Lead developers leave Apex
Another dev leaves Respawn, more specifically Apex Legends. Jason McCord, the Design Director at Respawn has said his goodbye on twitter. It seems that he’s leaving in good terms. Devs come and go i...
Forum Discussion
@pandareno1999 I think I implied this a bit earlier but thank you for clearly stating it. People seem to forget at one time the respawn devs were the ones that made COD.
@hayhormy point was more about the fact that if people work in a good or let's be honest closer to the ideal place they are less likely to leave, because:
a) they know stuff they are doing and most of us are reluctant to change
b) they are paid the most or close to that in the industry, sure at some point you get 100k in your savings account or more and say "money is not a motivation for me" but still rarely people do take pay cuts
c) usually companies that pay the most also are leaders in other important aspects of the job - the scale of the projects, ability to improvise, experiment, invent aka waste resources for a greater good, less stressful environment, etc.
And in this case, I mean the dude you mentioned is a lead developer for the currently most popular BR game that makes billions in revenue...question arises what is there not to love.
Also from a development perspective or any other production perspective, there is room for worrying when a lead person leaves:
- how much knowledge will be left untransferred
- who will step in and will he/she be able to guide the team/process as well or there will be short term chaos
- what will be new ideas - outright crazy that will kill the vibe or be in line with the previous flow
- etc.
Staff rotation is common everywhere because as many said people sometimes are just irrational and want to change for the sake of change and a potential realization that it was the worst mistake of their lives, yet they still do it 🙂 but that definitely involves some risks, worries, room for error, and potential underwater stones that indicate something bad about the particular company they used to work for.
Anyway let's wait and see 🙂
If I was a game developer and loved what I do, have passion for the game I helped create - If I saw that the community was asking for this or that, wanted to see fixes etc... I assume, my passion would be to continue to build to the game to try and make as many people happy and address issues and concerns. Now - if I worked for a company, like ...... well, lets just say, like EA - and my bosses told me something like - "NO, do not work at fixing the bugs and issues, I want your team focused on events and skins etc, so we (EA), can continue to watch the money roll in."
Myself, I would probably feel at that moment, that it was my time to leave. Why take so much abuse because your bosses won't let you do what you want to do to a game you developed and help create. My passion would quickly dissipate - and I would be announcing my leave. However, I doubt I would give the exact reasons why, or slander my former bosses, in fear that it may effect my future endeavors within the gaming industry.
Anyway - that's just my take on what would be my opinion if that was my situation : )
Wonder if anything like the above was the situation in these two cases.....hmmm.
- @NickBeam27 When it comes to skins the devs typically do not mess with those. That is a entirely different team that does not do much with the development of the game. When it comes to fixing things or wanting to implement things players ask for always remember they have overhead and they have time frames to do things. So its not as easy as someone saying ok I am going to go fix this they have stuff they are required to do.
A lot of games push content as much as they can to give players more to do other than repeating the same things over and over. So them pushing content is a good thing while there may be bugs a lot of them can be over looked and not to game breaking. Before anyone can chime in on me talking about sounds in game not hearing footsteps i suggest actually turning your volume to 100 to actually hear things. This is one of the most common complaints in this game is the sound. Yet majority of players rather set their volume to 50% and blame a game for not hearing things.
As you mentioned though which goes back to my first statement the boss decides what to do and when to do it. There are issues for sure here and there but a lot of companies and i do not mean EA just speaking in general tend to worry about minimal bugs later as they are not game breaking issues. People complain about servers also which a lot of people do not complain about servers which should be a high indication maybe the issue is not on the game but on my end. After awhile devs can only handle so much stress and realize it is time to move on. They did awesome work and hopefully those who fill his shoes also will do some amazing work.- @E9ine_AC from my experience in development (not the game but the software still) I can say that there is a constant clash of business needs vs creativity needs. What I mean is:
- developer wants to make engine more resource-efficient that would take a load of end user's hardware / manger does not see added value to that because software per se is running right
- developer wants to have all the time in the world to work on the issue until it is solved / manager wants estimate or at least guesstimate to control the costs = end result costs exceeded, a developer does not care about the given estimate because he was forced into giving it
- before mentioned clashes of values = developer wants to evolve, make things different / boss wants new features that can be monetized
and so on.
In my case manager was not too greedy and allocated time for more than 40 developers to do what they want time to time while still pushing some of them to meet deadlines. End result - not quite win win but let's say not lose lose either.
Apex... well it just seems that many know that the ship is going down but there is no official communication about evacuation instead people are still asked to deliver good for potentially last sale just to cash in as much as possible.
Just to mention some of the major cases that have not and probably never will be addressed until this community dies:
- FPS drop issues, inconsistencies
- sound issues (despite a major change in sound settings forced by the server since season 10? - miles_occulision command)
- hacker and banning situation
- SBMM and cross-play factor related to QoL changes mentioned multiple time accoross the forums
Community Highlights
- EA_Mako12 days ago
Community Manager
