Avalanche Studios NYC Retrospective – An Ambitious Company Ruined
10 hours ago
- #Postmortem
- #Game Development
- #Avalanche Studios
- Avalanche Studios NYC was founded in 2011 as an expansion of Avalanche Studios in Stockholm, aiming to tap into talent not interested in moving to Sweden.
- The studio's first major project was Just Cause 3 (JC3), which faced numerous development challenges, including a switch to a free-to-play model due to Square Enix's financial troubles.
- Development tools were a significant issue, with the old editor being unstable and the new editor, written in Python, proving to be a disaster due to frequent crashes and file corruption.
- Despite these challenges, JC3 was released in 2015 to good reviews, but the studio's leadership was later fired due to conflicts with Stockholm management.
- Just Cause 4 (JC4) followed, with initial optimism but quickly devolved into similar development issues, including poorly designed scripting systems and input systems.
- JC4 received worse reviews than JC3, with design decisions like escort quests and lack of clear core gameplay contributing to its shortcomings.
- The studio's final project, Contraband, was a multiplayer co-op open-world heist game that struggled with unclear design direction and was eventually canceled, leading to the studio's closure.
- The author highlights a culture of poor development practices, lack of code reviews, and failure to learn from past mistakes as key reasons for the studio's struggles.
- Lessons learned include the importance of proper code review, automated testing, and maintaining high-quality development practices to avoid capability traps and ensure project success.