Make each вЂњstory missionвЂќ self-contained and separate them from the вЂњfree roaming systems.вЂќ Keep friendly вЂњstory spacesвЂќ from overlapping with combat. Create a set number of formalized game play primitives or mission types, and repeat them over the game with a few mechanical twists and scaling difficulty. The most reliable is to make the core design more predictable and repeatable, and less interdependent. There are smart ways to develop and polish games with huge scope and scale. They often do the absolute minimum needed to make these edge cases work, but they keep them in. If youвЂ™re focused on making a polished, bug-free game, the smart move is to remove them, or make them impossible to reproduce. In fact, it's often harder than building the core system. There is no cost-effective way of polishing most goofy edge cases. 'Polish' is all about smoothing these rough edges.

Because that freedom is whatвЂ™s important and special. They excel at what IвЂ™d call the 'minimally-supported edge case.' They let you do what the systems and the world imply you can do. Such restrictions are like the berms encircling Disneyland, ensuring you donвЂ™t see anything less than perfect or see what's happening backstage.Д«ethesda games donвЂ™t care. TheyвЂ™re just trying to avoid messy edge cases that make the fiction, the world, the tech, or the gameplay look bad. You can't pull out a gun in Mass Effect unless the game decides it is Designated Gun Time. Solid Snake's missions are aborted if he leaves the area. Meanwhile, every Assassin's Creed protagonist will 'de-sync' if he kills too many civilians. Want to kill some major quest givers, locking yourself out of a ton of content? Sure! Want to skip hours searching for your father in Fallout 3 by stumbling on his hidden location? Why not? Feel like putting so many cabbages into your house in Oblivion that the game barely functions? Knock yourself, and your framerate, out! But it is there to regulate, normalize, and control it, which can feel like the same thing. A formal process isn't there to discourage iteration or creativity. IвЂ™ve even seen situations where designers fought, and lost, to cut bad content of their own making, because the changes would have added too much risk. It required approved by all leads and directors. One studio I worked for instituted a formal вЂњchange control formвЂќ for any substantial changes to a feature or level. This leads to a different creative environment. Tasks a few developers could do on their own now require a small army. Things once handled by personal relationships become a formal process. The bigger the team and more rapid the growth, the more rigid the process must be to keep things on the rails. You'd discover that 'trust' must be replaced with something else-process, oversight, and centralized control. It is impossible to recreate that chemistry in a reliable way. Imagine quickly adding 200 outsiders to that group. вЂњYou couldnвЂ™t build a studio and say, вЂIвЂ™m going to build something like that.вЂ™ I just donвЂ™t think you could. вЂњYou would not get this much good content that comes together the way it does without that kind of chemistry,вЂќ Bethesda creative director Todd Howard recently told Game Informer. It doesnвЂ™t take many layoffs to change the culture of a studio from someplace people consider a long-term home to one that feels temporary and treats people that way.

Those post-game layoffs that you hear about every year stem from huge teams scaling back to start a new project. But it still can be impossible to find meaningful work for everyone. This can be mitigated by having much of the team work on downloadable content created after a game ships, or starting the next project before the current one wraps-two things Bethesda already does. Pre-production teams must be kept small, and ramping up headcount on a project before itвЂ™s ready is a surefire way to run it aground. Because the bulk of a huge staff often is focused on production and polish, itвЂ™s often impossible to keep everyone busy as new projects ramp up. Leaving aside the very real problem of aggressively recruiting game developers to move to Bethesda, Maryland, expanding small teams is notoriously difficult, especially at a single-project studio.

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