot episode in medias res, when nothing is explained and the characters (and we) just need to adapt to the circumstances, and they liked the way of working with the cast, in which the story goes from one character to another, weaving their stories into a whole . The single-user “grouping” inside Kaos was inspired and motivated by these ideas, so, according to eyewitnesses, early ideas for Homefront revolved around the “Lost-plus-Red Sunrise” concept: we will bring together several characters in the occupied United States, and different chapters will be focused on different people, different types of tasks and different moods.

When Kaos implemented this in a demo for THQ, the ideas sold themselves. The management of the publisher liked the result, and the studio received a green light to continue working on the game.

“Now that the preliminary phase of the project is left behind,” says one of the creators of the game, “you have to pay the bills. Must really bring the promise to life. It was here that Shulman's professionalism ended. He promised so many things that there was not a single chance to succeed. "

Disappear from the map

It is easy to understand why Shulman was constantly pressured. The consequences of the failure to negotiate with the publisher became clear on November 3, 2008, when news began to reach Kaos that a number of THQ-owned companies had been closed. There were rumors of a bloodbath in which publishing house bosses repaired several studios a day.

One of the developers recalls how he went to check the world map on the THQ website to find out how true these gossips are. And all the studios were there, little orange lights on the map.

“I remember updating the page, and suddenly one of the studios disappeared. And I thought - 'Oh, my God!' All day, every 30 seconds, we pressed F5. And they saw another studio disappear. And then another one. It was a nightmare. ”

It’s possible that Shulman and his single-user clique saved Kaos (many veterans pay tribute to the fact that he and his demo allowed to make a deal), but it came at a great price. According to one employee, THQ bosses have always hinted what they want and what they expect from the next project, and the only way to soften the publisher was to promise more and more chips that would make the game competitive in the shooter market. When Homefront received the green light, the studio signed up for an incredibly long list of commitments.

“This is the nature of the business,” explains the head of one of the Kaos departments. “How many contractors during the construction of the highway set the conditions better than their competitor, just to draw up a contract and then exceed it by two years and a billion dollars? Let me first promise anything, just to get this order, and then break my promises. When you need to leave the company afloat, you have to do everything you can. ”

Endless pre-production

After Homefront received the green light, cloudless times came. The studio tried everything: boats, planes, even aircraft carriers. At the same time, work was underway on new multiplayer modes and attempts to decide what Homefront would still be. Kaos was worried about only one problem - almost immediately after the THQ bosses were fascinated by the demo they made, they demanded that the studio start work on a larger, better version for E3 2009.

“Everything was done from junk code, from junk resources, and all this garbage was collected together, ”says one of the programmers. “We spent eight months releasing a five-minute demo, which ... which was not a game at all. It was a very good demo, but all it consisted of was smoke and mirrors. ”

The fact that so much effort wasted on the production of demos and resources that were then determined to be thrown outraged many developers, and THQ's requests for evaluating a new build were a regular event while working on Homefront. Every time a request for a fresh demo came, “it was like: quit your business! We need to polish the demo, ”recalls one of the artists.

“You expect,” says another employee, “that if you spent eight months producing a demo version for E3 that would be well received by the press, you correctly managed that time because you just sold another 500,000 copies of the game.” But this leads to a very, very wrong math. No other industry will allow you to work in this way. Many in the world of games are simply deceived by their expectations, and most of all the marketing teams and things like E3 are to blame. I think this is a real problem. ”

By the summer of 2009, Kaos employees were depressed. In addition to sucking up all the juices for a demo for E3, Homefront is stuck in what one of the sources called "endless pre-production." Then it seemed that there was nothing to worry about. In the process of concluding agreements with THQ, and even after that, Shulman urged the team to be more ambitious.

“We were always mistaken with quality criteria,” says one of the employees. “It was a typical excuse for designers. They invented more and more new things, and if you told them “no”, they came back with the words “You know, but Shulman approved. He says that we must add quality. Add Chips'. And you could not resist it. "

That was the price of saving life for Kaos. The studio promised THQ to get the stars out of the sky, but, more dangerous, Dave Schulman seemed to be confident in the team's ability to keep these promises. At a time when Kaos should have moderated his appetites, Shulman strongly encouraged designers to inflate them.

The situation was also influenced by the role that Homefront initially assigned to THQ. The publisher wanted to create a franchise and tear its chunk from the military shooter market, where Call of Duty dominated and where EA's Medal of Honor and Battlefield also fed.

“The foundation of our concept was 'to become a leader among multiplayer FPS'. Now the question is - what does this really mean? In fact, this gives a zero idea of ​​what your game should be like, what gamut of emotions players should experience. I heard that the guys who released Gears of War, based on the slogan 'Marcus Phoenix - cool.' And, by the way, this is a pretty clear vision. Whatever happens, you just make the player feel like that cool healthy pumped up space marines, everything should be based on this. ”

Such a general description of Homefront meant that every designer came up with hundreds of fresh ideas. But the seven nannies had a child without an eye, and as a result, many small teams simply embodied their ideas in code, and then tried to understand

“We did not have a single development core. The weapon was what the guys in the gun crew saw him. The technique was what the guys from the transport team had in mind. The game turned into Frankenstein. "

Shulman care

That summer, THQ and Kaos conducted a joint audit of Homefront. They studied every element in dizdokah and pitchdock, everything that the studio promised since 2008, and made rather prudent forecasts about how much time it takes to implement each feature. It was then that the full scale of the disaster became clear.

Kaos spent millions of dollars and more than a year of development, and the results were very modest. Ironically, this was the beginning of the end of Shulman, the person who first initiated the audit.

According to a number of high-level sources, Shulman and THQ regularly had disputes over how he runs the studio and follows publishing guidelines. One of the Kaos leaders said that Shulman was trying to maintain the same relationship with THQ that the studio enjoyed when it was under the direction of DeLiz and worked on Frontlines, a relationship that largely left corporate influences out of the box.

But the THQ bosses who let Kaos go their own way were displaced by the publisher’s own corporate restructuring. The leadership that came to power demanded more direct and tighter control over the studios (the new game approval process was one of the products of this concept), and Shulman’s attempts to keep them at arm's length triggered a return fire. The publishing house began to demand more "transparency" from Shulman; the same one feared that as a result of such "transparency" the publishing house would begin to influence his people in Kaos, and rejected the requirements.

All high-level sources deny that Shulman was fired, describing the breakup as a mutual process. When Shulman and THQ executives realized that they could not agree on how to manage the development of Homefront, they decided to disperse, and soon Shulman left the company.

At the same time, it is curious that most of the people from Kaos, whom I consulted while writing this article, described Shulman's departure as being fired. One day, David simply did not show up for work, and an unknown representative from THQ said that Shulman and the publishers had diverged. The suddenness of the event and the heavy corporate press with which it was noted made it clear who was at the head of this decision.

His resignation did not solve any problems with Homefront, but only gave rise to a new crisis of continuity. The task of returning the shooter to the system fell on Dave Votypka, who was trying to grow out of the role of creative director. Now he became a creative director and, in addition, a CEO, which means a huge responsibility for anyone. At the same time, he needed to deal with the internal culture of Kaos and the aggressive and aggressive behavior of the publisher. And all these challenges seemed to Votypka a little.

“He was a very quiet guy, very gentle, who did not like to bother,” recalls one of the employees who worked closely with Votypka. “He wanted everyone to be happy at the end of the day. But to be honest, in most studios these are not the qualities that directors can lead to success. The director must be able to conduct tough conversations, many tough conversations that will upset a large number of people. And Dave avoided such conversations in his favorite passive-aggressive style. ”

Comes: Danny Bilson

Given that Homefront was stuck in pre-production without any coherent development plan, and Dave Wotipka tried to cope with two key roles at once, THQ had every opportunity to take a more confident position in the formation of the shooter, and their newly appointed vice president for key games Danny Bilson intended to deal with this. He was literally gushing with ideas on how to resurrect Homefront, and the Kaos developers had to listen to them - do not care if they wanted to or not.

"He got into everything," - says one of the developers about the appearance of Danny. “Names of characters. Backgrounds. The position of the camera in the parking lot. He literally commanded how actors read shouts of AI. ” You could come with a recording of an actor’s voice reading 15 versions of the cry “Recharge!”, And Bilson rolled up the stage because the fourteenth record is not good enough.

Bilson’s opponents portray him as an arrogant, ignorant, interfering person, who, almost by chance finding himself in Kaos, redid everything that the team worked on, and as a result a large number of works were thrown into the trash. This point of view is universally shared by developers, ruthless in their criticism.

But the leading employees and directors of Kaos do not look at him so clearly. One of the reasons developers hang almost all Homefront issues on Bilson is because, as one employee said, “the teams worked in isolation from each other. You could sit five meters from someone and have no idea what this person is working on. As a result, when you received instructions from above, you most often associated their source with the most influential person in the room. It was usually Danny. ”

The situation was aggravated by the fact that Bilson’s biography, along with his behavior, made him an excellent target for hanging the label of an inept “Hollywood” who did not know anything about games. Bilson was a screenwriter and director whose filmography includesa whole series of nightmarish, so-bad-that-already-even-good sci-fi films , such as, for example, The Rocketeer. It is not surprising that one of the most popular stories describes Bilson's demand to rotate the main element of the level 90 degrees in order to “remove it from another angle”. This bike was supposed to illustrate that to influence development decisions, he was corny lacking qualifications.

The subtlety of this story (and many other stories about Danny), as one of the leading developers admitted, was that Bilson was right. He wanted to change the level, because at the right moment the player was looking at the wrong place, and this blurred the whole impression of the key episode. After his criticism, 3D artists and level designers had to redo a huge piece of the map, but as a result, the moment began to look much better.

“Looking back, I think he brought a lot of great solutions,” says one of the screenwriters. “He kept pushing us. His signature phrase was 'Where is the moment?' As a result, the game got a lot of cool, unique moments, and I doubt that we could achieve this without Danny. "

Indeed, the problem with Bilson, and both his critics and his supporters agree on this, was inconstancy. No matter how good his instincts are, no matter how poorly he understands the game dev, Danny plunged into the details of Homefront production, but was in the wrong position to work on the project daily. Bilson led the whole division and could not connect with Kaos and effectively join the development team. When he was not in the studio, he was absolutely unattainable, even if it was really required. And then he returned with the next visit and conducted an audit of all the changes that occurred during the absence.

“If you expect someone to come, take over the functions of a creative director, and then go about your business, you rely on the tactics of run-and-run. I think if Danny really wanted to be a creative director, he should just stay in the studio and be him. ”

To top it all off, many of Bilson's ideas (and much of Homefront's concept in general) were aimed at making a game that surpassed Call of Duty in entertainment and mechanics. This goal is easy to set, but incredibly difficult to achieve. Both THQ and Kaos catastrophically underestimated the task that they shouldered.

“When you sit with friends and discuss ideas for video games, any of them sounds just amazing,” says one of the architects of the project. “But you definitely need something more when it comes to producing a multi-million dollar franchise. No one at Kaos could have created such a franchise, no one had such experience in the past. ”

Shooter 1.0

At a time when THQ was still having fun deciding whether to close Kaos or release the Frontlines sequel, the publisher did not like the idea of ​​making a single-player game. Many developers in the studio also wanted to focus on large-scale battles involving military equipment, which have always been their signature dish. But as soon as Kaos sold THQ the life-saving idea of ​​a big single player campaign, executives at both the studios and publishers began to think of the “Call of Duty killer.”

“They disgustingly, just disgustingly called it in their negotiations. They said: 'We are working on Shooter 1.0' ... This meant that we would take a gentleman's set of lotions of standard FPS, polish and throw into battle, ”says one of the designers,“ and I could understand this approach, because you need to learn to walk before than you can run. But they assumed that we would make shooter 1.0 somewhere in the middle of the project, and then we would start innovations. ”

Kaos, not new to creating shooters, even started collecting Call of Duty levels in the Unreal editor to understand why the game looked so impressive. They planned to recreate the characteristics of weapons and maps in order to perfectly reproduce the impressions of the game.

At this rate, it was not far from a complete copy of the competitor’s campaign. One of the scriptwriters said that such a strong fake of CoD even threatened the main theme, the motive of resistance in the occupied United States.

“It was decided that we would challenge Call of Duty,” he says. “And I think this is not the best choice we could make. Because initially we promised people ... gerilyu; promised an asymmetric, urban, dirty slaughter. But, unfortunately, what we did was no different from the COD's “super-soldiers in the great war” approach. You start the game and the first weapon you get is the AK-47, although you should have received something like a short-barreled .38 caliber or a 150-dollar shotgun from Wal-Mart as your first weapon. We promised one thing, but did a completely different one. ”

Most of the studio’s key employees now, looking back, agree that the decision to challenge Call of Duty was a bit crazy. But no one imagined that CoD would raise the bar every year or that Modern Warfare 2 would direct the plot in the same direction of defending the homeland in its Hollywood blockbuster campaign. Even if employees imagined how to make a competitor the original Call of Duty, they were drowning deeper and deeper.

“You can’t imagine our faces when we saw the [Modern Warfare 2] video on E3 and realized that everything was happening in America,” says one of the artists. “And no one started talking about what impression this made on us, no one wondered if we should change the direction of work ... I think it was already too late.”

About * b positions

Even if it was too late to breed Homefront and Call of Duty in different angles, this did not stop management attempts to compete with CoD in terms of entertainment. One of the directors recalls the endless meetings in 2009 and 2010, which requested more and more dramatic changes in the elements of Homefront, which were in deep production. Frightened by Modern Warfare 2, the senior managers regularly asked the same question: “How exciting is this moment?” Can we make it 110% exciting? ”

“In my opinion, it was not worth making these changes,” one of the studio’s key employees expresses his opinion. “It was necessary to leave everything as it is. Everything has already been done, and it was actually done quite well. Perhaps it did not deserve 11 points, but it was a solid ten. What is the difference between 100 and 110 percent in the long run? Let's just say - if you remake an element from scratch to squeeze out one hundred and one hundred and ten, and you fail, do you think you still have a hundred left? ”

The directors and the publisher in these changes made at the last moment were most depressed by the fact that ultimately the flour for their implementation fell on the shoulders of the lowest-level developers who had to translate ideas into code. If the bosses of THQ and Kaos were not going to throw two years of development and pre-production into the trash, a long cruel crunch was inevitable.

At the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, Homefront was still bad, primarily due to the turmoil with dramatic alterations. It began to seem that Kaos might not release the game at all, so the studio began to attract experienced shooter developers to see the light at the end of the tunnel. A group of professionals has been hired to work on the Medal of Honor at EA with the task of guiding Homefront through this crunch.

The old-timers of Kaos, with whom we spoke, said that the newcomers from EA were the most amazing, most impressive employees of the studio. They did not care at all about the general disorganization of the development.

One of those who came from EA, in turn, notes that Kaos was incredibly messy. “Homefront was a well-worn position. The main difference between Medal of Honor and Homefront is that Homefront management was inexperienced and was afraid to show it. And MoH was done by professionals. ”

Over time, a group of team leaders and leaders - including Chris Cross (Chris Cross), Rex Dickson (Rex Dickson), Dex Smither (Dex Smither) and others - began in fast and furious mode to work on blocking features, completing systems and building levels. But perhaps the biggest change at Kaos, and by far the most controversial character working on Homefront, was the new production director, David Broadhurst.

Mr. Evil

В первую очередь именно с Бродхерстом, а не с кем-нибудь еще, ветераны Kaos связывали надежды на выход Homefront в свет. Он был безжалостным менеджером, загонявшим каждого участника проекта в течение последних этапов разработки, в том числе и семимесячного кранча. Он взял в свои руки дезорганизованный и полуготовый шутер, который выглядит так, как будто из него уже ничего никогда не выйдет, и завершил его за год.

А ещё… А ещё его ненавидели. Один из работников до сих пор называет его не иначе как «ублюдок». Бродхерст работал в стиле быка, не веря ни в мягкие указания, ни в то, что надо объяснять причины, по которым он отвергает тот или иной кусок работы. Вместо этого, по словам сотрудников, он устраивал разработчикам разнос на глазах у всей студии, на полной громкости и не скупясь на время.

One of the directors pays tribute to the merits of Broadhurst, but wonders if such tough measures were really required.

“Over the past year, we have received several very talented and capable leaders. ... They were all aware that they were under pressure. They all knew what the stakes were. They were extremely determined to release the game, and there are no complaints about them. All of them are united by the fact that they were extremely respectful of the studio employees, knew the approach that would allow people to get better results, and very rarely tried to put pressure on someone emotionally.

But Broadhurst was a bad guy in everything. Almost constantly he was not happy with the quality with which everything is done, the speed with which everything is done, and he did not miss the chance to inform you of his dissatisfaction. He pressed you until you started working 23 hours a day to finish it and fix it. And every time he made a complaint to you in plain sight. Personally, I do not agree with this approach, with the fact that this way you can treat subordinates. But honestly, it was thanks to Broadhurst that we were able to do a lot. He weaned us from many bad habits. "

However, not only the studio’s bad habits disappeared between the hammer of the exhausting crunch and the anvil of aggressive Broadhurst management. The morale of the employees, already weak, fell nowhere below.

Torn end

The last year of work on Homefront was a bloody and creepy experience for most workers, and even at that time, many felt that their efforts were wasted because of poor management. These were the people wound by Danny Bilson, puffed up by Dave Wotpyka and publicly humiliated by David Broadhurst. And now they were required to forget about self-esteem and work out the next 90-hour week.

“It’s impossible to maintain such a hard pace so that it doesn’t affect you physically and emotionally,” says one of the leaders. “This is a very traumatic experience. And everyone who has this experience can imagine what it is like to live in this regime for a whole year. This affects a person greatly. Even those guys who were the soul of the company, the second after the general, who could put together a studio at a difficult moment and say “hey guys, we are sailing in the same boat, we are able to go through this and become stronger” - nothing remains of them. Each was for himself; everyone said to himself, “I have to go through this, I must endure tomorrow, I must end this game and forget it like a nightmare.”

The decline of morality was not just a personal problem for employees: it affected the whole game, seeping into the very core. “To make a good game, you need to get people to be emotionally involved. We all got into this industry because we were fans of games. We all know how a good game is different from a bad one. But it's incredibly difficult to stay focused when you play the same game for three years, again and again and again and again, every damaged or bad iteration. You begin to lose focus on those qualities that are basic. And this really can’t be done. ” However, when morality goes into oblivion and every working day is like serving in Vietnam, this focus disappears. You can’t even give a hint about perfectionism or quality analysis in a team that can not stand the project and is just trying to survive.

The full scope of the problems became clear at the Kaos Christmas party in 2010, when Votipka’s speech did not have a positive effect on the studio staff. Danny Bilson, too, managed to turn his back on him many three weeks earlier when he tweeted “I’m sitting at Kaos Studios in New York with a team that has been working 7 days a week for several months now. Chatting about their 'look at a thousand yards'. ”

This commentary prompted an immediate reaction from employees, at least one of which made employees' complaints about THQ and studio management public. Problems surfaced for everyone to see, and Dave Votypka was forced to proceed to eliminate holes and protect Kaos from the title of the worst AAA studio in the world.

Finish

Votypka would not have been able to drive the studio into a tailspin more efficiently. One leader recalls this period as the lowest point of his career.

“You started asking yourself: 'What the hell am I doing here?” Why do I spend more time with a guy from a neighboring cube year after year than with my family and friends? ' With the same success, one could go to Siberia for 13 months; I disappeared from all the radars. And the same was true for many others. I can’t say with certainty that someone as a result broke up with his family or other long-term consequences, but in any case this is wrong. You don’t become the best family man or best friend if you are absent all the time. ”

Bad press and fallen morale accelerated the outflow of talent from Kaos: as soon as the news of the studio hard labor spread across the industry, competitors began to act. And the key employees were just happy to run away from Homefront and its fucking development and do something else.

In parallel, suspicions grew that no matter what happened to the Homefront, the days of Kaos were numbered. The news of the opening of the THQ large studio in Montreal was clear evidence - Kaos is no longer included in the plans of the publisher.

No one believed that the studio was trustworthy. Regardless of the results of Homefront, the development process was ugly, and the revenues did not match the costs. The management team was whipped up, all plans were crumbling, and a significant part of the really good workers quietly left during the crunch. Someone called it a self-sustaining reaction: the staff lost optimism about the future of the studio and left, and this reinforced THQ in the belief that Kaos was on its last legs.

Running in a circle

By the time Homefront was released, after many months of crunching and exhausting work, workers had very little optimism about its prospects. Many in the studio got used to the idea that they were making a mediocre game, so when the shooter began to collect reviews that were not indifferent and restrained, but not without admixture, this came as a surprise to everyone.

It's funny that although the marketing department did its best to emphasize that John Milius (director of Red Sunrise) had very little influence on the development of Homefront, the game could only win by taking more from the film. As one of the scriptwriters noted, the image of the North Koreans as “faceless monsters” seriously damaged the narrative. Although their pure, undiluted malice led to the creation of a number of impressive scenes of mass executions and mass graves, she also turned opponents into stereotyped villains whose motivation interests no one.

“If you recall Red Dawn, there was a Cuban officer who seemed like a complete bastard throughout the film. And you see how he shoots civilians, you see how he looks at the burning detachments. But in the end, he manages to arouse sympathy. He writes his wife a letter in which he says: 'I did not subscribe to this. I am not a police officer and not an occupier - I am a partisan. I don’t know how it happened, but I lost my way. ” And, having met the wounded guys, he gives them leave. And in the game we did not give the Koreans a single chance to show humanity, and this largely ruined the plot. ”

“The game turned out to be another ugly shooter, filled with banal events taking place with people you don’t care about,” says another screenwriter.

What really upset the guys from Kaos was that the good multiplayer game was exhausted and destroyed by an overrated, unsuccessful single-player campaign, dragging out a huge amount of development resources. Initially, it was multiplayer that was the foundation of both Homefront and Kaos, and now everyone just said that it was a disappointing single.

It's funny, but both Kaos and THQ at the very beginning of work on Homefront equally wanted to avoid repeating the story with Frontlines. The new game was supposed to be grander and sold much better, and the resources allocated for its creation and promotion fully reflected these expectations. However, after three years and tens of millions of dollars spent on development, both the studio and the publisher were in exactly the same place from where they started their journey.

Failure

THQ расценивало Homefront как провал. Даже если в издательстве и не ждали «убийцу Call of Duty», надежда была по крайней мере на соперника. Разочарование от результата и сдержанная реакция игроков делали вполне логичным предположение, что Homefront — всего лишь очередная посредственность в и без того переполненном жанре шутеров.

Такая оценка терзала многих ключевых работников студии. Как сказал один из руководителей, «Homefront просто вышвырнули, хотя он не был плохой игрой. Мы продали около двух с половиной миллионов копий, что вообще-то является довольно успешным результатом, но хоть кто-нибудь назвал Homefront успехом? При том, что нам говорили 'Эй, это один из немногих узнаваемых брендов на рынке. Многим он понравился, и если бы вы сосредоточили свои усилия не на топовом, а на среднем сегменте, вы бы заработали кучу денег'».

A publisher who declined to comment on this statement should agree with this view. Given that THQ went to CryTek (the creators of Crysis and Far Cry) with a proposal to develop a continuation of Homefront, it definitely believes that it can do more. And if so, there probably is in the game universe, despite all its shortcomings, something attractive.

Yes, Homefront was not the brutal partisan shooter that we were promised, but Kaos and, in particular, their art team managed to create a world with great potential. The scenes in the rebel camps, hidden in the ruins of the city outskirts, where people convert the Stairmaster into a water pump and turn back yards into huge greenhouses, perfectly conveyed the changing course of things and the difficulty of living in the new world. The same applies to images of concentration camps, where people survive behind barbed wire fences, flooded with the light of searchlights. As if compensating for the wretched campaign, the art team of the studio put all its efforts into creating a reliable atmosphere that honestly conveys the spirit of despair. They are proud of the results of their work and regard the efforts of THQ to attract CryTek to work on the series as proof of their innocence.

“Colleagues to whom I tell this whole story often ask,“ Why should I be interested in some kind of Kaos Studios there? ”, Says one of the artists,“ But, actually, this should interest them very much, because that the history of Kaos is a great example of how things are today in the gaming industry. ”

Based on their experience with Homefront, many Kaos executives conclude that incompetence is a major issue in the production of AAA-class and mid-range shooters. Not thematic incompetence, but a fundamental lack of understanding of how to make successful games with a great team and tens of millions of dollars.

Один из директоров Kaos описывает это так: «Поверьте мне, когда вы работаете над игрой стоимостью больше 30 миллионов долларов, часть этих миллионов уйдет на переделку всего и вся — просто потому, что игровая индустрия ещё слишком незрелая. Таких трат нет, например, в киноиндустрии… Мы пока очень слабо себе представляем, как сделать игровой блокбастер, и на протяжении всего производственного цикла людям приходится переизобретать колесо».

And here you should pay attention to the words of Kaos veterans that David Shulman was a good developer before becoming a gender, or that Dave Votypka was a good designer before becoming a creative director. While Kaos was recovering from DeLiz's departure and was hiring people to work on AAA products, many studio employees were simply appointed to leadership roles or increased their areas of responsibility. THQ and Kaos regarded expansion as a very organic, natural process.

But this tactic did not work. Kaos got stuck when faced with a big project and big resources. Regardless of the previous experience of the new studio executives, none of them was ready to manage something like Homefront. But EA managers were ready for this, with their AAA-culture reaching the finish line.

On the other hand, leaving a minimum of autonomy for the studios belonging to the publishing house is also not a panacea, but only a way to complicate management. One Kaos executive noted that THQ, which oversaw Homefront, had little to do with THQ, which originally protected Kaos. “One of the reasons for the success of THQ was that the company started as a group of completely autonomous studios, each of which could implement its own concept, and THQ was just a publisher for these concepts. It was this approach that enabled them to grow into a $ 40 per share corporation. ”

But under the direction of Bilson (and, perhaps, even before his arrival), the publishing house began to practice greater control over the work of the studios. “This is destabilizing development. The autonomy of the studio gives you the opportunity to realize a lot of truly original, creative, genre-changing ideas and products. And when you become a cog in a huge machine, both originality and consistency disappear from the process at once, simply because somewhere at a very high level there is someone who signs the checks, and this gives him the right to say at the very last moment Change it. ”

Here is such a game dev

Many Kaos employees are still convinced that it was improper management that led to poor development and, as a result, to the failure of the game. In reality, management is only the tip of the iceberg. Homefront is a great example of how those responsible for the release of AAA titles encourage the lack of good governance and common sense. They try their best to avoid creative risks, but do not pay attention to spending millions of dollars and months of development on preparing a bloated demo for E3. They give a lot of millions of dollars to a company that promises to achieve great sales and profits, but do not bother with the question of how this will be done. They take small, successful studios like Kaos and give them sophisticated, ambitious projects like Homefront. And then they give free rein to Peter’s principle when choosing managers, which can be compared with the appointment of a platoon commander as the commander of an entire army. Such “combat training” is very expensive, both in terms of money and in terms of relationships within the team.

Before joining the mass exodus of developers from Kaos, one programmer turned to his experienced colleagues, mercenaries recruited from other AAA studios, to guide Homefront through the last stages of production. He began to throw on them his despair from the surrounding failures. He could not believe in the level of incompetence, indifference and arrogance that reigned in Kaos; he considered the situation an absolute disaster and felt nothing but disgust.

Experienced programmers listened to a colleague’s complaints about the thousand-and-one-thing that got him, and agreed that overall the work was not going as well as in their previous AAA projects. But they waited for him to pour out his emotions, and then just shrugged.

"This is a game dev."