But it is there to regulate, normalize, and control it, which can feel like the same thing. A formal process isn't there to discourage iteration or creativity. I’ve even seen situations where designers fought, and lost, to cut bad content of their own making, because the changes would have added too much risk. It required approved by all leads and directors. One studio I worked for instituted a formal “change control form” for any substantial changes to a feature or level. This leads to a different creative environment. Tasks a few developers could do on their own now require a small army. Things once handled by personal relationships become a formal process. The bigger the team and more rapid the growth, the more rigid the process must be to keep things on the rails. You'd discover that "trust" must be replaced with something else-process, oversight, and centralized control. It is impossible to recreate that chemistry in a reliable way. Imagine quickly adding 200 outsiders to that group. “You couldn’t build a studio and say, ‘I’m going to build something like that.’ I just don’t think you could. “You would not get this much good content that comes together the way it does without that kind of chemistry,” Bethesda creative director Todd Howard recently told Game Informer. It doesn’t take many layoffs to change the culture of a studio from someplace people consider a long-term home to one that feels temporary and treats people that way. Those post-game layoffs that you hear about every year stem from huge teams scaling back to start a new project. But it still can be impossible to find meaningful work for everyone. This can be mitigated by having much of the team work on downloadable content created after a game ships, or starting the next project before the current one wraps-two things Bethesda already does. Pre-production teams must be kept small, and ramping up headcount on a project before it’s ready is a surefire way to run it aground.
Because the bulk of a huge staff often is focused on production and polish, it’s often impossible to keep everyone busy as new projects ramp up. Leaving aside the very real problem of aggressively recruiting game developers to move to Bethesda, Maryland, expanding small teams is notoriously difficult, especially at a single-project studio.
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