10 Biggest Dangers To Gaming Right Now (From A Dev's Perspective)

10. Too Many Cooks Spoil The Normal Maps (Studio Collaborations Going OTT)

When I worked at Ubisoft circa 2015, the studio manager was discussing what the future of gaming would be, and believed that, through inter-studio collaboration, Tom Clancy’s The Division would be the world’s first “quadruple-A videogame.”

That statement implanted in me a little seed of unease - if the future of gaming could only be achieved with two or even three studios, surely that would raise a ton of new problems. Would we have any creative control? Would we compartmentalise the game to avoid overlap? How would the lead studio even entertain quality control? Being an “underling” studio, quite a few of my then-colleagues regarded it as the most stressful project they’d ever worked on.

Put it this way - my colleagues and I discovered the answer to “how could anyone ever nit-pick a flat orange circle?,” was “with an extensive list of bullet points.”

Fast-forward to the modern day and Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora seems to have taken inter-studio collaborations to the max, with Ubisoft Massive, Ubisoft Shanghai, Ubisoft Dusseldorf, Lightstorm Entertainment and FoxNext all pitching in to see the project through to release. Based on personal experience, I don’t envy the developers between those six-plus studios one iota for such a (big, blue) mammoth task.

If such grand inter-studio projects are to be more commonplace in the future, I foresee quite a lot of production and communications problems. Perhaps though, much like the Na’vi, they'll discover the secret to true harmony with their peers, and the projects will be as easy as fusing their fleshy blue pigtail tendrils with the weird fungus-medulla of a flying blue dinner plate bird.