Rome 2 programmer says “leaders seemed to resent critical feedback and treated it as unwelcome"
A former developer at Total War studio Creative Assembly has writtena lengthy personal accountof his time at the studio, in which he details development troubles onstrategy gameTotal War: Rome 2andTotal War: Attila, and alleges that these issues were exacerbated by an inflexible and counterproductive leadership structure and “chronic mismanagement,” sometimes resulting in what he calls a “toxic work environment.”
McKinlay also goes into detail on the issues he faced as a programmer, largely centred around AI, and claims that upper management either misunderstood or routinely ignored issues raised by programmers. He also alleges that leadership put the addition of marketable new features - and marketing itself - at a higher priority than giving the programmers the support and resources they needed.
He also alleges that the design and programming teams were at odds as regards certain features, and that upper management frequently sided with designers. “The way it looked from my point of view was that production leadership let designers do whatever they wanted, and it’s one of the main reasons that Rome II went so badly wrong,” writes McKinlay. “Designers instructed us not to improve [the AI] in certain ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deprive them of that.”
“The Total War team was very hierarchical for its size,” McKinlay writes, “and key design and management decisions were made by a small handful of individuals at the top without any real oversight from the wider development team.” Total War’s “leaders”, writes McKinlay, “seemed to resent critical feedback and treated it as unwelcome. It was common for important decisions to be already treated as final by the time they were communicated to those of us in the trenches, if they were communicated to us at all.”
In terms of the aforementioned Rally Point video, McKinlay was subject to ridicule and harassment after it aired. He says this culminated in death threats, although he adds that he felt he “did not have actual reason to fear for my safety.” While he says that he doesn’t believe Creative Assembly intentionally stoked these fires, he believes that “this narrative was actually quite convenient for Creative Assembly, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I became a scapegoat for the project’s failures.”
McKinlay eventually left the studio during the development of Attila, after friction with the design team over feedback resulted in him being “chewed out by management”, which he alleges was “clearly intended to silence [him] for the convenience of management figures who wanted to continue doing things their way no matter the consequences to anybody else”. McKinlay left soon after, feeling that he had “made enemies in the team’s leadership and that it would probably affect my chances of promotions and things like that down the line.” In McKinlay’s view, he parted after “it became clear that leadership was going to keep repeating the same mistakes.”
Towards the end of the piece, which is far more detailed and gets much further into the weeds of actual game design than is practical to summarise here, McKinlay poses the following question:
“Despite ongoing problems with the games and a number of high profile embarrassments, the series continued to be profitable,” he concludes. “This fact was used against developers like me who argued for better practices, and was often used by creative leadership as a metric to confirm the success of prior projects and decisions regardless of other ways that they might have failed.”
It’s worth reiterating that this is one developers’s perspective on an entire studio, and one that hasn’t worked there for ten years, even if the recentHyenas sagacould suggest that some of the issues McKinlay raises are still ongoing. McKinlay is also not entirely negative about his time there, mentioning friends at the studio still.
We’ve reached out to Creative Assembly for comment.
