The "Lego Skywalker Legend", which is full of tubes and praise, is behind the high-intensity overtime and squeezing?

"Star Wars" this IP in the domestic popularity has not been very high, the recent popular among European and American players "Lego Star Wars: Skywalker Legend" has not many Chinese players contact, even if the developer TT Games for the players to present the game content is quite exquisite and interesting, if you do not understand the "Star Wars" itself is difficult to get the fun. So today, instead of talking about the game itself, not about Star Wars, we're going to talk about what's behind the biggest movie adaptation in Lego history.

Lego Star Wars: Skywalker was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, postponed to 2021, and finally confirmed at the beginning of the year that the release date was April 5 – this time finally no more ticket jumps. As a game that includes all 9 Star Wars canonical movie plots, the volume of the game is worthy of Lego's largest film adaptation game work, and players have also made a high evaluation of the game's interesting remodeling of a large number of Lego classic "Star Wars" classic shots and rich galaxy exploration content, so that the game has achieved good results in word-of-mouth and sales within a few days after its release. However, according to the previously revealed news, the ambitious LEGO Star Wars project, which covers all 9 Star Wars canon films and spin-offs "Ranger Solo" and "Mandalorian", has brought great work pressure to developer TT Games and its employees, and the squeezing of employee labor continues to occur, and a large number of TT Games employees are lost during this project.

From the launch of the LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker legend project in 2017 to the official release of the game on April 5 this year, 5 years may sound like a long time, but LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Legends is not an ordinary video game, at least not for the developers of the British studio TT Games. This huge project, which covers 9 Star Wars canons and some spin-offs, is quite tiring from a development point of view, especially the TT Games LEGO series has always been made with a fine attention to detail, which has forced the development time to be lengthened; on the other hand, since TT Games launched its first LEGO Star Wars game in 2005, the successive works have undergone many remakes and reuse of materials, such as Lego Star Wars: The Legend of Skywalker. Such a completely new work would undoubtedly take longer to develop than in the past.

(2005 original LEGO Star Wars)

That's exactly what happened, according to a survey of more than 30 current and former TT Games employees by game media Polygon, the entire development process of the project is heart-wrenching. The management of TT Games learned of the scale of the project and gave the development staff more time to develop the game than the average project, but the conflict between the staff and management still broke out: the development staff had to use a new internal game engine called NTT, which was unstable and lacked important features. Although there were employees who asked to switch to Unreal Engine, management wanted to save on licensing costs and use NTT. In this way, an already complex and huge project had to be developed in a game engine that was unfamiliar to the employees and had imperfect functions, and the previously extended construction period became insufficient, and in practice, even without the use of the new engine, the development work was difficult to complete within the time set by management.

In an interview with Polygon, six former TT Games employees recounted their experiences working under Jon Burton. Jon Burton founded Traveller's Tales in 1989, which was transformed into TT Games Studios in 2005 and was acquired by Warner in 2007. Even before the Skywalker Saga project, burton yelled at them even before the Skywalker Saga project. "It's not an urgent measure to take when something goes wrong, it's premeditated." A former employee described this as follows. Some of TT Games' games need to be released in conjunction with festivals or movies, so many things have long been decided, and employees have to work during special periods.

Many TT Games employees say overtime is already commonplace and it is difficult to take time off. If they don't work hard, companies feel guilty for dragging down the team. One former employee described the incident this way: "It's a very gentle form of blackmail."

The sheer size of the project itself and the lack of collaboration and conflict within the company forced lego Star Wars: Skywalker to postpone the game for two years. During this period, first the management made requirements for the use of NTT's new engine, and then many times the management directly proposed changes to the gameplay design... The longer it drags on. According to Polygon, more than 40 employees will leave TT Games and subsidiary TT Fusion in 2021 due to internal problems.

Fortunately, after a long delay and internal chaos, LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Legends still met with players with a very good look, and did not disappoint everyone in terms of the game itself. Whether it's lego's humor or the grandeur of Star Wars, the legendary space opera, the developers have made it pretty beautiful. But as a game, the development process behind it is really not happy, like the developer "Insomnia Group" of "Ricky and Jingle" has proved to everyone last year that a company that treats employees well and never works overtime can also present excellent works that everyone admires; CDPR, which is full of overtime and rush, has also failed to make "Cyberpunk 2077" what everyone expects. In the post-pandemic era when games are relatively scarce, players are more "quality" than "quantity", and LEGO Star Wars: Skywalker Legends rarely meets both of these points, and it would be better if the story behind it can be more comfortable.

Source: KOTAKU & Polygon

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