Yesterday, former WildStar Design Director Timothy Cain posted a video explaining why he ended up leaving the MMORPG before it launched. The general gist of the video came down to a conflict with the art director – and as a result the entire art department. The art director’s apparent animosity resulted in artists being disrespectful to Cain, making claims about his personal artistic ability, and assuming he hated artists and that he wouldn’t take on their ideas.
The problem was compounded by the studio deciding to back the art director in all things, from Cain’s point of view. This resulted in things like classes being removed without Cain’s knowledge and doing development things that would cause issues that the art director felt fell to Cain’s team to fix.
The whole thing came to a head when the studio head told Cain that a Korean QA group tested the game and had a ton of complaints about it – all development. When he received the documents, it turns out that the team was happy with the development, despite a few questions about how things worked, but they issued nearly 80 pages of complaints about the art direction. Feeling lied to, Cain quit – and then was followed out by several others.
If you want a peek behind the scenes at what he felt working at Carbine on WildStar was like, the video is worth a watch. They paid really well, according to Cain, but in the end “Carbine broke me.” Cain feels he has mostly been “repaired” since his time at the company.
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