Death March: the long and painful journey Homefront

As bad management, incompetence and pride killed owned by THQ Kaos Studios.

It happened at the Christmas party, although it was hardly possible to call anyone at least some of the Kaos developers or their colleagues. The end of December 2010 was a passing respite in the midst of a cruel crunch, during which the studio was desperate to finish Homefront, the most ambitious attempt by THQ to snip its piece off the temptingly profitable market for AAA-class military shooters.

The work schedule was so all-consuming that one of the employees compared it with Siberian hard labor, and the relations inside the studio (and beyond it too) literally cracked at the seams under such pressure. Now, at the festive party, all these people and the tension between them were gathered under one roof to spend the past year lamely and prepare for the uncertainties of the next.

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Traditions are such that the head of the studio must give a speech and a toast at a corporate holiday, and the creative / CEO Dave Votypka had a difficult task. Many employees believed that it was Kaos managers who were guilty of the nightmarish development cycle, and regardless of whether they personally blamed Butykot or not, he was a management representative on New York night.

Hot-water went into the room and looked at the crowd. He was quite popular in Kaos before he became head of the studio. Typical chesnaga, with a colorless sense of humor and a cold, sardonic mind. That evening he decided to allow himself some black humor.

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

Nobody even smiled. One of the workers recalls: “After these words, our second half literally cursed the Hotkey, because now it seemed he was guilty of having committed the most intimate of their closest people.”

What was very close to the truth. Vyotpka and Kaos worked day and night on a franchise that only a few people believed was competitive. THQ looked less and less interested in Kaos and shifted the focus to friendly Montreal. The developers gave Homefront all their strength, so they had no desire to listen to jokes about it. Against the background of general stinginess and leakage of talented personnel from the studio, they already understood that good days are no longer foreseen.

Continuity crisis

Kaos has always been the studio of Frank DeLise (Frank DeLise), even long after his departure. “DeLise was a bulldog, he knew how to take by the balls and didn’t tolerate garbage from anyone,” says one of the game designers. DeLise created the inner culture of Kaos, gave the studio a name and made sure that its veterans were strongly protected from everything. Kaos might have been listed as a professional studio owned by THQ, but it still had a lot left from the simple modding team of Battlefield, which it was originally from.

DeLise turned a group of modders into Trauma Studios by working on a modification of the Desert Combat for Battlefield 1942, a modern military adaptation that has become quite popular in the Battlefield community.

This mod attracted the attention of the guys from EA; Trauma became an EA division and worked with DICE. In 2006, when EA closed Trauma, the studio was re-formed under the wing of THQ called Kaos Studios and began work on Frontlines: Fuel of War.

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

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

However, this style of management and development has its downsides. “It was not a very friendly environment. It seemed to reflect the very bulldog, Frank. Everything worked well while he was with us, because he could give an answer to any question that arose. But when Frank left, this culture began to rot. "

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

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

The whole creative had to come from the new creative director of the studio, Dave Votypka, who held the position of design director at DeLise and was one of the main veterans of the studio. Hot-selling is very appreciated as a soft and talented designer. “He wanted everyone to be happy at the end of the day,” recalls Dave’s colleague.

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

One of the studio workers said: “We were extremely concerned about the preservation of our inner culture. What for? I have no idea. When I was working on Frontlines, we experienced a lot of problems because we were too similar to a small team of mod designers, and not to a large AAA-class studio. ”

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

Joining

In 2008 and early 2009, all conversations in game devs were exclusively about a market downturn. Optimism and tranquility left the industry, and their place was taken by fears that everyone is hanging by a thread and the recession is unlikely to end soon.

THQ tried to adapt to new conditions, looking for places to cut the budget, and everyone knew that Kaos was a huge stain on the publisher’s accounts. Kaos was a big studio with an up to tears expensive office in Manhattan, paying employees well above the industry average to offset the cost of living in New York. In short, in a general downturn, Kaos employees lived as if with a target drawn on their backs.

“When they attracted Schulman,” says one of the workers, “he had to understand the situation. This is somewhat similar to the presidential election: it no longer matters what you said during the election race, and only when you enter the office do you begin to understand what is actually happening. I think he quickly realized that Kaos did not have another game that can be shown by THQ. The studio was simply not ready to do anything, but we urgently needed to provide the publisher with an idea of ​​what the next project would be. And we really had to present something amazing. ”

The first business action of Schulman and Votypka was the search for something, anything that would be approved by the publisher. The simplest and most reasonable option was to develop the continuation of Frontlines. But before taking up the game, it was necessary to go through the procedure of issuing "green light" just introduced in THQ.

To understand why Homefront had so many problems during development, it is important to familiarize yourself with the order in which THQ gave studios the “green light” and with the context in which this happened. This procedure, new to the publisher, rather, however, was common in game devs, was a multistage process, designed so that studios could work on games without THQ intervening until the release was prepared. The publisher had to collect the proposals of the studios, express their opinions, periodically look at the prototypes and give (or not give) the go-ahead to the development of the idea. After several iterations, the decision was made whether to send the game to full development or to close it.

Unusual in this process was that THQ introduced it at a time when everyone knew that cuts were inevitable. With the stakes of life, the new selection procedure has become infinite.

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

Lost plus Red Dawn

From the very beginning, there was no clarity about what the next Kaos game was thinking. The studio specialized in multiplayer shooters, and THQ and most of the Kaos developers equally wanted to start working on Frontlines 2. However, the fact that THQ wanted Kaos to focus on Frontlines 2 did not mean that the publisher would approve the development of the project. To tell the truth, Frontlines brought nothing but mediocre reviews and sales, and it was a good reason to expect THQ to reject the idea of ​​yet another Kaos multiplayer shooter.

In Kaos itself, many developers were simultaneously pragmatic about the prospects for the studio on the one hand and wanted to have a hand in creating an advanced shooter on the other. The head of one of the departments described it this way: “When someone gives you money for the maintenance of a game studio in the center of Manhattan, and the studio throws it right and left in the blind hope of success, it is very scary, even at the highest level. To succeed, you need to achieve your goal in the complete absence of experience creating single-player games. And even more so the experience of creating cinematic blockbusters in the style of Michael Bay (Michael Bay). "

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

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

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

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

“Now that the preliminary phase of the project is over,” says one of the creators of the game, “you have to pay the bills. Must really bring the promise to life. It was here that ended the professionalism of Schulman. He promised so much of everything that there was not a single chance to succeed. ”

Disappear from the map

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

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

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

Perhaps Shulman and his single-user clique saved Kaos (many veterans pay tribute to the fact that he and his demo allowed him to make a deal), but this was given to them at a great price. According to one of the employees, THQ bosses always hinted that they want to receive and what they expect from the next project, and the only way to soften the publishing house was the promise of more and more new chips that would make the game competitive in the shooter market. When Homefront got the green light, the studio subscribed to an incredibly long list of commitments.

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

Endless pre-production

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

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

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

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

By the summer of 2009, Kaos workers were down. In addition to sucking out all the preparation of the demo for E3, Homefront is sticking to what one source called “endless pre-production”. Then it seemed that there is nothing terrible. In the process of concluding agreements with THQ, and after that, Shulman urged the team to be more ambitious.

“We were always wrong with the criteria of quality,” says one of the workers. “It was a typical excuse for designers. They invented new and new things, and if you said “no” to them, they would come back with the words' You know, and Shulman approved. He says we need to add quality. Add chips. And you could not resist it. ”

That was the price of saving lives for Kaos. The studio promised THQ to get stars from the sky, but, more dangerously, Dave Schulman seemed to be confident in the team’s ability to keep these promises. At the time when Kaos should have restrained his appetites, Schulman strongly encouraged designers to inflate them.

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

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

Such a general description of Homefront meant that each designer gave out hundreds of fresh ideas. But at seven nannies a child without an eye, and as a result, many small teams simply embodied their ideas in the code, and then tried to understand how such a gaming system should work.

“We did not have a single development core. The weapon was the way the guys from the gun crew saw it. The technique was the way the guys from the transport team conceived it. The game was turning into Frankenstein. ”

Schulman care

THQ and Kaos conducted a joint audit of Homefront that summer. They studied each element in dizdok and pitch docs, everything that the studio had promised since 2008, and made rather prudent predictions about how long it would take to implement each feature. It was then that the full scale of the disaster became clear.

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

According to a number of high-level sources, Schulman and THQ regularly had discussions about how he runs the studio and carries out the directives of the publisher. One of the leaders of Kaos said that Schulman was trying to maintain the same relationship with THQ that the studio enjoyed when it was under the leadership of DeLise and worked on Frontlines, a relationship that largely left corporate influence behind board decision making.

But the THQ bosses, who allowed Kaos to go their own course, were biased due to their own corporate rebuilding of the publishing house. The leadership that came to power required more direct and tight control over the studios (the new game approval process was one of the products of this concept), and Schulman’s attempts to keep them at arm's length caused a return fire. The publishing house began to demand greater “transparency” from Schulman; the same was afraid that, as a result of such “transparency”, publishers would be influenced by its publishers in Kaos, and rejected the demands.

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

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

His resignation did not solve any problems with Homefront, but only gave rise to a new crisis of continuity. The task of returning the shooter to the system went to Dave Votypka, who was trying to grow out of the role of creative director. Now he became the creative director and, in addition, the general director, which means tremendous responsibility for anyone. However, he needed to deal with the inner culture of Kaos and aggressively aggressive behavior of the publishing house. And all of these calls to the HotLot seemed not enough.

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

Comes: Danny Bilson

Considering that Homefront was stuck in preproduction without any clear development plan, and Dave Votypka tried to cope with two key roles at once, THQ had every opportunity to take a more confident position in shaping the shooter, and their newly appointed vice president for key games Danny Bilson (Danny Bilson) intended to deal with this. He literally gushed with ideas on how to resurrect Homefront, and the developers of Kaos should have listened to them — don't care if they want to or not.

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

Opponents of Bilson portray him as an arrogant, ignorant person interfering in everything, who, almost by chance finding themselves in Kaos, redid everything the team was working on, and as a result a large amount of work was thrown into the dustbin. This point of view is universally shared by developers who are ruthless in their criticism.

But leading employees and directors of Kaos look at him not so unequivocally. One of the reasons why developers put almost all the problems of Homefront on Bilson is because, as one employee said, “the teams worked in isolation from each other. You could sit five meters away from someone and have no idea what this person is working on. As a result, when instructions from above came to you, you most often associated their source with the most powerful person in the room. Usually it was Danny. ”

The situation was further aggravated by the fact that the biography of Bilson, along with his behavior, made him an excellent target for labeling an incompetent “hollywood player” who knew nothing about games. Bilson was a screenwriter and director, whose filmography includesa whole series of nightmarish, so-bad-what-already-even-good sci-fi films , such as The Rocketeer, for example. It is not surprising that one of the most popular stories describes Bilson’s demand to turn the main element of the level 90 degrees in order to “remove it from another angle”. This bike was supposed to illustrate that it simply did not have enough qualifications to influence development decisions.

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

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

The real problem with Bilson, and both his critics and his supporters agree, was inconstancy. No matter how good his instincts were, no matter how badly he understood game dev, Danny was immersed in the details of Homefront production, but was not in that position to work on the project on a daily basis. Bilson led the whole unit and could not associate himself with Kaos and effectively join the development team. When he was not in the studio, he was absolutely unattainable, even if it was really required. And then he returned with a regular visit and conducted an audit of all changes that occurred during the absence.

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

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

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

Shooter 1.0

At a time when THQ was still having fun deciding whether to close Kaos or release the sequel to Frontlines, the publisher didn’t like the idea of ​​making a single player game. Many developers in the studio also wanted to focus on large-scale battles with military equipment, which have always been their signature dish. But as soon as Kaos sold THQ the salutary idea of ​​a big single-player campaign, managers and studios and publishers began to think about the “Call of Duty Killer”.

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

Kaos, not new to the creation of shooters, even started collecting Call of Duty levels in Unreal to understand what makes the game look so impressive. They planned to recreate the characteristics of weapons and maps to perfectly reproduce the impressions of the game.

At this rate, it was not far from a complete rival campaign. One of the screenwriters said that such a strong forging of CoD even jeopardized the main theme, the motive of resistance in the occupied United States.

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

Most of the studio’s key employees now, looking back, agree that the decision to challenge Call of Duty was a bit insane. But no one imagined that CoD would raise the bar every year or that Modern Warfare 2 would direct the plot to the same mainstream defense in its Hollywood-blockbuster campaign. Even if the employees had an idea of ​​how to make a competitor of the original Call of Duty, they sank deeper and deeper.

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

About * b positions

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

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

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

At the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, the Homefront was still bad, primarily due to the turmoil with cardinal alterations. The impression that Kaos might not release the game at all began to take shape, so the studio began to attract experienced shooter developers to see the light at the end of the tunnel. A team of professionals who worked on EA's Medal of Honor was hired to lead Homefront through this crunch.

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

One of the newcomers from EA, in turn, notes that Kaos was incredibly erratic. “Homefront was a fucked position. The main difference between Medal of Honor and Homefront is that the Homefront management was inexperienced and afraid to show it. And MoH was done by professionals. ”

Over time, a team of team leaders and executives - including Chris Cross (Chris Cross), Rex Dickson (Rex Dickson), Dex Smither (and others) - began to work in the afterburner mode on locking features, completing systems and building levels. But perhaps the most important change in Kaos, and unequivocally the most controversial character working on Homefront, was the new production director, David Broadhurst.

Mr angry

First of all, it was with Brodhurst, and not with anyone else, that Kaos veterans pinned their hopes on the Homefront appearance. He was a ruthless manager who pounded every project participant during the final stages of development, including a seven-month crunch. He took into his hands a disorganized and half-ready shooter that looks as if nothing will ever come out of it, and completed it in a year.

And also ... And he was hated. One of the workers still calls him nothing but a "bastard." Brodhurst worked in the style of a bull, not believing either in soft instructions or in explaining the reasons why he rejects this or that piece of work. Instead, according to employees, he arranged for developers to carry on in front of the entire studio, at full volume and not stint on time.

One of the directors pays tribute to Broadhurst’s merit, but wonders whether such harsh measures were really needed.

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

But Broadhurst was the bad guy in everything. Almost constantly, he was not satisfied with the quality with which everything is done, with the speed with which everything is done, and he did not miss an opportunity to inform you about his dissatisfaction. He pressed on you until you started working 23 hours a day to finish everything and fix it. And every time he made a complaint to you in public. Personally, I do not agree with this approach, so that it is possible to treat subordinates in this way. But to be honest, it was thanks to Broadhurst that we managed to do a lot. He taught us many bad habits. ”

However, not only the studio’s bad habits disappeared between the grueling crutch's hammer and the anvil of the aggressive Broadhoerst management. The moral of the staff, already weak, fell below nowhere.

Torn end

The last year of work on Homefront was a bloody and creepy experience for most workers, and even at this time many felt that their efforts were being lost in vain due to poor management. They were people who were wound up by Danny Bilson, inflated by Dave Warping and publicly humiliated by David Broadhurst. And now they were required to forget about self-esteem and work out the next 90-hour week.

"It is impossible to maintain such a hard pace that it does not affect you physically and emotionally," - says one of the leaders. “This is a very traumatic experience. And everyone who has this experience can imagine what it is like to live in such a regime for a whole year. This greatly affects the person. Even those guys who were the soul of the company, the second after gender, who at a difficult moment could put together a studio and say, “Hey guys, we are sailing in the same boat, we are able to get through it and become stronger” - nothing is left of them. Everyone was on his own; everyone said to himself, "I have to go through this, I have to endure tomorrow, I have to finish this game and forget how awful the dream is."

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

The whole scale of the problems became clear at the Kaos Christmas party in 2010, when it was not a positive effect on the studio workers. Danny Bilson also managed to turn many away from himself three weeks earlier when he tweeted. “I’ve been sitting at Kaos Studios in New York with a team that has been working 7 days a week for several months now. We chat about their 'look at a thousand yards'. "

This comment triggered an immediate response from the workers, at least one of whom made staff complaints about THQ and studio management public. The problems came out on public display, and Dave Votypka was forced to begin to eliminate the holes and protect Kaos from the title of the worst AAA studio in the world.

The finish

Butt would not have been able to drive a studio into a corkscrew more effectively. One executive remembers this period as the lowest point of his career.

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

Bad press and fallen morality accelerated the outflow of talents from Kaos: as soon as the news of the studio penal servitude spread around the industry, competitors began to act. And the key employees were just happy to run away from Homefront and its fucking development and do something else.

In parallel, suspicions grew that whatever happened to the Homefront, the days of Kaos were numbered. The news of the opening of THQ's big studio in Montreal was a clear testimony - Kaos is no longer part of the publishing plans.

Nobody thought that the studio was trustworthy. Regardless of the results of Homefront, the development process was ugly, and revenues did not correspond to the costs. The management team was quickly assembled, all plans collapsed, and a significant portion of the really good workers quietly left during the crunch. Someone called it a self-sustaining reaction: the staff lost optimism about the future of the studio and left, and this reinforced THQ in the belief that Kaos was on its last legs.

Running in a circle

By the time Homefront was still released, after long months of crunch and hard work, the workers had very little optimism about its prospects. Many in the studio got used to the idea that they were doing a mediocre game, so when the shooter began to collect those who were not indifferent and restrained, but not without admixture of praise and feedback, this was a surprise to everyone.

It's funny that although the marketing department did the utmost to underline that John Milius (the director of Red Rising) had a very small influence on the development of the Homefront, the game could only benefit by taking more from the movie. As one of the writers noted, the image of the North Koreans by “faceless monsters” seriously damaged the narration. Although their pure, undiluted malice led to the creation of a number of impressive scenes of mass executions and mass graves, it also turned opponents into patterned villains, whose motivation does not interest anyone.

“If you remember Red Dawn, there was a Cuban officer who seemed like a complete bastard throughout the film. And you see how he shoots civilians, see how he looks at the burning troops. But ultimately he manages to evoke sympathy. He writes a letter to his wife, saying: 'I did not subscribe to this. I am not a police officer and not an occupier - I am a partisan. I do not know how it happened, but I lost my way. " And, having met the wounded children, he lets them go. And in the game we did not give the Koreans a single chance to display humanity, and this largely ruined the plot. ”

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

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

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

Failure

THQ regarded Homefront as a failure. Even if the publisher didn’t wait for the “Call of Duty Killer”, hope was at least for the opponent. The disappointment with the result and the restrained reaction of the players made it quite logical to assume that Homefront is just another mediocrity in the already crowded shooter genre.

Such an assessment tormented many of the studio’s key employees. As one executive said, “Homefront was simply thrown out, although it was not a bad game. We sold about two and a half million copies, which is actually quite a successful result, but at least someone called Homefront a success? With that, we were told 'Hey, this is one of the few recognizable brands on the market. Many liked it, and if you had focused your efforts not on the top, but on the middle segment, you would have earned a lot of money. ”

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

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

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

Based on the experience of working at Homefront, many Kaos executives conclude that the main problem in the production of AAA-class shooters and the middle segment is incompetence. Not thematic incompetence, but a fundamental lack of understanding how to make successful games with a great team and tens of millions of dollars.

One of the directors of Kaos describes it this way: “Believe me, when you are working on a game worth more than $ 30 million, some of these millions will be spent on reworking everything and everyone - simply because the game industry is too immature. There are no such expenses, for example, in the film industry ... We still have very little idea how to make a blockbuster game, and throughout the entire production cycle, people have to reinvent the wheel. ”

And here we should focus on the words of Kaos veterans that David Schulman was a good developer before becoming CEO, or that Dave Votypka was a good designer before becoming a creative director. While Kaos was recovering from DeLise's care and recruiting people to work on AAA products, many studio workers were simply assigned to leadership roles or they increased their areas of responsibility. THQ and Kaos regarded the expansion as a very organic, natural process.

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

On the other hand, to leave studios owned by the publishers a minimum of autonomy - this is also not a panacea, but only a way of complicating management. One Kaos executive noted that THQ, overseeing Homefront, had little to do with THQ, which initially protected Kaos. “One of the reasons for the success of THQ was that the company began as a group of completely autonomous studios, each of which could realize its concept, and THQ was just a publisher for these concepts. It was this approach that allowed them to grow into a corporation worth $ 40 per share. ”

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

Here is such a game dev

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

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

Experienced programmers listened to colleagues' complaints about the thousand-and-one-thing that got him, and agreed that, in general, the work is not as good as in their previous AAA projects. But they waited until he splashes out his emotions, and then just shrugged.

"That is gamedev."