These days, veteran Naughty Dog employees describe the design department as a sea of unfamiliar faces. With 70 percent of the non-lead designers and a significant number of artists who worked on Uncharted 4 now gone, the company has had to fill those roles with less experienced staff, many of whom hadn't worked on Naughty Dog games before The Last of Us II.
Every newcomer means weeks' or months' worth of training and hard lessons about how the rest of the team works. A task that might take a veteran designer two hours could take twice or three times as long for a newer employee, and it can be hard to know what the directors want until you've been working there long enough. On The Last of Us II, new artists working with new designers found themselves baffled as to how to hit the standards that Naughty Dog expected, a problem exacerbated by a management culture in which feedback is usually negative. (One of the studio's unwritten maxims is that if you don't hear anything, you're doing well.) "It's been a little bit of the blind leading the blind as we go in circles and find our way," said one developer.
In the past, Naughty Dog has been reluctant to hire junior-level staff for this very reason. The studio's bar for detail is so high that inexperienced people are unlikely to hit it on their first or second tries, which inevitably leads to hours of rework and hours of crunch for everyone.
Naughty Dog's lead designers "expect the same level of quality out of a lot of the junior contractors as they do out of people who have been here for a while, which is ridiculous," said one developer. "It's certainly led to a lot of stress and feeling like shit to most people who are new, which sucks."
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After the brutal development cycles of Uncharted 4 and Uncharted Lost Legacy, Naughty Dog has found itself with little choice but to hire a disproportionately high number of juniors and contractors for The Last of Us II, even if that perpetuates many of the problems that caused senior staff to leave.
Some at Naughty Dog who spoke to me for this story said they expect more people to quit, or that they plan to leave themselves, once The Last of Us II has shipped and bonuses came in (which is usually six months after release). And so the cycle will continue.
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