A former developer at Total War studio Creative Assembly has written an extensive personal account of his time at the studio, detailing the development problems with the strategy games Total War: Rome 2 and Total War: Attila, claiming that these problems were exacerbated by a inflexible and counterproductive leadership structure and “chronic mismanagement,” sometimes resulting in what he calls a “toxic work environment.”
Julian McKinlay, who worked on Total War games ranging from Napoleon to Attila between 2009 and 2014, also described his experience of being blamed by part of the community for Rome 2’s bug-ridden launch after appearing in a promotional video had appeared. McKinlay was blamed for misreporting information about the game. He makes it clear that he was not forced to give the interview, but answered questions based on what he understood about the state of Rome 2 at the time.
McKinlay also goes into detail about the issues he faced as a programmer, largely around AI, claiming that upper management misunderstood or routinely ignored issues raised by programmers. He also claims that leadership has made the addition of marketable new features (and the marketing itself) a higher priority than giving the programmers the support and resources they need.
He also claims that the design and programming teams disagreed on certain features, and that upper management often sided with designers. “From my point of view, it seemed like production leadership let designers do what they wanted, and it’s one of the main reasons why Rome II went so badly wrong,” McKinlay writes. “Designers told us not to improve [the AI] in some ways, because they believed that players enjoyed being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t take that away from them.”
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“The Total War team was very hierarchical due to its size,” McKinlay writes, “and major design and management decisions were made by a small handful of individuals at the top, without any real oversight from the broader development team.” The “leaders” of Total War, McKinlay writes, “seemed to resent critical feedback and treat it as unwelcome. It was common for important decisions to be considered final the moment they were communicated to those of us in the trenches, if they were communicated to us at all.’
Regarding the aforementioned Rally Point video, McKinlay was ridiculed and harassed after it aired. He says this culminated in death threats, although he adds that he felt he had “no real reason to fear for my safety.” While he says he doesn’t believe Creative Assembly deliberately fueled these fires, he believes that “this story was actually quite convenient for Creative Assembly, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I’ve become a scapegoat for the failures of the project. .”
McKinlay ultimately left the studio during the development of Attila, after friction with the design team over feedback led to him being “chewed out by management,” which he said was “clearly intended to silence [him] for the convenience of management figures who wanted to continue doing things their way, regardless of the consequences for anyone else.” McKinlay left shortly afterwards, feeling that he had “made enemies in the leadership of the team and that this would probably affect my chances of promotions and things like that later.” According to McKinlay, he resigned after “it became clear that leadership would continue to repeat the same mistakes.”
Towards the end of the piece, which is much more detailed and goes much further into the weeds of actual game design than is practical to summarize here, McKinlay asks the following question:
One question to ask is: how well do these experiences represent today’s Creative Assembly? Given the recent problems the studio is facing, it seems clear that studio management and creative leadership are still a source of major problems, but I should be clear that it is not for me to say how similar the details of the recent problems are with the problems I face. experienced. One thing I will say is that a number of the individuals responsible for the problems I’ve described in this statement are still with the company, or were until recent layoffs, which I think says something about the ongoing problems with the studio’s management culture.
“Despite persistent problems with the games and a number of high-profile embarrassments, the series remained profitable,” he concluded. “This fact was used against developers like me who advocated for better practices, and was often used by creative leadership as a benchmark to validate the success of previous projects and decisions, regardless of the other ways in which they might have failed.”
It’s worth repeating that this is a developer’s perspective on an entire studio, and one that hasn’t worked there for a decade, even if the recent Hyenas saga might indicate that some of the problems McKinlay suggests it is still ongoing. McKinlay is also not entirely negative about his time there and still mentions friends in the studio.
Another former CA employee boosted McKinlay’s account. Will Overgard, CA’s community coordinator from 2012 to 2015, shared the post on Xitter. “I still feel guilty about what happened to Julian, so please read his statement,” Overgard wrote. “I’m incredibly proud of what I contributed to CA… but I ruined someone’s career and that terrible feeling never went away.”
We’ve reached out to Creative Assembly for comment.