Nach Meiser-Verletzung: Düsseldorf denkt über Ersatz nach

Kris Roberts worked at Rockstar for years, first tuning the vehicles for the Midnight Club games and then leading the design of Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer modes. He says the final six months of development on Rockstar's cowboy epic was the worst period of crunch he's experienced in the game industry, and he argues that the overtime wasn't even really about making the game better. Instead, it was about putting on a show for executives.

With his transition from Midnight Club to Red Dead Redemption, Roberts went from an hourly employee to a "full-time" dev working what Rockstar called "core hours," as he explains in a new interview with Kiwi Talks on YouTube. "There was the expectation that you'll be there by 9:30 and we're going to stay until 6:00. If you're staying after that, there's dinner available and blah blah blah."

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But those expectations changed over time. "Eventually core hours expanded to include half days on Saturday, where you were expected to be there," Roberts continues. "Then core hours expanded to be full days on Saturdays. Then Sunday was 'optional,' but encouraged. By the end, we were working every day, all day."

Roberts describes the last six months of work on Red Dead Redemption as a "blur," alluding to the delirious effects of sleep deprivation. "You end up in an amnesiac state where you probably don't have clear recollection or memory of exactly what was going on," he says.

Rockstar's history of crunch goes back years, and it became a matter of public debate around the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 – a debate the company responded to with testimonials from employees suggesting that things weren't actually so bad. But even now, allegations of overwork continue, and protections against crunch are a key point among the employees attempting to unionize at Rockstar.

For his part, Roberts feels "conflicted" about airing these old frustrations, in part because he pushed himself into "self-directed" crunch on Midnight Club. "I was doing that because I thought it was important or I wanted to be involved at that level and it was me doing it," he says.

But things were different with Red Dead Redemption, and Roberts is particularly frustrated by "artificial" incidents where Rockstar would declare "all hands on deck" overtime during weekend visits from executives like Sam Houser and Leslie Benzies.

"I remember a couple specific examples of a Friday afternoon, [when] management would send out an email that said, 'Just so we're all clear, we need to be here this weekend.' Then a follow-up email would say, 'And this weekend doesn't just mean Saturday.' I've made promises to my kids about what we're going to do this weekend. and Friday afternoon at 4:30 you're telling me I need to be here on Sunday regardless of what's going on. That's unacceptable," Roberts says.

"And it wasn't because, 'Oh, if you have a certain number of issues in Bugstar, or 'If you have critical things that must be fixed before the next build,' or 'If you have a legitimate business case for putting in that weekend time then we want you to be here.' It was more like, 'No, we need to put on the show of appearance that everybody's here all the time, because we have an executive visiting or something."

As multiplayer design lead, Roberts was then tasked with communicating these expectations to his team. This was a part of why he eventually said "I don't want to do this" and chose to leave the studio. "It was certainly in the top four" reasons for moving on, he jokes.

So, and you know there was the punchline for me of okay the expectation is I go to my team and tell my designers and people that you know okay we need to be here Sunday and it's like that was so challenging for me and that you know I think really was a component of what sort of pushed it over the edge for me as far as like I don't want to do this I mean whatever

"Don’t boycott GTA 6," fired Rockstar devs say: "Support our legal battle instead" and "win justice for the people who helped make it."

Dragon Quest 9 was a Nintendo DS exclusive when it launched in 2009 – and it technically still is. Square Enix never set the RPG free, despite many of its fans' appetite for a remake, and it seems franchise creator Yuji Horii isn't worried about it – possibly because he's still hurting from fans' reactions to the DS game 17 years ago.

The RPG's emperor recently spoke to Japanese site Famitsu as Dragon Quest celebrated its 40th anniversary; Nintendo Everything translated a chunk of Horii's interview. In it, he discusses fans' response to Dragon Quest 9 being a Nintendo DS exclusive after experiencing the visual splendor of the first completely 3D Dragon Quest, Dragon Quest 8, in 2004. Their response was… not good.

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"It made for interesting gameplay," Horii says about the Nintendo DS, "and I thought everyone would be surprised, but when we announced it, we had a lot of criticism, like 'What? On Nintendo DS?' At the time we were actually a little disheartened."

He explains that Square Enix was motivated to lock Dragon Quest 9 to the DS because its developers wanted "quick and easy play over local networks." He says that, "At that time there were not many games using local networks and it was difficult to do so. But with Nintendo DS, the moment you turn the power on you can connect with people."

Fans had been preparing themselves for Dragon Quest 9 to launch on technology with some muscle, the PS3 or Wii, maybe, as a contemporaneous Nintendo Life article suggests. So their jaws dropped through the floor and straight into Hell once Square Enix made the unprecedented announcement that, no, Dragon Quest 9 will be bound to the petite DS.

Forum discussions from around Dragon Quest 9's release reveal players' vitriol for the cute DS which I believe is innocent in all of this; it's not the console's fault it was made to be whimsical handheld and not a prehistoric Steam Deck. One 17-year-old thread on GameFAQs features players calling Dragon Quest 9 "really horrible" and "extremely boring."

But, with time, public sentiment started turning around. User Liamland says on a 12-year-old GameFAQs thread, "After playing [Dragon Quest 8] on the PS2, it would seem as if [Dragon Quest 9] on the NDS was a step down, from a graphics and sound standpoint. But ultimately the DLC content, multiplayer tag mode, and character flexibility of DQIX makes it arguably a better game than DQVIII."

"We thought that was an amazing system, and decided we wanted to make Dragon Quest 9 using that ability," Horii tells Famitsu. So Fans have grown to agree with him – though, they'd still really like it to be at least a little more free from the Nintendo DS.

"Is there any hope?" asks one Reddit thread wondering about the likelihood of a Dragon Quest 9 remake. The answer is, probably not – Square Enix has never spoken of it despite fans' incessant screams. After all this time, Dragon Quest 9's developers continue to be chased by the same problem: no one really wants Dragon Quest 9 to be exclusive to the Nintendo DS, and they never did.

RPGs like Dragon Quest 11 and Nier: Automata are heavily outsourced, Square Enix producer says, with surprisingly few devs in-house.