quote:

Pretty much. Right up until content lock for a patch, everything would be going into the main branch - including stuff for the patch and stuff that people were working on 3, 6, 9, 12 months out. Which meant that the patch branch would end up a giant clusterfuck for weeks, if not months, and one of the reasons that content would get locked 3 months prior to release. (The reason this is bad, is that you can't respond to player feedback when nothing but critical bugs make it to the live environment for minimum of 3 months, sometimes 6 months. It absolutely killed our community to have to constantly tell them we're aware of an issue and there's a fix coming, but not for half a loving year.)

This was compounded by the fact that Art and Code assets were in a P4 environment, which made merging them relatively simple (I say relatively because sometimes merging Art assets just straight up deleted them entirely, forcing a revert), but all game data was in some proprietary system because one of the lead programmers wanted total control over it. This forced the merging process to happen 2 or 3 times per change to a locked branch (i.e. bug fixing all that garbage in the patch branch). We would constantly accidentally push stuff up to the patch branch that shouldn't be there and constantly miss merges because someone would push the Art/Code portion of a change but forget the data half or vice versa - or the data half of the change would be in three separate changelists and only two of those would get pushed because the proprietary data management system was really bad at tracking changelists - compared to P4 anyway.

Then, to make matters even worse, merging privileges were constantly taken away from everyone whenever one of these mistakes would occur. There were times when my (subordinate) associate designer had merging privileges and there were times when my boss (a lead designer) did not. So, you never really knew who had privileges or who had the go-ahead to merge. You had to ask half a dozen people for permission to push anything up, and then after that you might not have the power to do so anyway. That meant that our two build engineers had to push all changelists into patch builds, for the entire company, manually. Which meant that less and less changes would get approved AND those two engineers were so swamped they couldn't actually work on optimizations/bug fixes for the actual build until they became critical issues - at which point, some devs would be given back merge privileges and we start the whole idiotic, disastrous process over again.

The end result is an absolute disaster where you can't release updates fast enough to appease your customer base AND those updates are bloated with unnecessary Art, Code and Data that causes unintended and hard to identify bugs or missing necessary Art, Code and Data that breaks literally everything in the game (see: Crafting).