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UC4 Game Director Justin Richmond Leaves ND (And famousmortimer leaves GAF #1393)

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Some thing smells fishy with people leaving left right and center.

I'm sure we had a lot of "ND is doomed" posts when Gavin and Rubin left and we all know how that went. This is how companies work. I've seen this happening myself countless times. It really isn't nearly as special as some of you claim.
 

leadbelly

Banned
Well, this seems completely unrelated to the recent departures of key people in other studios and also the recent lay-offs, but it is strange how this all seems to be happening at the same time.
 
While this news is distressing, I think time will truly be the ultimate teller here.And I must ask, not to be disrespectful but, has this Putty fellow been verified or what, cause no offense, this is the internet where anyone can "claim" to be friends or family etc with certain people, and I think it might be best to find out the whole story before everyone jumps to one certain conclusion over the other here.Again not meaning disrespect just stating my opinion.
 

Archie

Second-rate Anihawk
Riot's president already confirmed that they had a card game in development and cancelled it awhile back.

Dunno why people are acting like this is some kind of super sekret insider information.
 

Boken

Banned
Riot's president already confirmed that they had a card game in development and cancelled it awhile back.

Dunno why people are acting like this is some kind of super sekret insider information.
Yea but what about their top secret mmo
 
giphy.gif


Please.......

Its almost like you forgot how unenjoyable Summer was, hell that's over 50% of TLoU right there.
I dont have many problems with cutscenes, but I'm with you on that. Except for Bill Summer was a borefest. Fortunately it picked up big time or I would have left the game scratching my head where all the hype is coming from.
 

Texhex

Banned
Mort, Col Rogers left Evo for personal reasons in Feb, he wasn't pushed, he left on his own terms, and certainly wasn't replaced and let go. I know this because he's a friend of mine, so please be sure next time of the accuracy of your information.
So mort being wrong again with his made up rumors? I'm shocked!
 

Facism

Member
so he left in order to work on LoL, exactly, lol. Uncharted 4 coming out for PS5 launch.

uh, UC2 MP was pretty ok, to be honest.

UC2 MP was brilliant until someone had the great idea that lowering the HP in a p2p environment was beneficial to the game. I remember when gaf UC2 regulars just dropped the game soon after, as did i.
 

Yaoibot

Member
Great post. You seem to have mixed up Stig's game with Barlog's and don't know Irrational made BI. You are truly a fountain of wisdom.

I'm not paid to provide precise insight on the industry, and I admitted my confusion literally one minute after I posted it. Could have just stealth edited, too. And who cares who made the SSM game, which was indeed an Albatross and doesn't diminish the value of my point simply because I messed up who the idiot in question was.
 

Yaoibot

Member
Dude ... :/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFiLNc46jAM

"Tumbling, burning with white hot fire, I plunged into the depths of the abyss. Unspeakable pain, relentless agony, time ceased to exist. Only this torture and a deepening hatred of the hypocrisy that damned me to this hell. An eternity passed and my torment receded, bringing me back from the precipice of madness. The descent had destroyed me. Yet, I lived."

That's overwrought and melodramatic. "Precipice of madness", "time ceased to exist", "plunged into the abyss"? Could the writing you chose be any more derivative? I feel like I've read each of those lines a thousand times or more. She's an okay writer, possibly confined by the medium and audience she's working with. I don't know. She should write a book and open herself up to a much wider critique and breath of readers.
 

manfestival

Member
UC2 MP was brilliant until someone had the great idea that lowering the HP in a p2p environment was beneficial to the game. I remember when gaf UC2 regulars just dropped the game soon after, as did i.

SO THATS WHAT HAPPENED!
I was actually pretty good at the game for a while. Then I got busy and put the game down for a while. I came back and it felt completely different and died way too fast. This threw me way off and and pretty much gave up on the game.
 

mckmas8808

Banned
Connecting dots where they don't need to be connected.



Stig and his team spent almost 100 million dollars on a game that failed every QA test that took. The game sucked. They shitcanned the game and a lot of the people involved. They offered stig a spot on barlog's project - he didn't want to go from game director to something lesser so he quit.
.

How could they have spent $100 million on the Stig game already?
 

UrbanRats

Member
giphy.gif


Please.......

Its almost like you forgot how unenjoyable Summer was, hell that's over 50% of TLoU right there.

Summer was definitely the most uninteresting bit of LoU, however (since we're playing with percentages) i'd rather play that than about 90% of UC1, 20% of UC2 and 60% of UC3.
 

gbrewski

Member
I just don't see the vast conspiracy here. The layoffs at Sony Santa Monica make perfect sense: God of War Ascension was an extremely disappointing game and if I were in charge and wanted to trim the fat in the face of financial issues, I would target that studio too. It needs a reboot.

As for Naughty Dog, clearly there was some internal squabbling that led to Hennig and Richmond departing, but I doubt the overlords at Sony had anything to do with it. When we see a mass exodus across multiple studios of many employees and hear some of them actually talk about problems at Sony, then you guys can go wild with theories, but as of right now, this looks completely normal.

Deep breaths everyone.

EDIT: And oh yeah Driveclub looked like ass and has been delayed. Clearly that director was doing poor work and was justly canned.
 

Truespeed

Member
You do that in pre-production though. UC4 has likely been in production for at least a year, and Sony has been pimping Henning and Justin Richmond as the leads of the game since the reveal last year. Fast forward 4 months and they're both gone?

Not even Hollywood fires directors in mid-production, they let them finish and take the loss on a bad movie.

In a perfect world you might, but that doesn't always happen. If things aren't progressing you can either start making changes or continue wasting time and money on something you have no creative faith in. I don't think ND is the type of company that's going to release something they're not happy with regardless of what stage they're in.
 

LevelNth

Banned
How many people have left ND now? I thought this just makes two, but it's a 14 page thread so it's gotta be like 5 or 10x that...
 
I just don't see the vast conspiracy here. The layoffs at Sony Santa Monica make perfect sense: God of War Ascension was an extremely disappointing game and if I were in charge and wanted to trim the fat in the face of financial issues, I would target that studio too. It needs a reboot.

I was under the impression that the people fired were working on the new IP, not the Ascension team.
 

LevelNth

Banned
Because they're the top talent involved. Game Director and Writer.
But if we're just looking at probabilities, wouldn't that also make them more likely to be offered better paying, more senior positions at other companies, which is a far more likely reason to leave?
 

Eterniti

Member
As someone who works in the same office complex as Riot Games, I can see how this happened. Riot, Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica (currently, that is), and Thatgamecompany are within a block of each other. And while I can't really say much for Riot (I don't talk to anyone there), there definitely seems to be a lot of shuffling people around from one building to the other. Lots of excitement all around.
 

kurbaan

Banned
In a perfect world you might, but that doesn't always happen. If things aren't progressing you can either start making changes or continue wasting time and money on something you have no creative faith in. I don't think ND is the type of company that's going to release something they're not happy with regardless of what stage they're in.

I highly doubt after all the previous games for ND a not a failure suddenly part way through u4 ND suddenly loses faith in these people.
 

LastNac

Member
Summer was definitely the most uninteresting bit of LoU, however (since we're playing with percentages) i'd rather play that than about 90% of UC1, 20% of UC2 and 60% of UC3.
No, I am dead serious. When I saved at the beginning of Winter it told me I was 51% of the way through on my save file.


Summer is literary half of TLoU.
 
so the Insider guy makes a big post, everyone thanks him and says stuff like "thanks for clarifying" , then a guy is from the industry and actually friends with the Driveclub director tells him he is wrong, what about the rest of his post?

was it all based on assumptions or what?
 
so the Insider guy makes a big post, everyone thanks him and says stuff like "thanks for clarifying" , then a guy is from the industry and actually friends with the Driveclub director tells him he is wrong, what about the rest of his post?

was it all based on assumptions or what?

Yup, I think so.
 
Connecting dots where they don't need to be connected.

Stig and his team spent almost 100 million dollars on a game that failed every QA test that took. The game sucked. They shitcanned the game and a lot of the people involved. They offered stig a spot on barlog's project - he didn't want to go from game director to something lesser so he quit.

This makes sense, right? Shitty game, money wasted, people fired, head guy leaves out of ego? I mean that all makes sense.


Amy Hennig has creative differences about the direction that UC4 should go in. Egos swell, she leaves. She's happy, she will make another studio much better when she gets there. Justin Richmond, an ally of Hennig's, gets an offer he can't refuse from Riot. He leaves.

These things happen. Naughty Dog is going to be fine. UC4 will still be awesome. Riot will be better with the pickup of Richmond and whoever gets Hennig will be better off. The sky isn't falling.


Guerilla Cambridge is working on a vita game that is shit and won't sell. They slim down as they retool for another project.

Again - this isn't new. This happens a lot.


The director of Driveclub doesn't deliver the game on time. Given more time the game still needs work. He is replaced.



Wouldn't you replace him? Wouldn't you shitcan stig's project that cost them almost 100 mil and had nothing of value to show for it? In fact they should have done it two years ago. The fact they let it go this far is a testament to how much they believed in him after GoW 3.


And all of this is happening before the fiscal year ends. Is sony trimming fat? Of course. Sony corporation is not in a great spot. So they are tightening up a bit. But a lot of people are connecting dots that don't need to be connected. Hennig/Richmond is about creative differences and ego. Stig is about wasted money and time. Col Rogers (driveclub) is about failing to deliver. Taken on their own they all make sense. Combine them together and you get glenn beck with a chalkboard.


And Jack Tretton was about money and inability to move up. He will make more money and have more power somewhere else - something Sony simply could not offer him. Shit happens.


It's the same with the xbox department guys. People move around. People leave for other companies. Shit happens.

Hello, all.

This is my first post on NeoGAF, and whilst I'm not generally one to deal in internet speculation, I have to put the record straight with regard to Pete Dodd's comments above.

Everything he has said with regard to myself and Driveclub is incorrect. It's also libellous.

As Putty (who is a personal friend of mine, and has been for about 25 years) suggests, I left Evo in February for personal reasons. The personal reasons being that my son, who is 4 years old, has been diagnosed with Nephrotic Syndrome, which is a potentially life threatening condition. I live 220 miles (4 hours drive) away from Evolution Studios, and was away from home 5.5 days a week. Given the circumstances, I could not continue to work there.

Driveclub is a great game, and the direction hasn't changed since my departure. This has been confirmed by SONY in various press releases over recent days.

I have no problem in dealing with very large projects, as I've been working in the games industry for the last 19 years, and have worked on some very prestigious titles, so there is genuinely no truth to anything posted by Mr Dodds at all. My departure (and indeed the setup of my 'indie' operation, BigRedSwitch) is 100% driven by family necessity, not some professional failing on my part.

I left SONY on very good terms. There is no animosity there, and I was absolutely nothing to do with the recent redundancies - in fact, the news of those redundancies was probably linked on here before I knew about them.

The games industry is a tough place at the moment. My circumstances with my son mean that I've had to leave secure work in order to try to make my own way in the world. This may entail getting another job. With people who obviously know nothing about the situation blackening my reputation for the sake of internet 'fame', this could be made much more difficult. It's nothing less than trolling.

I've contacted Mr. Dodd on his email address on his site. Due to the factual inaccuracy of his statements, I've informed him that he needs to remove the statements and apologise for the damage they have caused, as posting incorrect information and claiming it's true is quite simply libel.

I'm sure you can all appreciate just how difficult things are for myself and my family at the moment. I'd genuinely appreciate it if you can take my statements as word from the origin, and realise that there has been no big cover-up when it comes to my departure from SONY/Evo.

Thanks, all.

Col.
 

Ubiquitar

Neo Member
Annnnnnnddd.....here we go.



Edit: It has to be frustrating to have your name and rep dragged through the mud by the speculations of others. I'm glad Col_Rogers came here to clarify things. The truth shall set you free. In this case, it set Mr. Col_Rogers free.
 
supposedly the working conditions there are not very good either.
Hmm are you talking about ND or Riot? Riot was listed as one of the top tech companies to work for last year. I know one of Sony's studios also got in the top list in some other year but I'm not sure if it was ND or some other.
 

benny_a

extra source of jiggaflops
And this is why talking about individuals and their alleged failings is where this insider stuff should end.

If this is wrong, how do we know the other stuff isn't wrong either? And this is just purely the egocentric enthusiast perspective.

That this is actually damaging to the people this is about is a whole separate issue and very uncomfortable.
 
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