Guerrilla Games Reviews

Crunch. And more crunch. Final decisions were often made very late on, which meant major changes in systems which should have been already laid down in stone, and no tolerance of this pushing out deadlines, so a lot of extra work is required in all disciplines. Things are VERY graphics lead, so this can sometimes lead to other areas, specifically gameplay being almost criminally overlooked. The tech which at first might seem impressive, can be overly complicated, and cost a lot of time to use, time which is not factored into schedules. Some of the underlying code systems are extremely old, and not particularly in a good state. Studio(s) can be extremely political, which is fine if you are 'in' with the right people, but will cause you issues if you are not. Although layoffs were not overly regular, there is a *lot* of churn of staff, at most levels.

Low pay. Big enough to give the illusion of opportunities for growth, but in reality, you are pretty much stuck with no other options in Holland. They do not trust their own employees for more responsibility, instead, they hire from outside, but that does not work out many times, because of the difficulty of integration, especially for jobs for partner/spouse, people end up leaving again. On the surface democratic, but when actually it comes down to it, everything is tightly controlled by a impenetrable small club. A lot of man-resources wasted because some people on the top are way too 'creative' and moody, chasing the latest they have seen in that or the other Hollywood production or AAA game. Art trumps design (and quite often also common sense), while seemingly not a big problem, this causes lots of invisible pain, disgruntlement, and games that are much worse than they could be. You will hear a lot about the success story and it's heroes, but that is a mistaken view, a lot of it was luck. Lots of sharks disguised like sheep.