Problems with Huge AAA Gaming Projects - Former Ubisoft Dev Speaks

[DonFerrari]

JEMC said:

DonFerrari said:

JEMC said:

I doubt they alternate between releases. The Assassin's Creed team (or teams in Montreal) work in AC games and the Far Cry team work on FC games. Mixing them would cause extra problems that Ubisoft can't afford in an annual franchise.

As for your second part, that's exactly why they use several studios and what causes some of their problems and ultimately make the games end up being like they do: uninspired and "more of the same".

There may be an AC team or department, but they don't necessairily work all on the same game together. They could have subdivision. But that doesn't matter, their biggest problem is communication not tight timeline.

But the tight timeline is what causes some of those communications problems. The yearly releases force that several studios have to work together to get the game done in time, and that causes the communication problems.

If the game was bi-annual, the number of studios involved in the development could be lowered, maybe to only Montreal and Quebec, and that would simplify the communications while also speed up other tasks like making the right choices and the set up of priorities.

Perhaps, but without doing root cause investigation we can't assume anything... and in Lean we wouldn't look on how to stretch a process to make it take 3x more, but how to make it happen without problems in the time already available or how to reduce time... so we could either separate the teams in 3 to give each 3 years in alternation or see how to improve comunication... Only increasing time would make the budget 3x higher with no economical gain, who would apply it?