I'm not suggesting that it's been kept the exact same since 2016 (when the game started any sense of pre production, to our knowledge), there's always iteration. But there's 0 sourced information that says that there have been big sweeping changes.
Bruce Straley left the studio just before the game went into full production. And that article that you posted about him not returning to direct is from 2016. Again, when the game was announced. At that PSX, Naughty Dog specifically stated that they'd barely started development. So unless you're going to suggest that Straley somehow still had any significant impact on the game despite never being brought "on board" or it you've nuked your own point.
The key things you're missing is
what goes on and what can happen in the pre-production phase, especially when transitioning into game production, and the timeline of events for the game.
Pre-production usually consists of a team coming together and writing out the main ideas of the game, developing where certain key points in the narrative may happen, and how the game actually plays. This can all change wildly in development due to how complicated the process is to making the game, and as a result, can cause massive delays in the game, or cause a team to need more time to do that, but generally, if all of those people stay on and you have a goal to achieve, the game'll usually stay on schedule without any serious hitches. Which wasn't the case for The Last of Us Part II.
2016 was when the game started
production, as in when they started working on the game, but pre-production on the game had started in 2014, right after they wrapped up Uncharted 4, and the reason we know this is because the people working on it flat-out
told people this as they were wrapping up mocap shooting back in April of last year. All-hands-on-deck-mode, meaning this is the sole project that the studio is working on, didn't start until after they finished up Lost Legacy, and needed people from there to help make the game.
Right now, Naughty Dog is, I'd assume, in the post-production phase as they're finishing polishing up the game (which we know they're in because they'd stated they were already doing that when they delayed it for an additional two weeks, because they said it didn't meet their standard of quality just yet), sound mixing, editing any pre-rendered cutscenes that were created by the staff during production, and anything else that isn't covered by the main development team.
Like...you don't just make a fully-rendered trailer with allusions to a storyline and time skip that much in the narrative if you haven't
started working on anything yet or for something that
just began production
. If you
ARE, that's not only a colossal waste of money for a trailer that could mean nothing later down the line, but you also actively lied to your audience to generate hype: which even for their faults, I don't think even the artsy-fartsy factory that Naughty Dog would do something that dumb.
As for the Omniscient Jason Schreier (who as you'll see by my post history, I do not like, for good reason): You talk as if there was some type of mass exodus from the studio specifically because of TLOU2. Wrong.
Within the article (that I have read before) Schreier states that 70% of the designers from UC4 (not TLOU2) have left the studio. 70% of the number 20 he explicitly calls out is equal to 14.
Stop the presses, 14 people have left the studio over the 4 years between UC4's release and the writing of that article. Excuse me if I balk at the suggestion that this is somehow massively abnormal in a studio of about 200 people, in a sector of the tech industry.
Didn't Anthem have even less people leave and yet that game turned out to be a massive shitshow in the end because the main director/creative consultants for that game dropped like flies? All detailed in an
post-mortem Schreier himself wrote up? And that was for a game that had an 8 year cycle from another lauded game company, BioWare. Naughty Dog had six and they've already lost this many people working on The Last of Us Part II. And that's not even counting the people they already lost (i.e. Amy Henning, the main lady of the Uncharted series) over creative differences while working on U4), and Uncharted 4 showed how badly that affected the game. Not enough for a completely shit game, but enough that it wasn't as highly-regarded and for people to point out the pacing issues and weak story the game had.
Again, the amount of people leaving doesn't matter: it's the roles those people had and what they did that'll have a huge impact. If it's just some random buttfuck designer then yeah, who cares: there's plenty out there that are willing to take your place. If it's one of the lead writers, a director, or anyone in a higher position, not only do you have to account for the story losing some of those most integral people responsible for making the thing, and looking over your work to see if it meets their idea, but any potential changes could mean swathes.
70% of the designers left, yes: but not only was Uncharted 4, and pre-production on The Lost Legacy, being made by the entirety of the company up until release, where they had created a B-team for finishing up The Lost Legacy in the meantime, while the main team starting work on TLoU, but again: if we're going
only by what Schreier says, you'd have seen in the crunch article several former Naughty Dog employees expressing unusal grievances with the project; discussing that while the game they believe is good and worthy of praise, and that working at Naughty Dog is an excellent resume filler, the work environment was brutal: doubly so with all of the new blood they had to hire and teach for The Last of Us: Part II and The Lost Legacy.
It's a lot of people in comparison to, say the comic industry, but if you somehow believe losing 70% of the workforce responsible for designing the
game, something much more complex than a comic book, in a medium where you need that many people as projects get bigger and bigger, while three people getting promotions is a net good, then I'm wasting my breath even explaining this, but fuck it: I may as well make it entertaining for everyone else reading here.
Naughty Dog's also not part of the "tech industry", I don't know where the hell you're getting that from. Even Schreier has never referred to them as such, who (for someone you seem to hate, you sure seem to trust him a shitload and ignore half of the details in the articles he writes).
Valve is more akin a tech development studio that doubles as a game development than Naughty Dog is.
"Extremely bad crunch", sure. Point me to a AAA game that doesn't have that. Better yet, point me to a AAA game that has pushed boundaries of quality that hasn't had a crunch story or two to tell. The guy talks to people who don't enjoy their hours or the intensity of the work. And while I won't say that those feelings are completely meaningless, I will say: Welcome to the world of working. There are going to be people who think that. Schreier hones in, and with his very much leftie agenda, frames the dynamics of the game industry as some type of turn of the century factory worker allegory, when that could not be further from the truth.
oh my fucking god
Just because everyone else does it, that doesn't make it okay.
Do I really gotta bring up the question "If all of your friends jumped off a cliff and told you it was fine, would you do it?", because you're actually one of those r.etards who thinks the correct answer is to
jump!?
60 hour work weeks are fine, that's the world of working. 80-100 hours work weeks with no sleep, where you sometimes don't come home and have to sleep and eat at your desk is a fucking nightmare that can destroy the human body. And if you think that that IS normal because the opposing viewpoint fits into union propaganda, you're fucking delusional.
That point is null and void, unless you'll make unrelated arguments, coalescing with Jason Schreier's unionist propaganda?
I keep bringing up Schreier because you won't stop being a massive hyperactive nitpicker about me listing other sources
except him. I could give a shit less about his opinion on unions, but now that you brought it up, I guess I can talk about it; what I especially don't get is why you think crunch is a good thing, deride Schreier for it, yet constantly want to bring up how Schreier is a verifiable source,
except for the cases where his articles don't apply to your argument. You can't just pick and choose to believe him due to him doing things like leaking the Fallout scripts or whatnot in order prove his industry status/connections, yet completely ignore him when he writes about crunch or brush off his developer post-mortems as him lying/unionist propaganda: either he has
complete insider knowledge and connections, or he doesn't and he's lying.
Pick one.
And if you don't believe me, then this should be enough of a verifier:
Salty employees, who, in the same article you source (and seemingly have not read thoroughly, if at all beyond the headline), literally say:
That is not me being selective with what I choose to believe Schreier on. I believe the lion's share of the information that he puts out. There's 0 denying that he has industry connections. Undeserved though they may be. I don't buy into the narrative he tries to spin.
What you just posted was a Twitter thread with Schreier talking about how he believes late-stage capitalism is bad, within a retweet to Jeff Bezos donating $10 million dollars in addressing climate change.
There's nothing about The Last of Us or Naughty Dog employees in here, and the quote you linked doesn't appear
anywhere in there. Like, I'm legitimately confused here: are you trying to make a point that Schreier has connections in the industry because...Amazon employees are forced to work with no bathroom breaks for a power-hungry greedy CEO? I genuinely don't understand what the connection is here.
If this is meant to be a verifier for him pushing his take on unions, I don't see what the problem is here with his argument: this is the coldest take I've seen on Amazon I've ever seen. Amazon's factory conditions are notoriously brutal. Even if you wanna bring up how that's still unionist propaganda: how the fuck does capitalism that factor into incidents like the ones where people have accidentally bear-maced themselves because the cans weren't stored properly? Twice, in two different factories? Or other events that showcase the factory's terrible conditions? You can't blame the worker for r.etarded decisions the company makes.
You can make a good game and love what you're working on, but you can also fucking HATE how you got there...or better yet, you just lie/not break your NDA and talk about how good it is so as to not piss off the people who are going to sign your recommendations when you move to a better studio. If you want me to give a personal experience, I can say I love the videos that I made, or artwork that I've recently worked on, and I absolutely mean that when I say it. That doesn't mean I didn't think it was a long, excruciating, and borderline painful process; and these were for passion projects, I can only imagine how much worse it would be if I did that having an unreasonably short deadline and executives breathing down my neck.
You suffer for your art, and in the working world, you gotta deal with it, that's true: but there's only so much pressure and agony the human body can take before it gives out; there's a limit.
And lastly:
OmnipotentStupidity said:
But hey: if you wanna keep talking about how our claims are still baseless because these are third-parties and we can't possibly know that there's trouble brewing with this game, then...have fun with that, I guess. If any of this is not a red flag to you, nor these articles on the 2016-2017 rework due to the walkouts, then I don't know what to tell you.
...why do you exceptional morons keep TAKING the BAIT...what is it about it that makes it so TASTY and tantalizing to you...!?
