He's very clearly shitting on management. All the talent in the world is no good if not handled properly.
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Ex-Naughty Dog animator: "ND's games success is due in large part to Sony's deep pocket funding delays rather than skill alone"
- Thread starter Lant_War
- Start date
It's embarrassing. And of course folks are digging through his Twitter history to find ways to discredit him.
C'mon people.
As far as the Senior / Junior comment, I can 100% believe that. There's probably so much churn over there that it's hard to keep people that know their engine well enough to do things as efficiently as they need to the first time. A senior person familiar with their development methodology can probably do a task 3x faster than a junior. This is not to say that the junior is not skilled, just they don't have the same experience working in ND's pipeline, or in game pipelines in general. These things are accounted for in most game dev studios by these things called...producers. That apparently ND doesn't even use.
Not to mention, saying new inexperienced workers coming in and taking longer on tasks doesn't in any way constitute "shitting on workers".
Anything to defend the picture perfect image some people have of ND in their heads. It's extremely embarrassing. No studio gets excused for this kind of shit no matter how good their games are.
Yep!
Regarding the junior part, he even goes through the part of saying they are great and that other companies should look for them! It is just that in ALL cases, junior (or even seniors in a new structure) just require some time to adapt and learn how the company works.
I've worked multiple jobs where things went to shit in a matter of months. Have you not?
Kinda does. If he went from one craphole to another it lessens his perspective a bit.
It's not even surprising at this point
Gotta work hard to defend something indefensible like withholding someone's final paycheck.
I've been at jobs that I loved 90% of my time at only for it to go up in flames in a matter of weeks. Due to terrible management too. Really not that hard to believe.
No really .
The stage in these games just as big as any open world game.
Also ND really need to do better by there works.
Fanboys are a pathetic, worthless bunch. Motherfuckers in this thread trying to gaslight Cooper.
He literally says in his thread that the Juniors are amazing, but a big problem was that they spend as much time training them as making the game, which is a management issue and has to do with the insanely high turnover rate
Yes, that is exactly what he is saying... the reason the game needed more time is because too many senior team members left and a disproportionate part of the team was junior staff.
Yeah, the poster you're quoting was using that to say that's what people do to dismiss this.
The typical "but everything was okay just a week ago!" response.
I'd be surprised honestly. Jonathan's one of the best animators in the biz (even wrote a successful book on it).
There's even a tweet in the chain explaining why he left.
idk why people are trying so hard to simp for sony and ND and not reading the whole thread, it's embarassing.
not really that weird. Actual real life works like that sometimes, believe it or not.
I'm better holding off my opinion on treads like this, the only thing I can say is, if the studios crunch is bad and if the studios are taking a lot of time on picnic and drinking tea is bad too. Thats for sure the majority of those crunch games are games that make those suffering developers and greedy gamers proud.
that would be very surprising considering he's the lead animator behind some of the most well animated video games in the history of the medium.
Anything to protect ND am I right?
Not like we've had multiple reports at this point that they've had some clear problems there.
The Jason article dug into this as many ex ND employees felt similar. It was linked to Stockholm syndrome.
Jason said the same thing. they had to hire new devs and load up on junior talent and contractor that required months of training.
senior devs seem to have left the company leaving naugthy dog with an inexperienced team. thats what he means by senior team wouldve gotten it done a year ago.
ive seen it happen at my company. all the senior leads left and i had to waste years training new engineers straight out of college because we couldnt find anyone with experience to come work with us. this delayed us even more.
When you're among the best, I can fully understand why you would want to continue working with the best.
It was one year ago, what could have happened?
Read the fucking twitter thread.
Read the fucking twitter thread.
Jfc this is horrible, I hope this will be on the spotlight for a long time so that Sony/ND can do something about their culture and management.
I feel like his points would come across better of he wasn't so hard trying to paint ND as a bum studio that only delivers because of Sonys endless pockets.
Kinda hurts the overall message when people see it as a disgruntled ex-employee throwing shade.
The points he made about them stand on their own...without the need to downplay what the studios has been accomplishing for years.
Remember he's ex-BioWare.
Points down to Druckmann and Wells.
or Evan "AAA doesn't exist without crunch" Wells.
A Carefully curated path with few branches is not the same as go anywhere anytime open world . Not that this is the thread for it , but linear games have those kind of advantages over actual open world games
