In 2014,Hal0co-creator Marcus Lehto left Bungie to start a new studio and begin a brand new project. That studio turned out to be called V1 interactive and that game is going to beDisintegration, a character-based shooter that isgetting a beta later this month. Lehto spent 15 years working at Bungie as the art director onHalo: Combat Evolved,Halo 2andHalo 3. Now he has revealed the working conditions at Bungie that caused him to leave.
During a roundtable interview forDisintegration, Lehto discussed the way periods of extreme crunch at Bungie led to his departure. The negative effect extended periods of working long overtime hours had on his work life balance was tremendous. At V1 Interactive, a key goal Lehto has is to avoid crunch culture and make sure everyone on the team is healthy and happy.
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“One of the reasons I left Bungie is that many of us have seen the bad side of extended crunch periods that would go on for months and months … and what kind of human toll that took,” Lehto said. “We don’t want to experience that, we don’t want to replicate that at all again. So at V1, one of our primary goals with the studio is making sure that we create an atmosphere where everybody is intimately involved with what we’re working on, so there is a lot of responsibility on everybody’s shoulders. "
Lehto has spoken before about the crunch at Bungie, which has been a pretty widespread and known issue in the industry for many years now. In 2017,Destiny 2was thefirst Bungie game not created through “full, enforced” crunch,according to Bungie’s head of engineering Luke Timmins. These 50+ hour workweeks nearly killed the studio when it was developingHalo 2years ago. Those practices didn’t get fully absolved despite attempts to curb crunch and burnout untilDestiny 2launched and the wording still implies that there were probably still employees that did have to crunch on the game.
V1 Interactive’sDisintegrationcomes out sometime in 2020 and is being published by Private Division, a branch of Take-Two interactive, the publishers ofGrand Theft Auto. The game wasannounced with a cryptic trailer in Julyand since then more gameplay has been shown in trailers. The shooter will combine FPS and strategy mechanics in a class-based game that will include both a campaign and multiplayer mode.
Disintegrationis set for release in 2020.
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