Problems with Huge AAA Gaming Projects - Former Ubisoft Dev Speaks

[JEMC]

DonFerrari said:

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?

That would only be true if the same teams that now make an AC game in 1 year were involved in making it in 3 years, which wouldn't happen. Even more, those teams that now are busy working on AC games could actually work on other franchises or even start new IPs that would help Ubisoft as they could have 3-4 strong IPs that could be launched one each year, giving them a steady income while also ensuring a certain quality in their products.

And yes, in an ideal world Ubisoft would find a way to solve all their problems and keep launching one AC game each year while maintainung the quality, but we don't live in such world. So their option is to either put more people or teams into the yearly development of the game and prey that the problems won't get bigger/worse, or pause the whole thing to evaluate which are the problems and where do they come from, then solve it and start to make game again. There is of course a third option, which is to give the project extra time in order to identify and solve the problems as they appear, trying to get rid of all the problems and, once done, increase the production rate again.

Now honestly, I think that the best thing that Ubi could do is give AC a rest. They have burned too many historical settings in a very short time that could have been used more extensively.