The Skywalker Saga 5 let? » Vortex

TT Games developers will be able to relax on April 5. After less than five years, they will push the Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga into the finish line and will be able to make at least an informal end to the development of probably the most ambitious and largest game in the studio’s history. You could also find out from the articles we gave him at Vortex that the title was not born easily, but the editors of Polygon bring another part of the whole mosaic and, based on the testimony of several dozen current and former developers, they have a peek behind the curtain. The timing of the mentioned article at the moment when the players finally learned through the trailer perhaps the final release date of the long-awaited game does not seem like a coincidence and it must be admitted that the information provided is quite worrying. But before we go into the details of the development of the new Lego Star Wars, it is necessary to note that the official comments of the management of TT Games or Warner Bros. they do not comment in any way on the specific statements of the addressed developers, and the statement thus remains rather a one-sided depiction of the situation that should have prevailed in the studio in the area of ​​recent years.

The first thing Polygon comes across is the general setup of TT Games as a development studio. The problems that hindered the completion of The Skywalker Saga are supposed to stem from the time when the first Lego games were released under the banner of the then Traveller’s Tales. Paradoxically, the huge success they had was supposed to have a negative effect on the development team, as more and more titles were expected to roll off production lines at a rapid pace. What’s more, the developers were often under pressure due to the impossibility of postponing the release, either following the premiere of one of the films or simply having to come out at Christmas so that the younger players could find them under the tree. This has reportedly led to the inclusion of overtime deep in company standards and, as some developers have pointed out, the establishment of unpopular crunchů as part of the development of every game. That is, not as a crisis solution at a time when the studio is not catching up with obviously badly set time schedules, but as part of the entire schedule, which will be automatically activated at a certain point in time.

When there are no changes on the horizon

According to Polygon, nothing has changed since the entire TT Games Group studio was bought by Warner Bros. Although the new management was to conduct a company-wide satisfaction survey – which turned out very badly and was followed by assurances that restart – nothing significant happened and overtime continued. This was not affected by the transfer of the studio’s founder – and according to many troublemakers – Jon Burton to California and the change of his position from CEO to advisor. Burton provided Polygon with a statement, in which he refers to his expulsion and loss of contact with the day-to-day running of the studio, and he could not comment further under the current contracts with TT Games. Regardless of who was responsible for the inconvenience in the studio, however, poor morale affected individual employees and the improvement in the situation was said to be in sight.

The system for calculating overtime and remuneration was to be involved in everything, including the rules on flexible working hours, with which everyone had to agree in their employment contracts if they were to be concluded.

“In some cases, employees were warned of the consequences if they did not work overtime, and they were told that if they did, others would disappoint,” Polygon said of the alleged psychological pressure. He, of course, went hand in hand with the warning that everyone who went home would assign work to others, which is all but a pleasant environment for doing any activity. The system for calculating overtime and remuneration, which also included the rules on flexible working hours, which everyone had to agree to in their employment contracts if they were to be concluded, was to be involved in everything. The working hours were set at “only” 40 hours per week, but thanks to the flexibility clause on the given days, they could stretch flexibly, but without crediting overtime. It seems that there was work on weekends or well above the set working hours, which many used for the reason that they earned something from the allegedly low salary. It was therefore not uncommon to work calmly for 80-100 hours from Monday to Saturday while still enduring all the pressure that comes with it. crunch brings.

The Skywalker problem

However, let’s move on to the development of The Skywalker Saga, which was supposed to be influenced by all of the above, but naturally by other more specific issues that are specific to this project. Although the game was originally intended to be presented to the team as very ambitious, it did not appear that the TT Games team would develop a large number of new game mechanisms for it. However, this was to change during the development and the content of the game – already stretched to the surface of nine films – was to grow in terms of possibilities and various elements. The developers spent a lot of time with them, and it often happened that someone from the management came and threw several months of work in the trash without giving specific reasons. This was to be the case, for example, with a redesigned combat system that had nearly three dozen special strokes, but when the test team showed that most players used a single button to fight, the system was removed from the game. The biggest problem, however, was the new NTT engine, which the developers had to switch to just before the development of The Skywalker Saga.

“Employees inside the studio pushed hard for TT to switch to Unreal Engine, and a small group even created a test version of Lego Star Wars in this engine,” says Polygon. But this initiative – regardless of the experience of individual programmers who could handle Unreal Engine well – was rejected by the management. The reason was to avoid licensing fees, the price of which multiplied with each additional platform that the game targeted. And the fact that Epic Games has reduced Unreal Engine fees and provided developers with significant benefits shouldn’t have changed that – unfortunately for the people at TT Games. “Why don’t we use this technology, and instead create something that is unfinished and will bring a really terrible result,” the developers were asked, but even that was not the desired change in technology. Instead, developers began to worry about NTT, which also worked worse in many ways than previous engines, often crashed, didn’t save work in progress, and lasted very long before it was functional enough to turn some of the concepts into a functional result.

Metacritic as a goal

But even that was not all that the developers allegedly had to face. Another factor that was supposed to significantly influence the development and due to which a lot of things were reworked was the effort to climb to the point of 85 points in the future evaluation of the game on the Metacritic portal from the very beginning. This is the pressure that most likely persists and the question will be whether a huge portion of content and more advanced visual processing will be enough for such a high mark. But it should be important for the developers at the moment that in order to try to hone everything to perfection, they allegedly had to return to the already finished parts many times and perform a lot of revisions. At such moments, it should have been completely incomprehensible that the team working on The Skywalker Saga was gradually shrinking and a lot of people were leaving to work on other projects in the studio. “It simply came to my notice then. For example, the team of graphic designers has shrunk to six people to finish the game, but still needed to fix thousands of bugs and process feedback, ”says one of the anonymous developers, without mentioning what other projects are in the studio.

Due to previous information leaks, probably from the testing department, the testers allegedly lost access to all information beyond the current game build, and when one of the programmers or graphic designers wanted to contact a specific tester so that they could exchange details about the found error.

And to make matters worse, according to the employees of TT Games, the development team reportedly had a very significant disconnection from the testers, who did their work remotely, or from the TT Fusion branch. Due to previous information leaks, probably from this department, the testers allegedly lost access to all information beyond the current game build, and when one of the programmers or graphic designers wanted to contact a specific tester so that they could exchange details about the error, this was not possible. It is said that this only slowed down the work again, which created further problems at the level of the relationship between employees and management. Everything is to be crowned by the longer-term vision of TT Games, which used to form so that the company will no longer be dependent on Lego-licensed games if the studio ever loses it, but everything has recently returned to the old dormitories. The team, which was tasked with finding new ideas, was given the task of focusing on Lego again, despite its original mission, and nothing more seems to change in the future.

Nevertheless, the story of TT Games, as presented by Polygon, ends with a slight hope in improving access to the development of specific titles. After five years of developing The Skywalker Saga, it seems that it will be safer to switch to Unreal Engine, which some of the addressed employees consider to be an important step and a potential step forward. But the question still remains as to why it took so long and why the developers had to endure what they present in their testimonies.