Current Events > Ever wonder why Black Ops 4 was a shit show even for Call of Duty standards?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Whelp. Here you go. Ill quote the important stuff.

https://kotaku.com/the-human-cost-of-call-of-duty-black-ops-4-1835859016

At Treyarch, many contract employees, especially the testers, say they feel like second-class citizens. Testers work on the second floor of the office, while most of the other developers are on the first. Some testers say theyre told not to speak to developers in other departments, and one told me theyll only do so surreptitiously, out of fear of getting fired. When they get to work, testers have to park their cars in a different parking lot than other employees, one thats further away from the office. When lunch is catered, testers are told that the food downstairs is for the development team, not for them. Sometimes, theyre allowed to scrounge for leftovers an hour later, once the non-testing staff have gotten to eat.

[Black Ops 4] was also a turbulent production, marked by a drastic reboot, the last-minute addition of a battle royale mode, and what one developer described as perpetual crunch that perhaps hit the QA team hardest. Many of Treyarchs employees are not full-time staff but contractors, which means that, among other things, they dont qualify for the bonuses that full-timers might get from all those Black Ops 4 sales.

According to Glassdoor aggregates and testimonials from employees to Kotaku, Treyarchs QA testers are paid a base wage of around $13 an hour. For the past year or so, some say theyve been working around 70 hours a week. So it was a gut punch to at least a few of them when, in January of this year, news broke that the video game publisher Activision had given a cash and stock bonus worth up to $15 million to its new chief financial officer, Dennis Durkin. They didnt even qualify for a $15 bonus.

At the beginning of 2018, about two years into development on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Treyarch employees were called into a conference room for some bad news: The games campaign mode, which was to be centered on an ambitious two-versus-two multiplayer mechanic, was canceled.

For some studio veterans, it felt like history repeating itself. Treyarchs last game, Black Ops 3, was planned to feature an open world until the team rebooted midway through production, scrapping the open-ended map in favor of a traditional linear campaign. This overhaul had led to a difficult period of crunch for many Treyarch employees, who had to make up for all the lost work with extra hours. Now they were worried they might have to do the same on Black Ops 4.

This time, the plan had been to do something very different from previous Call of Duty campaigns. Black Ops 4 was set after Black Ops 3s story, but rather than play through the campaign yourself, youd play alongside a partner, battling against a pair of human opponents. (If you wanted to play single-player, theyd all be AI-driven bots.) Each side would pick a faction, and youd compete to gun down enemies and battle over different objectives in a post-apocalyptic world. One side might try to destroy a convoy, for example, while the other side worked to protect it. Or maybe one faction would set off to protect a journalist while the other faction tried to assassinate them. Each mission would give you chances to get into shootouts with the other team, hampering their progress if you did well. During different moments throughout the story, youd also get the chance to defect and switch sides if you werent happy with the choices your faction was making.

Theyd originally scheduled for a Black Ops 4 release in November, as was traditional for Call of Duty games, but Rockstar put a wrench in that one, bumping the highly anticipated western Red Dead Redemption 2 from spring 2018 to October 26. To try to preempt the cowboy game, Activision decided to shift Black Ops 4 forward to October 12, which meant Treyarchs developers had one fewer month than theyd thought.

I got more Im quoting soon
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That 2 v 2 campaign sounds awful tbh
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So they made a second scope change, this time eliminating the campaign entirely, which left Black Ops 4 with two main components: traditional player-versus-player multiplayer, and the supernatural Zombies mode, in which players would gun down hordes of undead. Call of Duty fans would expect more than just those two modes, so Treyarchs leadership had to come up with something else. As it turned out, many of the staff had been playing a lot of PlayerUnknowns Battlegrounds, the mega-popular battle royale game that had launched in 2017, and Fortnites free take on the game had just morphed into a cultural phenomenon. Why not do a Call of Duty-themed battle royale?

Now we have an even shorter amount of time to put in work on a new mode, said a developer. Actual development work on Blackout didnt start until nine months before launch. That mode came together by the seat of its pants. Its kind of a miracle that it did.

Some described seeing colleagues sleep in the office, while one described a culture of drinking to cope with the crunch. There were weeks straight when I was not taking weekends, said a former Treyarch developer. They described the effects of these hours: Panic attacks, burnout, dissociation. You feel like your boundaries are being violated. You lose all passion for what youre doing and forget why you were doing it in the first place. Its a nightmare.

I was told crunch would end after we released the game, that developer said. Then I was told crunch would end after winter break. Then I was told crunch would end once we got into [the summer]. That developer left the company in hopes of finding a better work-life balance elsewhere.

The people who I felt sorry for and really bore all that brunt were QA members, said a former Treyarch employee. Sometimes we were pushing updates twice in a week, which is absurd... As Black Ops 4 was live, it progressively got more broken and buggier, not because the developers didnt know what the problem was, but because they didnt have time to fix it.

Some of those misses might have been due to mistakes or lack of skill. Others were undoubtedly due to the pace of the work. A new update would go live, and then people would look at Reddit, said a Treyarch developer. Reddit would say, This is broken, fucking Treyarch, do they not care about us? That gets passed to QA. Then a meeting is held with QA leads: How did that go through? QA would say, We didnt get enough time.

Treyarch contractors get a limited number of sick days, but no paid time off. Taking vacations means giving up a salary for those days or weeks. Contractors are offered holiday pay for six days a year including July 4th and Thanksgiving, plus either Christmas or New Yearsnot both. In December of 2018, however, they all received an email explaining a complicated new change in policy. Among other things, the email noted that in order to receive holiday pay from now on, Volt contractors must work at least 510 straight time hours within the 13 weeks preceding the particular holiday and must work continuously for 13 consecutive weeks prior to the holiday week.

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In the months following Black Ops 4's release, Call of Duty players grew frustrated with the gradual implementation of microtransactions and loot boxes, and some Treyarch developers said they felt that pain. In interviews, many said they were just as frustrated with publisher Activisions never-ending quest for increased revenue, and they were frustrated with the lack of influence they had on it. (It makes you wonder, where does all the money go? Obviously its not to Volt employees.)

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there's a black ops 4? goddamn I have not been paying attention to this shit for so long
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