Comment on Amazon Lays Off 180 Employees In Its Games Division - Aftermath
neshura@bookwormstory.social 10 months agoNot entirely well versed in the New World Saga but from what I’ve heard and read here’s roughly what happened:
- The dev team was developing a hardcore always-on PvP MMO, which is fine but not for everyone
- Playtest rolls around and the devs get back player numbers you would expect for a hardcore PvP MMO
- Speculation: the higher ups really don’t like the projected return on their investment given the abysmal (for their ideas) player numbers and force the Studio to pivot to PvE content
- At this point the entire game has been designed around PvP and the devs now have only ~1 year to somehow shove PvE content in there
- Launch comes and since the devs had to spend all available time on forcing in PvE content what is present is buggy and doesn’t fit the game mechanics
- Ensue several months of panicked back and forth patching of the game by the devs, making the entire mess worse because everyone is pissed by one change or another
Zikeji@programming.dev 10 months ago
To be fair, a lot of the game breaking launch bugs that hurt the game for me were with PVP (specifically, the instanced wars). I do know there were others but those PVP bugs are what I’ll always remember. The lag, the broken healing, the hatchet exploit, and a few others.