There was no clear gameplay vision from the beginning, the art was also created on the knee and did not match the level design. A lot of features were developed simply with an eye on other games: it looked like this: “Oh, what a cool mechanic, let's do it with us too !!!”. As a result, the mechanics did not work at all in solo or jointly, and some were constantly talked about, but "things are still there."
Good ideas flew in one ear and immediately flew out the other and were sometimes marked with likes, but without showing the prototype were often considered controversial, as Robert likes to say, "shitty".
At the moment, the vision has been formed (although, rather, there is no longer an opportunity to change something), but the project feels like a hodgepodge and “an attempt to shove the unimpressible”.
A cool GM came to the company for a short time, who was in the lead for 1-2 months and tried to understand the boundaries of the problems. But he didn’t really get along with the management (the proposals were perceived with hostility), as a result, he left.
There was a similar story with a person (sort of) from Sperasoft, who in 2019 came to the role of art director, but left almost immediately, because he was simply not given a command for the necessary tasks.
In 2020, the entire art team, which was at that time in the studio, left. The company as a whole seems to have a fairly high turnover (at least until 2021). Mundfish tried to hire cool specialists, but they often fell off, because processes were not built at all inside the studio.
The management did not quite understand who a game designer is and what he does. They believed that this meant everyone involved in the design. If we add here how Robert and Oleg pushed their ideas without any hypothesis testing, without analysis and showed that they think they know better, the picture is not the most rosy. They generally tested some decisions in production by “gaiety” purely on themselves.
For a very long time they did not hire people to the team when they were required; in the end, they began to recruit some interns, and the testers approved by the current employees with the level of middle senior, suddenly, did not fit. At some point, the QA lead was an intern who was new not only to the project, but to QA in general. As a result, the whole team consisted only of interns who, at the behest of the CTO, were engaged in monkey testing, checks for duplicates were rare.
Robert and Oleg, although they are enthusiasts and burn with the project, they have no release experience (besides the ill-fated VR project). As a result, a complete misunderstanding of work processes. Instead of finding someone to help with this or to study the topic, they literally reinvented the wheel every time. This applies to almost all aspects, from task allocation to planning and forecasting the release date. Recall at least an interview in 2019 , when SRT stated that "the development of the final version of Atomic Heart is underway and the main work is nearing the final stage."
It often happened that before the release of a video, the authorities simply locked themselves with a powerful computer in one of the conference rooms for the whole weekend to rivet the video. At the same time, they blocked access to most of the project files. During the recording of the video, staged scenes were added, filmed, and then everyone in the studio was confronted with the fact that all these experiments were now uploaded to the project and “everything they did there needs to be fixed.” Sometimes fixes took months.
All this was done to make the video impressive, and then everything from it entered the game so that there were no complaints about them. Yes, the management could show the whole world some kind of prototype created on the knee, and the development team was then forced to build it into the game. As you can understand, some things broke the existing design, and sometimes the scenes shown could remain piecemeal in the game, because initially such a number of opponents in one battle was not meant or, say, there was no tactical benefit from the shown abilities, except for show how beautiful everything is.
Mundfish "already got sick of all the vendors in the world who are involved in testing, voice acting, translations and other things related to development." According to the source, the company comes and asks to calculate the cost, after which they either say that it is expensive or simply disappear.
As a result, after a month or two, colleagues from a neighboring vendor come to them and offer the same job only through them, of course, with an extra charge. This has been going on for over a year in different directions.
Apparently, the game can still be released in 2022 , and the next postponement does not threaten it. But, it is very likely that the game will have a lot of bugs, and performance on consoles (especially on the last generation) will suffer. Whether we will get a "Russian Bioshock" that will "raise the industry from its knees" or we will see an ambitious but failed attempt to create something really big - we will find out very soon.
