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City of Villains' Lead Designer quits

Submitted by Abalieno on February 2, 2006 - 08:25.

As reported on many forums:

Dave "Zeb" Cook aka Lord Recluse has officially left Cryptic Studios. He was the lead designer for CoV.

No reasons given yet for why he left, which only leads to lots of speculation (did he jump or was he pushed?). It's been noted in the original thread that he hadn't posted in about six weeks - enough time to give official notice before quitting.

As he was the lead designer of CoV, of which the second half (Issue 7 will finish off Villains, adding 40-50 content, Epic powers, a new zone, etc) is not complete yet, speculation ranges from "contract simply ended" to "he pissed someone off and got the bewt" to "he got a better offer from DDO".

I believe he also designed the not-out-yet new zone (Grandeville) completely, so the timing is rather odd.

Anyone recall any cases of one of the lead designers leaving a successful game mid-development? Is it time to start crying Co* is DOMED yet?

Getting the game to this point was probably a lot more interesting than slowly expanding it from here. We see the shift from design team to live team all the time (although I wonder if that is really the best way since it often leads to a change in direction).

In particular on QT3 this triggered a discussion on whether is good or not to switch/rebuild teams as a game is launched. To bring in "fresh ideas" or to let the creative guys move onto something more exciting.

My opinion is still the same, as I wrote in the comments on the forum. I brought up many, many times on this site the problem of "authorship" and I keep a section named "migratory fluxes" to try to track for what it's possible what happens behind the scenes, the "who's who".

That's what matter from my point of view. The "brand" is nothing. Are the people behind it to be important, even if too often overshadowed.

The mistakes you do are the premise of what you can learn, so it's always important that a team is solid and that the people working can develop experience and learn from those mistakes.

This is also why I'm never one of those wishing devs I disagree with to be fired. I despise that. Instead what I do is to search a dialogue so that the problems can be discussed and acknowledged. So that there is a confrontation and different points of view can be examined. That's how things can move on. With dedication, continued observation and dialogue.

And not by jumping from company to company and game to game, while dismissing the responsibilities and that commitment that is the foundation of these games.

Filed in: The Cesspit | Migratory Fluxes

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Re: City of Villains' Lead Designer quits

Chris_ (not verified) on February 2, 2006 - 15:45.

Warning: I'm conflating developers and designers into a shared role. I'm also not talking about producers, testers, CSRs--just the thinkers and implementors. And from what I've seen, artists and graphic designers have a different, if still crunch-prone work experience.

I can't blame devs for leaving. Even as a contractor, I can feel like I've been working too long on a single project. I've been working at a major grocery retailer since July 1994 and it's getting very, very old--thankfully I have an end date, but if I didn't I'd be looking to jump ship. Actually, I'd jump ship now if the right job came along.

Creative devs don't like to do production support. It's draining, stressful, and everything you fix feels like it's half-assed, and this kind of support feels even worse because you've usually just come off crunch time and are thrown back into on-call or crunch work for weeks or months. Of course, a developer who's been working on a project for a year or longer has a good feel of how the system works, what can be changed without a lot of problems, and may be able to anticipate problems, and that makes him or her the best candidate for early production support. What's been hardest for me is when the team starts to break up after going live--suddenly, key knowledge is no longer available and maintenance suffers for it.

Developers want to move on to new projects, challenges, and opportunities. Spending too long working with the same software leads to stasis, and that's unhealthy for creative people. Ultimately, if the employer wants to keep their developers, it's up to the employer to keep their devs fresh with interesting new projects, and with the exception of Google, I haven't found a company that has a policy to encourage that kind of exploration. I have worked at a few who turned a blind eye to lunchtime FPS gaming or after-hours fragging, but those were also an exception (only two of 15 employers, in my experience).

Instead, most corporate employers hire devs in to do a new project or two, which then move into maintenance as the dev gets new projects. The corporate developer eventually ends up spending eight months to do a four week development project, and maintaining a dozen aging applications. Can you blame them for wanting to move on to new work? Yes, I know the console and single-player game industry is a different than corporate development, but MMO development cycles are likely analagous to corporate environments: both develop systems for dozens to thousands of simultaneous users, keep those systems functioning for years or decades, and have regular feature and bugfix releases.

The point, in short, is that developers and designers are often burned out by the time the project is released and may feel trapped, and often believe that changing employers is the best alternative to escape their project.

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