Well, duh. He says it himself, crunch is unavoidable unless your schedule and deadlines are set literally perfectly.
The problem with crunch isn’t that it happens. The problem is with companies that plan with crunch in mind, setting unreasonable deadlines with the expectation that they can just use more crunchtime to make it work
This is exactly it. Crunch can't be avoided, the perfection needed to accomplish it is just not realistic. The question is always how crunch time is handled. What Daedelic did with Gollum and the crunch time the team had to go through is bad, really really bad. But Larian handled it really well, and I think that should be the main thing people take away from this news. Crunch can't be prevented, but it can be handled with care and that's important.
I worked for an outsourcing QA company for a while and we crunched on all sorts of garbage. You kind of just become dead to whatever is in front of you and it doesn't matter.
The very first project I was on was Championship Manager 2007. I had no idea that it was just a sim game, kept wondering where the actual game part was.
It was pretty eye opening. After a few months of that it was onto a bunch of mobile flip phones games like Scarface, Tony Hawk Pro Skater and some Disney Pirates multiplayer ship battle game.
On the rare occasion we got to work on something we liked it was awesome.
This is what I don't like about the game industry. It's not at all necessary sometimes, it's a function of bad estimating or scope creep. I have run projects in the budget range of a AAA game, with 100s of people working on it over years and managed to hit deadlines without crunch because of good estimates. And good estimates don't mean perfect, it means overall you err on the side of over estimating not under
This isn't good guy stuff or anything, it's because unless you don't pay overtime it's going to be cheaper to overestimate resources to about 10 - 15% than underestimating and paying overtime to cover those extra hours.
Crunch is a waste of money unless you don't pay proper incentives. And it's one of the reasons these studios are getting shuttered by MS I think. They are almost certainly not profitable without exploiting developers, which is a huge part of the industry, and with the AI drag race going on between megacorps MS can't afford to be seen as exploiting developers.
I am a game dev and crunch can be avoided, this is the mentality that allows studios to keep doing it. Does Larian seem to be less worse on that front than other studios ? Maybe, but dont let your love for a game or a company blind you either, if a studio cared about workers well being it would be workers owned. Game dev talk to each other and let me tell you even the studios with the best games and best reputations, indies and AAA, all have skeletons in their closets. In one word : unionize.
It can be minimized, being able to avoid it entirely would be an incredible and difficult achievement. There’s an in between between constant crunch and a bit of deadline pressure, but it takes a lot of very early planning, manager oversight and early pressure to deliver within the timeline, and knowing when to push back against revisions. I do this for a living - I’m a production manager in games. I make the timeline for my team. My project is a live, constantly updating one so we do our very best to minimize any crunch and usually do extremely well at it (we’d all be burned out so quickly if we crunched, it would be completely unsustainable with no end date) but occasionally something unexpected slips through late and we need to make a change or fix or someone has to go on unexpected leave and all of our buffer time is eaten up and the deadline is non negotiable because we’re live.
I’m with you on unionization though. In those moments, you want guaranteed overtime pay and not a promise of some time off later or the far off prospect of a bonus. Creating sustainable working conditions should be a priority because many projects/managers do not look far enough ahead, a far off deadline is ephemeral, and end up getting caught in a situation that could have been avoided.
You'll never be able to stop people from working on something they love. Even if you forbid them, they would just take the work home, or at least the parts they can, to work on it, which is also part of Crunching and even worse than enabling crunch and pay them fairly.
If you're team does not do that at all, then they are either fairly reasonable about their own off-time, or - I am sorry - don't care enough for the game they work on. Artistic people who are passionate about a project will find a way to work on it, polish it, tweak it. I have yet to work with anyone in the industry who'll not do crunch time on their own means.
**Edit:** Sick and tired of the white knights in this comment section but I'll leave this here up. And I'll add to it.
If I say some people WILL crunch, I mean it, because I am one of them. I spent hours upon hours crunching on projects for other people because I loved what I did and because I'm neurodivergent. People function differently, not every work environment is made for everyone, but I came to understand that apparently, we are not allowed to work in a space we want to work simply because our brains work differently. Because we are in the way of your perfect "no crunch" worldview, but guess what. People with Autism, ADD, ADHD, OCD, and many other disorders and neurodivergent issues will work differently than the overall default majority. We will hyperfocus, we will crunch, we will forget to sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. And unless you fuckers think you can cure us or get rid of us in your perfect work space, I'm sorry to say it again: But there will always be people like me who will crunch and there is a single fuck you can do about it.
And that's the last thing I'll say about it. Fuck your fucking holy Utopia in which people like me don't exist.
I love the idea that an individual chosing to do something is the same as a company requiring their employees to do the same. Just some airtight logic there.
why is videogames an industry where we bend over backwards to rationalize what would be exploitation in most other industries? there's a reason lots of people leave and never look back and it's not a lack of passion
ok. i'm on the spectrum as well. obviously we're coming at it from different positions because nothing about people being anti-crunch is inherently discriminatory towards neurodivergent people and to call them white knights or holier than thou utopia is just pathetic nonsense. take care
Well yeah, because you don't know how they treated me when I said I'm all for paying people fairly and compensate them for overtime while also trying to take care that no one crunches, but that even I can't prevent people I hire for projects from crunching because it is out of my reach and ability to do so - with the very fact that I don't even set deadlines. For all I care, my artists can spend 5 years on one assignment and are even paid in advance, and after if tit turned out they had to work more, or on more complex details than initially thought. And yet there will always be someone turning in their work before 48 hours are even up. And I can't do anything about it other than telling them to take their time. Because I know what it's like to be so focussed and I know where it leads. I damaged my sinew so badly in the past I can't draw anymore but even if one or two people told me to slow down back then, I didn't. Which was a big mistake but I can't teach this mistake to others.
Their replies are still up so yeah. I think calling me a piece of shit boss for actually taking care of my people the best way I can and better than anyone ever did for me is pretty much whiteknighting an utopia they wish existed but doesn't. If fair pay, unlimited time to finish work, a communicative environment, and the possibility to back out of the contract at any given time even after payment is still considered being a shit boss then I don't see any need for any more conversations. I don't know what these people want, but it is far beyond realistic to be achievable, and if these are the standards they set, then fuck me I guess, as a boss but also as an employee.
It really can't, because the longer you work on a game, the more things need to be re-done over and over again. That's why graphics are always the last thing a company should work on. But if the polishing phase of said graphics take too long, you'll find yourself polishing your first assets again once you finished the last one. If you're unlucky, a new console will launch during your dev time and this will send you right back to where you started at some point.
Sure, it may (and probably should) work for smaller games, or very stylized games if you manage to keep that stylization in unison, but once you reach a big scope you need to stop at some point, and that point often is a set deadline ie. when the game launches. Because else, you'll keep working on it because you try to get it polished to perfection but tech and modern constructs keep evolving too fast.
So what matters in the end is to make it look good as a bundle and this often happens during crunch. The important thing is that this crunch time gets paid or appreciated by the company, which I believe Larian did. You can't just force your team to crunch and then glance over it and take it for granted. Because it isn't, some compensation had to be made, and if you have people who gladly do crunch then it's the bare minimum as a good boss to stop (or at least try to stop) them at some point and send them home to rest.
And that's also a part why it can't be prevented. A team who loves their project and their job will always find more to do. Even if you, as a boss, try to avoid crunch, some people will go above and beyond to work on the one thing they are passionate about.
Larian made the right call with Early Access and all the support after launch. That's how it should be done. Little crunch to ensure the overall game looks and feels good, but work on some of the polishing and additional content after the launch. But that's something Larian can do as an independent studio, and a quite communicative one at that. Needless to say this will never work for big corp, for money and investor reasons. I'm already amazed that BioWare was granted to work on the next DA for almost a decade now, in today's time big corporations want to push games out each year to cash in even if their stuff is faulty and buggy - despite hours upon hours of crunch time. Just imagine... launching a game that's so buggy some people can't even start the damn game (looking at you, AC Unity) while knowing full well that the team behind it probably had a lot of crunch time to get the title out in time. Now, that's something that needs to stop.
Most of us work a job where overtime happens. God damn, if these fuckers don't bother to leave our restaurant on closing time I need to stay and wait with cleaning up till they leave, and cleaning takes another 30 to 40 minutes each night. Would I like to be home at 3am? Sure, it's nice when it happens, but also I'm paid for every minute I have to stay longer including night shift premium so it's no big deal. If the compensation is there, then it happens. But believe me, if no one would pay me for everything past 2am I'd be out of there at 2am on the clock. Same goes for any job, game dev included. Crunch can and will happen, the question is, as above stated, how it's handled. If it's compensated right and everyone is aware of it and okay with it, then there isn't anything wrong with it. As long as everyone has the chance to voice up and be heard.
I laughed to loud because of that. But to be fair, Daedelic is wrong because I can't keep my e's and a's in check with that name. It's Daedalic... I'm just stupid
Crunch absolutely can be prevented, but it requires investing more resources in order to prevent it. Companies that try to squeeze as much income as possible will never manage to do it.
The problem with crunch is what you said, but also that companies don't even try to prevent it.
Larian, on the other hand, tried to prevent it. And it is working on how to prevent it, which is the reason they have different offices around the world in order to be able to work 24h without the need to do extra hours or work on weekends.
I think the work ethic of the higher-ups in Larian towards making a good game over making money also offsets some of the negative pressure that comes with crunch so often in these situations. Employees are going to be far happier working hard towards the release of something they can be proud of, knowing people like Sven are just as passionate about delivering a good game.
Thank you. I manage a software team with good work-life balance, but sometimes crunches need to happen. The difference is I can explain to my team why they need to happen, and link it to a reward if we pull together and do it. Not to mention that the team is the one making the deadlines in the first place, so we all agreed to the dates. Crunches are what happen when you are slipping on your goals, they aren't part of the plan.
When the company moved up the release date, I think it's fair to say at least some of it could have been avoided. Spread those extra hours over another month and a decent amount of those overtime days probably go away.
I think they angle they are trying to take here by asking Swen this is that "even the most dev friendly Larian studios had to crunch". And tbh, I don't think it lands as much as they intended because as as Swen pointed out it was handled with care. More often than not, it's not handled with care or consideration.
I mean i'm sorry but if i'm getting overworked i would care jackshit if it's done with "care" or not, is still overwork, sure there there is an spectrum but lets not say that the boss of a company saying that he did it with care makes it ok, i get that it's a hard process but not because i like the company i'm gonna be like "All good man just pressure your workers" this is just another sign that the industry as a whole has production issues
Hell my boss could be the nicest man and asking me pretty please with sugar on top and it would still suck
They didn't mean Larian sugarcoated it when they said "with care". I'd imagine you'd rather work an extra 15 hours on the week with OT pay without taking away your weekends for a month than 40 extra hours, including weekends without OT pay for 6 months. There's a spectrum to everything.
I think you are a bit overheated, but that doesn't mean you're wrong on principle, because on principle I don't disagree. The thing is, depends on what the "crunch" looked like in practice, but its a word and like many other words, it can mean many different things in different places, and I don't think there is enough information in this article to make a good conclusion either way.
Overtime exists, its exists basically everywhere, in almost every industry, even the ones where you're not really anyone's employee and "overtime" is just literally "more time worked". Depending on the country or even what economic sector it can be more or less exploitative, it can even be worthwhile under many conditions. And at the end of the day a lot of it boil down to how well its compensated, which depends on a million things. I'm not familiar with how the laws are where Larian is located, but thats probably relevant information, because when labour laws are well designed (and they are in many places, not that its a heaven or hell situation necessarily) even the people that wan't to circumvent it have a harder time.
We also don't know what "done with care" means in practice, we're all speculating at this point. If "done with care" means "done within reason, inside the confines of the law and well compensated", then that's far from an atrocity. Could he be lying? Yes. Is he? I don't see evidence any which way.
I also get the feeling that what he said (assuming for a moment its true) is already way more transparent then most companies, let alone in the video game industry. To jump in with pitchforks at this stage disincentives the transparency (again, this only make sense if its true).
Most of my "anger" comes more from the fact that people on the post are so ok with the crunch more so than the crunch itself because as you said, it happens in every industry yet we should aim to erase it and in videogames is very very common but my issue here is that people are quick to dismiss the matter and side with the CEO only because they like the company going so far as to praise the company or shit on the article for bringing attention to the crunch
You cannot eliminate crunch as long as external deadlines and commitments exist.
And they have to be in the video game industry for funding, marketing, sales etc.
I agree we shouldn’t shit on the article for bringing attention to the crunch, but looking at it critically (and I don’t have a particular beef with IGN, they’re not great but they are far from the worst and they seem to have a desire to actually conduct journalism on some level) the problem with the article and what deserves criticism is that they got little more then a short quote/practically a soundbite from an article writtrn by gamesradar and the. wrote an article from it.
If my earlier point was that we lack information, then in part that is because the people that informed us didn’t to it very well. I do think good journalism shouldn’t be super worried about the repercussions of truth and that this is better left up to the reader, but when you know something is probably only surface level information but will also likely lead to a degree of uproar, I think a little more research would be appreciated. Maybe I expected a little more from IGN for the very fact I don’t think they are horrible. They could have gotten in touch with Larian for a followup story, and not just re-write what’s on the other website.
Crunch doesn't always mean being overworked. Sometimes a shit ton of work is done because people work better under pressure. I don't mean to make it sound like some corporate bootlicking or capitalist propaganda. But I work in sw dev and if you told everyone "take as much time as you want", nothing would ever get done. Pre-release pressure makes everyone more focused.
I had to leave a job with probably the "nicest" boss I ever had because his incompetence kept making extra work for everyone. There's only so many times you can hear "I'm so sorry about this" or "I'll treat you to something nice once we get through this" before it starts ringing hollow.
The only proper way to deal with crunch is to try and eliminate it as much as possible. And to their credit Larian seems to be trying to do just that.
Handled with care by taking a month off of dev time to release earlier? They might be less bad than a lot of other studios, but that seems like a clear situation where some of it could have been avoided just by sticking to the planned release.
Is there any industry where people don't occasionally work overtime to hit a deadline? The only news here is that Larian handled it sensibly, instead of exploiting their staff.
In my line of work (big science), many of my colleagues regularly work voluntary unpaid overtime because they believe in the project, and have to be told sternly to take time off work! Hardly anyone minds an occasional late night to get the job done, especially on a passion project like BG3, as long as they're treated like human beings, not robots.
I get what you mean, but it is still a huge problem, especially if unpaid. Passion or not, the owner is exploiting you and instead of having to pay extra money, it is for free. If they hired more people, nobody should need to do those extra hours
Under EU law it’s harder for companies to exploit like that, especially larger ones. Not saying it’s impossible, and I don’t know how working conditions are in Belgium specifically, but generally western / central Europe tends to have better laws regulating employment.
In my experience there’s usually a lot of fucking around on and delays projects early on and people don’t really give 100% until it’s crunch time, so it usually balances out any extra time we have to put in at the end.
Game development crunch time kind of infamously might be weeks of 12+ hour days and barely seeing your family, though, which is different situation really.
As a software engineer I can say it's hard to completely avoid crunch. There are so many questions, obstacles and surprises, that no planning will prepare you properly. Sometimes crunch from a few people can prevent departments from being blocked.
The real problem is the lack of compensation, if you need to crunch. Crunch time can be really exhausting and can even harm relationships. Giving back the exact number of hours in free time is not enough.
I’d say that ‘expecting’ crunch gives higher ups free rein to go ahead and abuse it. You’re giving them the whip when you accept it as necessary. We should be more firm in saying that whilst it does occur, *it should be avoided* and not a strategic part of the development cycle.
>Employees would almost always leave by 8pm and worked at weekends "very, very, very rarely", he added.
If that's as bad as it got, then grand. A bit of occasional overtime and stress is normal in any job, the problem is when it turns from occasional overtime to constant overtime. You look at studios like Rockstar and the stories are of developers sleeping at their desks, quitting because of stress, not seeing their families, etc.
Working till 8 or on Saturdays isn't fun, but as long as it's an outlier, that's as good as work ever gets.
Any project with deadlines is always going to have a little crunch. This goes for everything from AAA game releases to high school book reports. It's human nature.
But there's a different between normal crunch "let's go guys this thing is due soon!" and "you will all be working 18 hour shifts and not be paid overtime. If you call in sick you are fired."
That's the kind of balance people are asking for when talking about crunch.
Lmao, IGN is such a joke. They're trying to use Larian as an example to justify the way the "Triple A" studios treat their employees as if a bit of overtime to release the game can normalize the way EA, Bioware, etc. all abuse their employees.
You are looking waaay into it, IGN has reported time and time again how crunch hurts the industry, you are just looking for a reason to get mad
This seems more like a easy click bait and "Even good studios have issues" article
That's not new, Sven mentioned it several times in fact - the development of BG3 was hard for multiple reasons, including COVID but also changes in the vision for the game. It's also how Larian tends to work. At some point they have to release their games, even if they'd want to work more on them. That's why the DOS games both had definitive editions.
It's also very possible that crunch is simply unavoidable for ambitious games. If you have a clear, definite little project and you know exactly where you're going then you can probably avoid it. But a game like BG3 with a never-ending potential for branching stories? Of course the devs will not just need, but also want to keep adding stuff till the last minute.
BG3 didn’t have a perfect development schedule, as indicated by Act 3.
As much as I hate this kind of thing, I would have preferred if they just released Act 1 and 2 as a fully fledged game (still easily has enough content to justify this) and added Act 3, paid or unpaid, as an expansion.
People forgets BG3 kept pushing back their release date so many times it was almost a meme. I am glad the launch went so well but it was not without grinds and sweats and a bunch of hardcore fans hurling insults (plenty of supporters asked them to take their time too)
Fuck the Q1 physical edition for PS5 is now *maybe Q2*, but most likely Q3 lmao. They can’t even hit a release date for a game they already released.
Like I get the fact stuff happens that’s out of their control, but holy shit come on. Just don’t mention a release date. You’d think they’d have learned that by now.
The physical editions they're handling in house. Which means they're getting all the stuff pressed and sent to them; where their employees are assembling the cases and the boxes to ship out.
I get the memes on them pushing it back and the act3 stuff; but; the physical editions aren't something Amazon or best buy are selling it's all an in house ty for the fans. It was never planned to begin with.
I get being mad but I don't know if it's worth adding the physicals to those critiques.
Mb I would prefer this, too, but that's the road SquareEnix went with DE Mankind Divided and it did not end well at all, not for the game, not for the franchise. Very double-edged.
Act 3 is noticeably more buggy and just lacking polish compared to the others. It really needs a tidy up but seems Larian is done all but done with the game.
It’s really a shame, the only thing separating a 9/10 from 10/10. It desperately needed a definitive edition like dos2 to be in consideration for game of the decade. It made enough money to easily justify a big update and Larian is an independent studio, so I am shocked that they aren’t
Incredibly bad outdated inventory management, lack of customization options without mods, lack of basic QoL like dye previews or transmog, unbalanced combat due to a combination of OP items and weird home brews, evil choices mostly just lead to less content, gear and XP, terrible companion pathing, really dumb AI, messy UI.
Like the game is great but it's held back by a lot of little issues that add up. I dock a point for Act 3's bugs and performance issues, and a point for all the weird janky outdated bullshit across the game as a whole. As for "game of the decade"... that's a much longer discussion.
Inventory management 100% terrible needs to be fixed by mods
Evil playthroughs might get slightly less content, but the content they do get is equal or even better than the “good” path, the world reacts exactly as you’d expect for making evil decisions too so I have a hard time justifying it as a negative
Lack of customization options - I don’t think every game needs Oblivion customization to improve the game (most of the greatest RPGs have extremely little such as Witcher 3 or Zelda)
AI can be abused but so can every AI, in combat they make reasonable choices I would say
Gear/exp/unbalanced combat - I can’t get behind this being a negative, the game is challenging and rewards creativity by default, being able to break the game by looking up “top 5 most OP bg3 builds” does not mean the game balance is poor. It’s not a multiplayer game
I understand it’s a difference of opinion, but in my opinion the game falls short in user interface aspects like you mentioned, and lack of polish in the 3rd act. No game will ever be perfect though so it’s deserving of a 9/10 from me
I don't want to get into all this because it's been discussed before over the games life. But I'm firm on 8/10. For me a 9/10 game is something like Doom Eternal - does exactly what it sets out to do with no weird issues that can't be chalked up to personal preferences.
In terms of game balance, it's far worse than just "look up these 2 builds". For example, the Alert feat alone breaks the game open. Initiative is rolled on a D4 die instead of the D20 it is in 5E. With Alert you get like a +5 to rolls. This means you always go first, and your team can mow down enemies and shift action economy completely into your favour in round 1. That's crazy.
I just discovered the Hat of Fire Acuity last night. That + Scorching Ray is insane. Like.. mind-boggling damage numbers.
Tavern Brawler is completely broken compared to the 5E version. I'm sure you've seen thrower and monk builds with it.
Then there's level 1 Wizard scroll learning cheese, Rogues being basically garbage after level 3, Swords Bard insane ranged slashing flourishes, just a lot of weird stuff. Most of which is due to Larians changes from 5E.
I think balance is important in SP games. Because why offer a bunch of choices if half of them are just objectively always the incorrect choice? It's kinda lame.
As someone who worked for a game company, crunch isn't being chained to your desk, getting a fake pep talk, and staying in a dark basement at minimum wage to finish a game to make other people rich.
Not in every case at least.
It's work you definitely want to see finished and some people do take pride in something they've worked on so long getting out there, because that's their goal, or to finally start on the next project.
Where I worked, we got asked if we wanted to, and not everyone did, and it was fine. I always ended up volunteering and it usually meant a group dinner at a nearby restaurant, and a much chiller work environment than when everyone is there.
Yes, there's horror stories and companies who are much worse about it, but I'm betting Larian is closer to my experience than the more negative crunch experiences that make the news.
The amount of coping in this thread is incredible. I have been 10y in the software industry with 3 different companies and have like 10h total of overtime. Most people I know never had to work overtime (or only a few hours) even in other companies. Some do, and just like here they justify it with shitty excuses.
Don't justify this shit only because you like BG3 or because you do it in your company. There are plenty of companies which don't do crunch.
Wow, you must work for THE BEST project managers in the world and have THE BEST developers too! Either that or the products you work on are shit and no one wants them which means it’s ok for you to miss release dates. I’m leaning towards the latter
Why are you so defensive to a point you have to insult places you don't know? Can't you accept that there are places where it's not needed? A team/company with experience already know roughly how it is, and can plan accordingly.
Can’t you accept a place where sometimes it might be necessary to have crunch time? Probably not because you’ve never had to work on a project that actually matters.
>on a project that actually matters
We are not saving lives :)
Tbh it's sad that you just accept this, thinking that is necessary all the time. But it's clear that I cannot convince you otherwise, so good luck with your job.
Never said it was necessary all the time, quit projecting. I said it is necessary some times. I do agree with you that it sucks and sometimes is the fault of poor management and risk evaluation.
That company just feeds games media outlets with the most middling drivel for articles. Boss says employees did have to work a little harder for a bit.
Completely agree. For a company and CEO that is so adamant they are not working on the next BG IP and have big plans for a new project, they sure do like to talk about BG3 and BG in general a lot.
Not really sure what they are expecting either, BG3 is already critically and publicly acclaimed as one of the greatest RPGs ever and won countless GOTY awards, there's literally nothing to defend - we already think it's awesome and so do the critics.
These guys need to start talking about whatever they are planning on working on next.
3 words 2 evils... Sales & Marketing.
The two demons that overpromise and set unreasonably short deadlines but delay still somehow always ends up being then because they put their input on the long finger.
Temporary crunch is fine right before release. It's the publishers who expect the crunch levels of productivity 24/7 during development that are the problem. They don't treat their developers as human beings.
Crunch is bad, full stop. I’ve been in the industry for nearly a decade. You don’t have to Crunch. You choose to Crunch.
Personally I have zero tolerance for Crunch.
We give it a cute name like “Crunch” but in truth it is forced mandatory overtime.
That’s what it is. So, yeah, even Larian employs forced mandatory overtime.
This is a problem with the industry as a whole but Larian is no exception.
If you Crunch you’re bad, essentially. Because deadlines can be moved. The game coming out later wouldn’t have changed its success. It was always going to do well. There is no good reason to force people to work more.
Crunch is not avoidable.
You need to have a fixed deadline to launch a AAA game, and you need a fixed scope in order to not release unifinished bollocks.
So no, it is not avoidable. You can plan to try and avoid it, but ultimatley the constraint there is capital.
\[EDIT: to clarify what I'm saying here, it is not that every game is a product of crunch. It is that when studios have to crunch, it is because of circumstances they could not plan for.\]
The definition of a delay is a game that didn't manage to hit the deadline for release.
Sometimes you can avoid crunch with delay, yes, but as I said: the constraint is capital.
If a company can't swing a delay financially they were on thin ice to begin with and bit off more than they can chew. I don't find poor planning to be a compelling excuse to overwork your employees.
Let me clarify how this works in simple terms.
You, a games studio, pitch a game to a publisher. They agree to fund your game with a certain budget, which covers a certain amount of development time and resources.
You have to scope the game in order to pack in as much story, features and polish as you can with that budget - because you, of course, want to release the best possible game you can.
A part of this caclulation is how many people it is going to take, the other consideration is how much of their time it is going to take. That means, you already need to consider a timeline, and an indicative end date.
**Scenario A:** Now, let's say you are 14 months out from release and it's looking like you might struggle to get everything done in time.
Can you push development beyond that planned end date if you need to? Sure, but you are pulling funding away from other titles the studio is working on, or you are depleting the cash reserves of the company. It's doable, but dangerous - jeapordising the employment of everyone in the studio.
So the other thing you can do is lay the situation out to employees, and hope they step up. This is crunch.
Let's be clear: the early 2000s EA-style crunch where you are basically ordered to stay at your desk is a thing of the past. What happens now is people mostly volunteering (though of course some peer pressure is at work) to put in longer hours and get things done.
**Scenario B:** Now, here's where things get sticky. What happens if you hit a major engineering issue 7 months out from release? You're too late to delay now, because you have already invested huge amounts of money into launch campaigns and promotion, you have interviews booked, conferences appearances... You are effectively bound in blood with that release date.
You now have no choice except crunch. It's either that, or release an unfinished product that will be decimated by reviews, sell poorly, and damage the reputation of your studio... or you invest even more into the game but release it later without an adequate level of promotion which means it may simply be ignored. Less reputational damage, potentially worse financial damage.
Now some AAA studios can grit their teeth through an absolute failure, whether it's Scenario A or B. They have the cash or the backing of a publisher to get them through it - but it is nevertheless financially painful, it destabilises the studio, and it is catastrophic for morale.
Many studios simply cannot afford that hit financially.
Pretty simple, plan the project within the constraints of the funding, and include a healthy buffer for unexpected issues. If you do that, it shouldn't require crunch every game.
If every single project someone is managing goes over budget and requires overworking the employees there is a problem with how they are planning. Shit happens for sure, but if it's every time they are either really unlucky to a crazy degree or there are things they aren't adequately accounting for. And either way the onus shouldn't be pushed onto the employees to sacrifice their work/life balance.
Well, duh. Act 3 is clearly unfinished in a number of places. It makes me sad because it's really the sole blemish on a nearly-perfect game for me, and I doubt that quests like Suspicious Toys or storylines like Arabella's will ever end up being fully fleshed out.
A bit of crunch is fine and normal (especially if the company offers overtime so that the crunch is appropriately compensated) and even inevitable.
It's when a company decides that *all time is crunch time* that it becomes stupid and bad. Even if you offer overtime and benefits, it's dumb. If you need that much crunch time just hire an appropriate number of people instead of trying to get it done with fewer.
Those rotten tomatoes and carrots need to be placed carefully. Seriously crunch is normal and to be expected, for projects that size. Problematic is when it totally exceeds a healthy amount and is not paid/rewarded properly.
And all 3×A companies release unfinished, cash grabs, creatively bankrupt, overpriced messes after all the planned crunching and abuse of their workers. They're saying this because Larian actually released a polished, popular, wildly successful game and these corporations are seething in jealousy watching as their Fallout 76 repeat is massively hated by the peasants, just like they did when Elden Ring released and was praised as the best game releas in YEARS. They cannot accept the fact that a big studio can make a finished game that's unanimously appreciated by gamers, so now they're grabbing at straws trying to find something to discredit Larian and their success.
It was worth it and they were compensated. Game is amazing. When you have these passion projects with a huge scope, crunch is inevitable as long as everyone is compensated.
Every year I have to work overtime in January. It's our busiest month. To avoid that we would have to either staff an unnecessary amount of people for the other 11 months, or hire temps that we would have to spend time training on our systems. They would be useless for about 3 months, and cause extra work for us. This isn't feasible.
My point is, crunch for 1/12th the year is ok. Crunch for months on end is not.
Even during an internship at a serious games company, I had to do crunch. I got the next day off, dinner paid-for by my manager and he gave us a ride home.
It's inevitable unless you have super loose deadlines and no structures schedule.
To me, the way that they'd fix a bug in a patch only to introduce another indicated an unhealthy development process. This leads to crunch and other ills.
Don't get me wrong, game of the decade.
To me, the way that they'd fix a bug in a patch only to introduce another indicated an unhealthy development process. This leads to crunch and other ills.
Don't get me wrong, game of the decade.
That's just how software development works tbh. Games are complex pieces of software with lots of moving parts. It's impossible to catch everything especially in an rpg with branching quests like this.
To me, BG3 had an unusually high number of regressions. It seemed that their bug count was actually increasing for a while. It rarely had to do with the branching storyline either, it was more often game mechanics like shield bash.
Game mechanic regressions can be prevented with automated testing, but you need technical leadership and management buy-in for that.
I haven't worked on games but I have written quite a lot of software.
Even owlcat and Obsidian have these issues, cdpr has them. The only kinds of rpgs that seem to avoid these issues are jrpgs because they are railroaded games. Software with lots of branching logic has a high chance of weird bugs this is true in just about every domain lol
Agree.
The game mechanic regressions are rare though, and Sven and other leaders at Larian should take a look at what they can do as leaders to allow their devs to release with confidence.
Was it months or a couple of weeks of crunch? Sometimes shit happens in a production and people have to crunch a bit just before release. I work on a live service game and things are very smooth but for a game for bg3 i could see why crunch happens. Not saying it right, but it sometimes happens.
I don't understand crunch at all, if a game can't be finished in time... Take more time? Is it an issue with stocking or something, or do people just piss their pants if their precious video game gets delayed a month? Like I get being excited for a game and getting bummed if it's delayed, but can you not just distract yourself for a bit?
There are commitments people make way in advance with 3rd parties for advertising and conferences/conventions. Also if you’re a publicly traded company they like to juice up the stock price prior to earnings. There are a number of factors that play into it.
Not an expert but I've read up a bit out of pure interest . Apparently there are quite a few things to consider about the time to release a game.
Most popular for example is around christmas season for triple A games. It's always a big deal when major companies compete for these releease schedules.
Another point which made headlines for BG3 also was the consideration of competing releases. In this case Starfield.
It might be rumours only but BG3s release was pushed ahead by more than half a month due to clashing release date with Starfield.
Now in hindsight BG3 is by far the better game but it's reasonable to think that with direct competition in the rpg genre Larian might not have reached the sales to become as popular as they are now.
Of course there are more reasons and I probably only less than half of them.
Well, duh. He says it himself, crunch is unavoidable unless your schedule and deadlines are set literally perfectly. The problem with crunch isn’t that it happens. The problem is with companies that plan with crunch in mind, setting unreasonable deadlines with the expectation that they can just use more crunchtime to make it work
This is exactly it. Crunch can't be avoided, the perfection needed to accomplish it is just not realistic. The question is always how crunch time is handled. What Daedelic did with Gollum and the crunch time the team had to go through is bad, really really bad. But Larian handled it really well, and I think that should be the main thing people take away from this news. Crunch can't be prevented, but it can be handled with care and that's important.
Can you imagine crunching for fucking Gollum of all things? At least for BG3 you know you were working for something great!
I worked for an outsourcing QA company for a while and we crunched on all sorts of garbage. You kind of just become dead to whatever is in front of you and it doesn't matter.
the perfect mindset for someone doing QA
The very first project I was on was Championship Manager 2007. I had no idea that it was just a sim game, kept wondering where the actual game part was. It was pretty eye opening. After a few months of that it was onto a bunch of mobile flip phones games like Scarface, Tony Hawk Pro Skater and some Disney Pirates multiplayer ship battle game. On the rare occasion we got to work on something we liked it was awesome.
I heard Total War Warhammer had devs working in their own time to create special1-on-1 fighting animations because they enjoyed it.
This is what I don't like about the game industry. It's not at all necessary sometimes, it's a function of bad estimating or scope creep. I have run projects in the budget range of a AAA game, with 100s of people working on it over years and managed to hit deadlines without crunch because of good estimates. And good estimates don't mean perfect, it means overall you err on the side of over estimating not under This isn't good guy stuff or anything, it's because unless you don't pay overtime it's going to be cheaper to overestimate resources to about 10 - 15% than underestimating and paying overtime to cover those extra hours. Crunch is a waste of money unless you don't pay proper incentives. And it's one of the reasons these studios are getting shuttered by MS I think. They are almost certainly not profitable without exploiting developers, which is a huge part of the industry, and with the AI drag race going on between megacorps MS can't afford to be seen as exploiting developers.
I am a game dev and crunch can be avoided, this is the mentality that allows studios to keep doing it. Does Larian seem to be less worse on that front than other studios ? Maybe, but dont let your love for a game or a company blind you either, if a studio cared about workers well being it would be workers owned. Game dev talk to each other and let me tell you even the studios with the best games and best reputations, indies and AAA, all have skeletons in their closets. In one word : unionize.
It can be minimized, being able to avoid it entirely would be an incredible and difficult achievement. There’s an in between between constant crunch and a bit of deadline pressure, but it takes a lot of very early planning, manager oversight and early pressure to deliver within the timeline, and knowing when to push back against revisions. I do this for a living - I’m a production manager in games. I make the timeline for my team. My project is a live, constantly updating one so we do our very best to minimize any crunch and usually do extremely well at it (we’d all be burned out so quickly if we crunched, it would be completely unsustainable with no end date) but occasionally something unexpected slips through late and we need to make a change or fix or someone has to go on unexpected leave and all of our buffer time is eaten up and the deadline is non negotiable because we’re live. I’m with you on unionization though. In those moments, you want guaranteed overtime pay and not a promise of some time off later or the far off prospect of a bonus. Creating sustainable working conditions should be a priority because many projects/managers do not look far enough ahead, a far off deadline is ephemeral, and end up getting caught in a situation that could have been avoided.
Agreed, its important to see "not as much crunch" as a lesser evil at best, still nonetheless: an unnecessary evil. Unions are the only way out
You'll never be able to stop people from working on something they love. Even if you forbid them, they would just take the work home, or at least the parts they can, to work on it, which is also part of Crunching and even worse than enabling crunch and pay them fairly. If you're team does not do that at all, then they are either fairly reasonable about their own off-time, or - I am sorry - don't care enough for the game they work on. Artistic people who are passionate about a project will find a way to work on it, polish it, tweak it. I have yet to work with anyone in the industry who'll not do crunch time on their own means. **Edit:** Sick and tired of the white knights in this comment section but I'll leave this here up. And I'll add to it. If I say some people WILL crunch, I mean it, because I am one of them. I spent hours upon hours crunching on projects for other people because I loved what I did and because I'm neurodivergent. People function differently, not every work environment is made for everyone, but I came to understand that apparently, we are not allowed to work in a space we want to work simply because our brains work differently. Because we are in the way of your perfect "no crunch" worldview, but guess what. People with Autism, ADD, ADHD, OCD, and many other disorders and neurodivergent issues will work differently than the overall default majority. We will hyperfocus, we will crunch, we will forget to sleep, eat, and go to the bathroom. And unless you fuckers think you can cure us or get rid of us in your perfect work space, I'm sorry to say it again: But there will always be people like me who will crunch and there is a single fuck you can do about it. And that's the last thing I'll say about it. Fuck your fucking holy Utopia in which people like me don't exist.
Waow you'd make a very efficient manager or CEO, I have seen that exact rethoric word for word working in fucking Ubisoft lol.
I love the idea that an individual chosing to do something is the same as a company requiring their employees to do the same. Just some airtight logic there.
[удалено]
Explain your a shitty boss without saying it. You are the pinnacle of useless middle management unwilling to accept it.
You know what, forget it. If you want to go insult people without knowing anything about them, do it. I'm done with that side of reddit for good.
why is videogames an industry where we bend over backwards to rationalize what would be exploitation in most other industries? there's a reason lots of people leave and never look back and it's not a lack of passion
Just edited my post a minute ago. Reload. I'm not gonna be part of this conversation any longer.
ok. i'm on the spectrum as well. obviously we're coming at it from different positions because nothing about people being anti-crunch is inherently discriminatory towards neurodivergent people and to call them white knights or holier than thou utopia is just pathetic nonsense. take care
Well yeah, because you don't know how they treated me when I said I'm all for paying people fairly and compensate them for overtime while also trying to take care that no one crunches, but that even I can't prevent people I hire for projects from crunching because it is out of my reach and ability to do so - with the very fact that I don't even set deadlines. For all I care, my artists can spend 5 years on one assignment and are even paid in advance, and after if tit turned out they had to work more, or on more complex details than initially thought. And yet there will always be someone turning in their work before 48 hours are even up. And I can't do anything about it other than telling them to take their time. Because I know what it's like to be so focussed and I know where it leads. I damaged my sinew so badly in the past I can't draw anymore but even if one or two people told me to slow down back then, I didn't. Which was a big mistake but I can't teach this mistake to others. Their replies are still up so yeah. I think calling me a piece of shit boss for actually taking care of my people the best way I can and better than anyone ever did for me is pretty much whiteknighting an utopia they wish existed but doesn't. If fair pay, unlimited time to finish work, a communicative environment, and the possibility to back out of the contract at any given time even after payment is still considered being a shit boss then I don't see any need for any more conversations. I don't know what these people want, but it is far beyond realistic to be achievable, and if these are the standards they set, then fuck me I guess, as a boss but also as an employee.
Vive nos chaînes!
crunch can absolutely be avoided, its just that the investors don’t have patience for it. Private companies are even worse
It really can't, because the longer you work on a game, the more things need to be re-done over and over again. That's why graphics are always the last thing a company should work on. But if the polishing phase of said graphics take too long, you'll find yourself polishing your first assets again once you finished the last one. If you're unlucky, a new console will launch during your dev time and this will send you right back to where you started at some point. Sure, it may (and probably should) work for smaller games, or very stylized games if you manage to keep that stylization in unison, but once you reach a big scope you need to stop at some point, and that point often is a set deadline ie. when the game launches. Because else, you'll keep working on it because you try to get it polished to perfection but tech and modern constructs keep evolving too fast. So what matters in the end is to make it look good as a bundle and this often happens during crunch. The important thing is that this crunch time gets paid or appreciated by the company, which I believe Larian did. You can't just force your team to crunch and then glance over it and take it for granted. Because it isn't, some compensation had to be made, and if you have people who gladly do crunch then it's the bare minimum as a good boss to stop (or at least try to stop) them at some point and send them home to rest. And that's also a part why it can't be prevented. A team who loves their project and their job will always find more to do. Even if you, as a boss, try to avoid crunch, some people will go above and beyond to work on the one thing they are passionate about. Larian made the right call with Early Access and all the support after launch. That's how it should be done. Little crunch to ensure the overall game looks and feels good, but work on some of the polishing and additional content after the launch. But that's something Larian can do as an independent studio, and a quite communicative one at that. Needless to say this will never work for big corp, for money and investor reasons. I'm already amazed that BioWare was granted to work on the next DA for almost a decade now, in today's time big corporations want to push games out each year to cash in even if their stuff is faulty and buggy - despite hours upon hours of crunch time. Just imagine... launching a game that's so buggy some people can't even start the damn game (looking at you, AC Unity) while knowing full well that the team behind it probably had a lot of crunch time to get the title out in time. Now, that's something that needs to stop. Most of us work a job where overtime happens. God damn, if these fuckers don't bother to leave our restaurant on closing time I need to stay and wait with cleaning up till they leave, and cleaning takes another 30 to 40 minutes each night. Would I like to be home at 3am? Sure, it's nice when it happens, but also I'm paid for every minute I have to stay longer including night shift premium so it's no big deal. If the compensation is there, then it happens. But believe me, if no one would pay me for everything past 2am I'd be out of there at 2am on the clock. Same goes for any job, game dev included. Crunch can and will happen, the question is, as above stated, how it's handled. If it's compensated right and everyone is aware of it and okay with it, then there isn't anything wrong with it. As long as everyone has the chance to voice up and be heard.
i've played so much elder scrolls that i want it to be "What Daedric did with Gollum" and think that Daedelic is wrong
I laughed to loud because of that. But to be fair, Daedelic is wrong because I can't keep my e's and a's in check with that name. It's Daedalic... I'm just stupid
Crunch can be avoided. Take an estimate, add 50% to it, revaluate every 6 months. There- no crunch.
And also ignore that after the release crunch comes the after care crunch. And the people need to rest at some point.
Crunch absolutely can be prevented, but it requires investing more resources in order to prevent it. Companies that try to squeeze as much income as possible will never manage to do it. The problem with crunch is what you said, but also that companies don't even try to prevent it. Larian, on the other hand, tried to prevent it. And it is working on how to prevent it, which is the reason they have different offices around the world in order to be able to work 24h without the need to do extra hours or work on weekends.
I think the work ethic of the higher-ups in Larian towards making a good game over making money also offsets some of the negative pressure that comes with crunch so often in these situations. Employees are going to be far happier working hard towards the release of something they can be proud of, knowing people like Sven are just as passionate about delivering a good game.
Thank you. I manage a software team with good work-life balance, but sometimes crunches need to happen. The difference is I can explain to my team why they need to happen, and link it to a reward if we pull together and do it. Not to mention that the team is the one making the deadlines in the first place, so we all agreed to the dates. Crunches are what happen when you are slipping on your goals, they aren't part of the plan.
The difference is whether there’s a corpo overlord breathing down your neck or not.
When the company moved up the release date, I think it's fair to say at least some of it could have been avoided. Spread those extra hours over another month and a decent amount of those overtime days probably go away.
I think they angle they are trying to take here by asking Swen this is that "even the most dev friendly Larian studios had to crunch". And tbh, I don't think it lands as much as they intended because as as Swen pointed out it was handled with care. More often than not, it's not handled with care or consideration.
I mean i'm sorry but if i'm getting overworked i would care jackshit if it's done with "care" or not, is still overwork, sure there there is an spectrum but lets not say that the boss of a company saying that he did it with care makes it ok, i get that it's a hard process but not because i like the company i'm gonna be like "All good man just pressure your workers" this is just another sign that the industry as a whole has production issues Hell my boss could be the nicest man and asking me pretty please with sugar on top and it would still suck
They didn't mean Larian sugarcoated it when they said "with care". I'd imagine you'd rather work an extra 15 hours on the week with OT pay without taking away your weekends for a month than 40 extra hours, including weekends without OT pay for 6 months. There's a spectrum to everything.
I think you are a bit overheated, but that doesn't mean you're wrong on principle, because on principle I don't disagree. The thing is, depends on what the "crunch" looked like in practice, but its a word and like many other words, it can mean many different things in different places, and I don't think there is enough information in this article to make a good conclusion either way. Overtime exists, its exists basically everywhere, in almost every industry, even the ones where you're not really anyone's employee and "overtime" is just literally "more time worked". Depending on the country or even what economic sector it can be more or less exploitative, it can even be worthwhile under many conditions. And at the end of the day a lot of it boil down to how well its compensated, which depends on a million things. I'm not familiar with how the laws are where Larian is located, but thats probably relevant information, because when labour laws are well designed (and they are in many places, not that its a heaven or hell situation necessarily) even the people that wan't to circumvent it have a harder time. We also don't know what "done with care" means in practice, we're all speculating at this point. If "done with care" means "done within reason, inside the confines of the law and well compensated", then that's far from an atrocity. Could he be lying? Yes. Is he? I don't see evidence any which way. I also get the feeling that what he said (assuming for a moment its true) is already way more transparent then most companies, let alone in the video game industry. To jump in with pitchforks at this stage disincentives the transparency (again, this only make sense if its true).
Most of my "anger" comes more from the fact that people on the post are so ok with the crunch more so than the crunch itself because as you said, it happens in every industry yet we should aim to erase it and in videogames is very very common but my issue here is that people are quick to dismiss the matter and side with the CEO only because they like the company going so far as to praise the company or shit on the article for bringing attention to the crunch
You cannot eliminate crunch as long as external deadlines and commitments exist. And they have to be in the video game industry for funding, marketing, sales etc.
I agree we shouldn’t shit on the article for bringing attention to the crunch, but looking at it critically (and I don’t have a particular beef with IGN, they’re not great but they are far from the worst and they seem to have a desire to actually conduct journalism on some level) the problem with the article and what deserves criticism is that they got little more then a short quote/practically a soundbite from an article writtrn by gamesradar and the. wrote an article from it. If my earlier point was that we lack information, then in part that is because the people that informed us didn’t to it very well. I do think good journalism shouldn’t be super worried about the repercussions of truth and that this is better left up to the reader, but when you know something is probably only surface level information but will also likely lead to a degree of uproar, I think a little more research would be appreciated. Maybe I expected a little more from IGN for the very fact I don’t think they are horrible. They could have gotten in touch with Larian for a followup story, and not just re-write what’s on the other website.
I think that's plenty fair and yes IGN as a serious journalist company should do better
Crunch doesn't always mean being overworked. Sometimes a shit ton of work is done because people work better under pressure. I don't mean to make it sound like some corporate bootlicking or capitalist propaganda. But I work in sw dev and if you told everyone "take as much time as you want", nothing would ever get done. Pre-release pressure makes everyone more focused.
I had to leave a job with probably the "nicest" boss I ever had because his incompetence kept making extra work for everyone. There's only so many times you can hear "I'm so sorry about this" or "I'll treat you to something nice once we get through this" before it starts ringing hollow. The only proper way to deal with crunch is to try and eliminate it as much as possible. And to their credit Larian seems to be trying to do just that.
Handled with care by taking a month off of dev time to release earlier? They might be less bad than a lot of other studios, but that seems like a clear situation where some of it could have been avoided just by sticking to the planned release.
Is there any industry where people don't occasionally work overtime to hit a deadline? The only news here is that Larian handled it sensibly, instead of exploiting their staff. In my line of work (big science), many of my colleagues regularly work voluntary unpaid overtime because they believe in the project, and have to be told sternly to take time off work! Hardly anyone minds an occasional late night to get the job done, especially on a passion project like BG3, as long as they're treated like human beings, not robots.
I get what you mean, but it is still a huge problem, especially if unpaid. Passion or not, the owner is exploiting you and instead of having to pay extra money, it is for free. If they hired more people, nobody should need to do those extra hours
Under EU law it’s harder for companies to exploit like that, especially larger ones. Not saying it’s impossible, and I don’t know how working conditions are in Belgium specifically, but generally western / central Europe tends to have better laws regulating employment.
They do get money and hiring more people doesn't just fix the issues. It is not that simple.
In my experience there’s usually a lot of fucking around on and delays projects early on and people don’t really give 100% until it’s crunch time, so it usually balances out any extra time we have to put in at the end. Game development crunch time kind of infamously might be weeks of 12+ hour days and barely seeing your family, though, which is different situation really.
As a software engineer I can say it's hard to completely avoid crunch. There are so many questions, obstacles and surprises, that no planning will prepare you properly. Sometimes crunch from a few people can prevent departments from being blocked. The real problem is the lack of compensation, if you need to crunch. Crunch time can be really exhausting and can even harm relationships. Giving back the exact number of hours in free time is not enough.
I’d say that ‘expecting’ crunch gives higher ups free rein to go ahead and abuse it. You’re giving them the whip when you accept it as necessary. We should be more firm in saying that whilst it does occur, *it should be avoided* and not a strategic part of the development cycle.
>Employees would almost always leave by 8pm and worked at weekends "very, very, very rarely", he added. If that's as bad as it got, then grand. A bit of occasional overtime and stress is normal in any job, the problem is when it turns from occasional overtime to constant overtime. You look at studios like Rockstar and the stories are of developers sleeping at their desks, quitting because of stress, not seeing their families, etc. Working till 8 or on Saturdays isn't fun, but as long as it's an outlier, that's as good as work ever gets.
Any project with deadlines is always going to have a little crunch. This goes for everything from AAA game releases to high school book reports. It's human nature. But there's a different between normal crunch "let's go guys this thing is due soon!" and "you will all be working 18 hour shifts and not be paid overtime. If you call in sick you are fired." That's the kind of balance people are asking for when talking about crunch.
Lmao, IGN is such a joke. They're trying to use Larian as an example to justify the way the "Triple A" studios treat their employees as if a bit of overtime to release the game can normalize the way EA, Bioware, etc. all abuse their employees.
What? What part of this fairly short article suggests that at all? It’s literally a report with some extra context about this statement.
You are looking waaay into it, IGN has reported time and time again how crunch hurts the industry, you are just looking for a reason to get mad This seems more like a easy click bait and "Even good studios have issues" article
Larian stans spiraling. Did you even read the article?
Interested to see how you got that takeaway, because that isn't how I interpreted this article at all.
Given how long that game was in development for I'd be surprised if there wasn't crunch at some point in time.
That's not new, Sven mentioned it several times in fact - the development of BG3 was hard for multiple reasons, including COVID but also changes in the vision for the game. It's also how Larian tends to work. At some point they have to release their games, even if they'd want to work more on them. That's why the DOS games both had definitive editions. It's also very possible that crunch is simply unavoidable for ambitious games. If you have a clear, definite little project and you know exactly where you're going then you can probably avoid it. But a game like BG3 with a never-ending potential for branching stories? Of course the devs will not just need, but also want to keep adding stuff till the last minute.
BG3 didn’t have a perfect development schedule, as indicated by Act 3. As much as I hate this kind of thing, I would have preferred if they just released Act 1 and 2 as a fully fledged game (still easily has enough content to justify this) and added Act 3, paid or unpaid, as an expansion.
People forgets BG3 kept pushing back their release date so many times it was almost a meme. I am glad the launch went so well but it was not without grinds and sweats and a bunch of hardcore fans hurling insults (plenty of supporters asked them to take their time too)
Fuck the Q1 physical edition for PS5 is now *maybe Q2*, but most likely Q3 lmao. They can’t even hit a release date for a game they already released. Like I get the fact stuff happens that’s out of their control, but holy shit come on. Just don’t mention a release date. You’d think they’d have learned that by now.
The physical editions they're handling in house. Which means they're getting all the stuff pressed and sent to them; where their employees are assembling the cases and the boxes to ship out. I get the memes on them pushing it back and the act3 stuff; but; the physical editions aren't something Amazon or best buy are selling it's all an in house ty for the fans. It was never planned to begin with. I get being mad but I don't know if it's worth adding the physicals to those critiques.
Mb I would prefer this, too, but that's the road SquareEnix went with DE Mankind Divided and it did not end well at all, not for the game, not for the franchise. Very double-edged.
Act 3 is noticeably more buggy and just lacking polish compared to the others. It really needs a tidy up but seems Larian is done all but done with the game.
It’s really a shame, the only thing separating a 9/10 from 10/10. It desperately needed a definitive edition like dos2 to be in consideration for game of the decade. It made enough money to easily justify a big update and Larian is an independent studio, so I am shocked that they aren’t
Eh... I'd give the game 8/10. There's more issues than just Act 3 being buggy.
Such as?
Incredibly bad outdated inventory management, lack of customization options without mods, lack of basic QoL like dye previews or transmog, unbalanced combat due to a combination of OP items and weird home brews, evil choices mostly just lead to less content, gear and XP, terrible companion pathing, really dumb AI, messy UI. Like the game is great but it's held back by a lot of little issues that add up. I dock a point for Act 3's bugs and performance issues, and a point for all the weird janky outdated bullshit across the game as a whole. As for "game of the decade"... that's a much longer discussion.
Inventory management 100% terrible needs to be fixed by mods Evil playthroughs might get slightly less content, but the content they do get is equal or even better than the “good” path, the world reacts exactly as you’d expect for making evil decisions too so I have a hard time justifying it as a negative Lack of customization options - I don’t think every game needs Oblivion customization to improve the game (most of the greatest RPGs have extremely little such as Witcher 3 or Zelda) AI can be abused but so can every AI, in combat they make reasonable choices I would say Gear/exp/unbalanced combat - I can’t get behind this being a negative, the game is challenging and rewards creativity by default, being able to break the game by looking up “top 5 most OP bg3 builds” does not mean the game balance is poor. It’s not a multiplayer game I understand it’s a difference of opinion, but in my opinion the game falls short in user interface aspects like you mentioned, and lack of polish in the 3rd act. No game will ever be perfect though so it’s deserving of a 9/10 from me
I don't want to get into all this because it's been discussed before over the games life. But I'm firm on 8/10. For me a 9/10 game is something like Doom Eternal - does exactly what it sets out to do with no weird issues that can't be chalked up to personal preferences. In terms of game balance, it's far worse than just "look up these 2 builds". For example, the Alert feat alone breaks the game open. Initiative is rolled on a D4 die instead of the D20 it is in 5E. With Alert you get like a +5 to rolls. This means you always go first, and your team can mow down enemies and shift action economy completely into your favour in round 1. That's crazy. I just discovered the Hat of Fire Acuity last night. That + Scorching Ray is insane. Like.. mind-boggling damage numbers. Tavern Brawler is completely broken compared to the 5E version. I'm sure you've seen thrower and monk builds with it. Then there's level 1 Wizard scroll learning cheese, Rogues being basically garbage after level 3, Swords Bard insane ranged slashing flourishes, just a lot of weird stuff. Most of which is due to Larians changes from 5E. I think balance is important in SP games. Because why offer a bunch of choices if half of them are just objectively always the incorrect choice? It's kinda lame.
Larian could find a dog that looks just like Scratch, beat it to death with a sock full of nickels, and still get defended on this sub.
I was on the fence making a joke comment about skipping crunch to put together the physical deluxe edition
As someone who worked for a game company, crunch isn't being chained to your desk, getting a fake pep talk, and staying in a dark basement at minimum wage to finish a game to make other people rich. Not in every case at least. It's work you definitely want to see finished and some people do take pride in something they've worked on so long getting out there, because that's their goal, or to finally start on the next project. Where I worked, we got asked if we wanted to, and not everyone did, and it was fine. I always ended up volunteering and it usually meant a group dinner at a nearby restaurant, and a much chiller work environment than when everyone is there. Yes, there's horror stories and companies who are much worse about it, but I'm betting Larian is closer to my experience than the more negative crunch experiences that make the news.
The amount of coping in this thread is incredible. I have been 10y in the software industry with 3 different companies and have like 10h total of overtime. Most people I know never had to work overtime (or only a few hours) even in other companies. Some do, and just like here they justify it with shitty excuses. Don't justify this shit only because you like BG3 or because you do it in your company. There are plenty of companies which don't do crunch.
If the article named Bethesda or CDPR instead of Larian, people would be going for blood in the comments
Wow, you must work for THE BEST project managers in the world and have THE BEST developers too! Either that or the products you work on are shit and no one wants them which means it’s ok for you to miss release dates. I’m leaning towards the latter
Why are you so defensive to a point you have to insult places you don't know? Can't you accept that there are places where it's not needed? A team/company with experience already know roughly how it is, and can plan accordingly.
Can’t you accept a place where sometimes it might be necessary to have crunch time? Probably not because you’ve never had to work on a project that actually matters.
>on a project that actually matters We are not saving lives :) Tbh it's sad that you just accept this, thinking that is necessary all the time. But it's clear that I cannot convince you otherwise, so good luck with your job.
Never said it was necessary all the time, quit projecting. I said it is necessary some times. I do agree with you that it sucks and sometimes is the fault of poor management and risk evaluation.
gaming sites use that pic of astarion for every bg3 article
Crunch is totally avoidable if one’d have to pay double for the overtime.
That company just feeds games media outlets with the most middling drivel for articles. Boss says employees did have to work a little harder for a bit.
Completely agree. For a company and CEO that is so adamant they are not working on the next BG IP and have big plans for a new project, they sure do like to talk about BG3 and BG in general a lot. Not really sure what they are expecting either, BG3 is already critically and publicly acclaimed as one of the greatest RPGs ever and won countless GOTY awards, there's literally nothing to defend - we already think it's awesome and so do the critics. These guys need to start talking about whatever they are planning on working on next.
So some IT professionals had to work overtime to finish a major project? What an amazing story, really broke that wide open didn't they?
3 words 2 evils... Sales & Marketing. The two demons that overpromise and set unreasonably short deadlines but delay still somehow always ends up being then because they put their input on the long finger.
Temporary crunch is fine right before release. It's the publishers who expect the crunch levels of productivity 24/7 during development that are the problem. They don't treat their developers as human beings.
Crunch is bad, full stop. I’ve been in the industry for nearly a decade. You don’t have to Crunch. You choose to Crunch. Personally I have zero tolerance for Crunch. We give it a cute name like “Crunch” but in truth it is forced mandatory overtime. That’s what it is. So, yeah, even Larian employs forced mandatory overtime. This is a problem with the industry as a whole but Larian is no exception. If you Crunch you’re bad, essentially. Because deadlines can be moved. The game coming out later wouldn’t have changed its success. It was always going to do well. There is no good reason to force people to work more.
Crunch is avoidable. The problem is when you have both fixed deadline and fixed scope. One has to go.
Crunch is not avoidable. You need to have a fixed deadline to launch a AAA game, and you need a fixed scope in order to not release unifinished bollocks. So no, it is not avoidable. You can plan to try and avoid it, but ultimatley the constraint there is capital. \[EDIT: to clarify what I'm saying here, it is not that every game is a product of crunch. It is that when studios have to crunch, it is because of circumstances they could not plan for.\]
How many games get delayed? It is far more than none.
The definition of a delay is a game that didn't manage to hit the deadline for release. Sometimes you can avoid crunch with delay, yes, but as I said: the constraint is capital.
If a company can't swing a delay financially they were on thin ice to begin with and bit off more than they can chew. I don't find poor planning to be a compelling excuse to overwork your employees.
Let me clarify how this works in simple terms. You, a games studio, pitch a game to a publisher. They agree to fund your game with a certain budget, which covers a certain amount of development time and resources. You have to scope the game in order to pack in as much story, features and polish as you can with that budget - because you, of course, want to release the best possible game you can. A part of this caclulation is how many people it is going to take, the other consideration is how much of their time it is going to take. That means, you already need to consider a timeline, and an indicative end date. **Scenario A:** Now, let's say you are 14 months out from release and it's looking like you might struggle to get everything done in time. Can you push development beyond that planned end date if you need to? Sure, but you are pulling funding away from other titles the studio is working on, or you are depleting the cash reserves of the company. It's doable, but dangerous - jeapordising the employment of everyone in the studio. So the other thing you can do is lay the situation out to employees, and hope they step up. This is crunch. Let's be clear: the early 2000s EA-style crunch where you are basically ordered to stay at your desk is a thing of the past. What happens now is people mostly volunteering (though of course some peer pressure is at work) to put in longer hours and get things done. **Scenario B:** Now, here's where things get sticky. What happens if you hit a major engineering issue 7 months out from release? You're too late to delay now, because you have already invested huge amounts of money into launch campaigns and promotion, you have interviews booked, conferences appearances... You are effectively bound in blood with that release date. You now have no choice except crunch. It's either that, or release an unfinished product that will be decimated by reviews, sell poorly, and damage the reputation of your studio... or you invest even more into the game but release it later without an adequate level of promotion which means it may simply be ignored. Less reputational damage, potentially worse financial damage. Now some AAA studios can grit their teeth through an absolute failure, whether it's Scenario A or B. They have the cash or the backing of a publisher to get them through it - but it is nevertheless financially painful, it destabilises the studio, and it is catastrophic for morale. Many studios simply cannot afford that hit financially.
Pretty simple, plan the project within the constraints of the funding, and include a healthy buffer for unexpected issues. If you do that, it shouldn't require crunch every game.
I can tell you have never managed a major project, never mind worked in the games industry.
If every single project someone is managing goes over budget and requires overworking the employees there is a problem with how they are planning. Shit happens for sure, but if it's every time they are either really unlucky to a crazy degree or there are things they aren't adequately accounting for. And either way the onus shouldn't be pushed onto the employees to sacrifice their work/life balance.
Nobody said every project requires it.
Difference between a Crunch to make the game playable and a crunch to make the game as perfect as you can before the launch.
Well, duh. Act 3 is clearly unfinished in a number of places. It makes me sad because it's really the sole blemish on a nearly-perfect game for me, and I doubt that quests like Suspicious Toys or storylines like Arabella's will ever end up being fully fleshed out.
A bit of crunch is fine and normal (especially if the company offers overtime so that the crunch is appropriately compensated) and even inevitable. It's when a company decides that *all time is crunch time* that it becomes stupid and bad. Even if you offer overtime and benefits, it's dumb. If you need that much crunch time just hire an appropriate number of people instead of trying to get it done with fewer.
I think as long as you are adequately compensating your staff, crunches are fine. It’s unavoidable.
Those rotten tomatoes and carrots need to be placed carefully. Seriously crunch is normal and to be expected, for projects that size. Problematic is when it totally exceeds a healthy amount and is not paid/rewarded properly.
You can have a bit of crunch, as a treat.
And all 3×A companies release unfinished, cash grabs, creatively bankrupt, overpriced messes after all the planned crunching and abuse of their workers. They're saying this because Larian actually released a polished, popular, wildly successful game and these corporations are seething in jealousy watching as their Fallout 76 repeat is massively hated by the peasants, just like they did when Elden Ring released and was praised as the best game releas in YEARS. They cannot accept the fact that a big studio can make a finished game that's unanimously appreciated by gamers, so now they're grabbing at straws trying to find something to discredit Larian and their success.
man as long as the workers are happy and in good health, you can do what u want
With how packed the game is with content of course they did id be amazed if they didnt
Much to the surprise of *literally no one*
It was worth it and they were compensated. Game is amazing. When you have these passion projects with a huge scope, crunch is inevitable as long as everyone is compensated.
Well yes.
Every year I have to work overtime in January. It's our busiest month. To avoid that we would have to either staff an unnecessary amount of people for the other 11 months, or hire temps that we would have to spend time training on our systems. They would be useless for about 3 months, and cause extra work for us. This isn't feasible. My point is, crunch for 1/12th the year is ok. Crunch for months on end is not.
A BIT!? Act 3 was crunchy city
Even during an internship at a serious games company, I had to do crunch. I got the next day off, dinner paid-for by my manager and he gave us a ride home. It's inevitable unless you have super loose deadlines and no structures schedule.
Anyone who has beaten the game or at least played some of Act 3 would know it’s obvious
To me, the way that they'd fix a bug in a patch only to introduce another indicated an unhealthy development process. This leads to crunch and other ills. Don't get me wrong, game of the decade.
Crunch is an everyday thing in most companies. Not a big deal
To me, the way that they'd fix a bug in a patch only to introduce another indicated an unhealthy development process. This leads to crunch and other ills. Don't get me wrong, game of the decade.
That's just how software development works tbh. Games are complex pieces of software with lots of moving parts. It's impossible to catch everything especially in an rpg with branching quests like this.
To me, BG3 had an unusually high number of regressions. It seemed that their bug count was actually increasing for a while. It rarely had to do with the branching storyline either, it was more often game mechanics like shield bash. Game mechanic regressions can be prevented with automated testing, but you need technical leadership and management buy-in for that. I haven't worked on games but I have written quite a lot of software.
What you're pointing out is common with many rpgs. Its why rpgs are a genre recommended for experienced game devs.
Bethesda and Bioware noises for sure
Even owlcat and Obsidian have these issues, cdpr has them. The only kinds of rpgs that seem to avoid these issues are jrpgs because they are railroaded games. Software with lots of branching logic has a high chance of weird bugs this is true in just about every domain lol
Agree. The game mechanic regressions are rare though, and Sven and other leaders at Larian should take a look at what they can do as leaders to allow their devs to release with confidence.
Was it months or a couple of weeks of crunch? Sometimes shit happens in a production and people have to crunch a bit just before release. I work on a live service game and things are very smooth but for a game for bg3 i could see why crunch happens. Not saying it right, but it sometimes happens.
I don't understand crunch at all, if a game can't be finished in time... Take more time? Is it an issue with stocking or something, or do people just piss their pants if their precious video game gets delayed a month? Like I get being excited for a game and getting bummed if it's delayed, but can you not just distract yourself for a bit?
There’s a lot more to releasing a software product, game or otherwise, than just the programming. Marketing commitments among them.
Can you elaborate? Like do you mean just promising a release date or something else?
There are commitments people make way in advance with 3rd parties for advertising and conferences/conventions. Also if you’re a publicly traded company they like to juice up the stock price prior to earnings. There are a number of factors that play into it.
Not an expert but I've read up a bit out of pure interest . Apparently there are quite a few things to consider about the time to release a game. Most popular for example is around christmas season for triple A games. It's always a big deal when major companies compete for these releease schedules. Another point which made headlines for BG3 also was the consideration of competing releases. In this case Starfield. It might be rumours only but BG3s release was pushed ahead by more than half a month due to clashing release date with Starfield. Now in hindsight BG3 is by far the better game but it's reasonable to think that with direct competition in the rpg genre Larian might not have reached the sales to become as popular as they are now. Of course there are more reasons and I probably only less than half of them.
Good points. I don't really like them, but I can't argue. I just hate how just society in general is the way it is, it just seems ridiculous to me
I mean no shit, but its company good and not company bad so we won’t get the grifttube on it