Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

As The Witcher 3’s staff grew larger, this insistence on realism led to some complications. At one point, Tost’s team noticed a serious problem in Velen: there was too much to eat.

Urquhart pointed out that making games is sort of like shooting movies, if you had to build an entirely new camera every time you started. That’s a common analogy. Another is that making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake. Or trying to drive a train while someone else runs in front of you, laying down track as you go.

“You’re polishing something that’s at ninety-five percent while this thing over here at sixty percent needs a lot of love. So that was what made crunch hard, because [when] you’d get down into it, you’d have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.”

In the last months and weeks of a game’s development, chaos reigns supreme as team members scramble to polish, playtest, and fit in all the last-minute features they can think to add. Then, suddenly, something clicks. It might be the visual effects, or the audio cues, or the optimization that gets a game’s frame rate as stable as possible. Usually, it’s all of the above: a single holy moment when a game’s disparate parts coalesce into something that finally feels complete.

One surefire way to annoy a game developer is to ask, in response to discovering his or her chosen career path, what it’s like to spend all day playing video games.

If BioWare started developing all its games on the Frostbite engine, it could share technology with its sister studios, borrowing tools from other EA-owned developers like Visceral (Dead Space) or Criterion (Need for Speed) whenever those companies learned cool new tricks for enhancing facial capture or making it look even prettier to blow things up.

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When they disagreed on something, they’d each rank how they felt about it, on a scale from one to ten.

“We are ninety-nine percent done,” he said, “but that last one percent’s a bitch.” Heart of the Swarm wouldn’t come out until March 2013. That last one percent took nearly a year.

“That wizard came from the moon,”