Former employees are speaking out about Carbine and recounting what went wrong at WildStar.
Dark Words from Former Employees
With the countless negative reports about the downward spiral of WildStar, the question arises: has the bottom not been reached yet? The preliminary answer seems to be a clear “No.” A user on reddit has compiled numerous sources documenting what went wrong during the development of WildStar and at Carbine specifically. However, the statements should be taken with caution, as they come from a thread in the gaming forum NeoGAF. Theoretically, anyone can claim to have been a former employee of Carbine.
The current statements align with those from employees on the “Rate your company” site Glassdoor.
In a conversation about the leadership of Carbine, a purported ex-developer commented (a bit rudely) “Funny, because I don’t know if you’re talking about Donatelli, Craig, Chauncey, or Jelinek. The whole place is run by idiots.”
The user ScatheZombie, who claims to have worked for the MMO, responded as follows:
“It’s not surprising, considering that most people in the leadership have significantly less experience – not just in their own jobs, but in development as a whole – than almost all of their employees.
I mean, if the Game Director was last a Staff Designer, the Executive Producer was just a Staff Artist, and the Director of Operations came from Quality Assurance… then it’s not completely their fault that they have no clue in those areas.”
The management had been unprofessional. People had roles that completely overwhelmed them. Good people were fired, and bad people were promoted. The teams were in constant competition with each other. It was a nightmare.
Major Issues in Structure and How Patches Were Created
It seems that the conditions during the development of patches and content were particularly bad. While the coded program is normally divided into several branches so that work can proceed on various fronts simultaneously, at WildStar, it allegedly all went directly into the “main branch” and could hardly be changed for three months. Instead, the branch was burdened with a lot of assets and things that would only be needed months later and that caused problems in the meantime.
This made it almost impossible for developers to respond quickly and push hotfixes. Bugs persisted in the game for months, and that would have “killed the community.”
Additional weight was added to the accusations when the former community manager of WildStar, David Bass, also spoke up. “Most experiences align with my own. They killed any desire I had to continue working in the [game] industry.”
Mein-MMO says: Even though some of the allegations mentioned above are a while ago, the big picture clearly unfolds as a disaster. While it occasionally happens that former employees speak poorly of their old company, particularly statements like “It took away my joy in the entire video game industry” paint a very harsh picture of the conditions at Carbine.
Especially tragic is the situation for the employees of the Q&A team, who had already suffered from overwork and understaffing at that time and often bore the brunt of the fans’ anger – because who else is to blame for the bugs being included in the patch? The answer seems simple: the people from “above.”
In summary, Carbine, as its logo so cruelly self-ironically predicts, is probably a wreck.
