A former developer at Total War studio Creative Assembly has written a lengthy personal account of his time at the studio, detailing development problems on strategy games Total War: Rome 2 and Total War: Attila, claiming those problems were exacerbated by an inflexible and counterproductive leadership structure and “chronic mismanagement” that sometimes led to what he calls a “toxic work environment.”
Julian McKinlay, who worked on Total War games from Napoleon to Attila between 2009 and 2014, also described his experience when he was blamed for the buggy launch of Rome 2 by part of the community after appearing in a promotional video. McKinlay was accused of sharing false information about the game. He clarifies that he was not forced into 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 problems he faced as a programmer, much of which revolved around AI, and claims that upper management either misunderstood or routinely ignored the issues raised by programmers. He also claims that leadership placed a higher priority on adding marketable new features – and marketing itself – than on providing the support and resources that programmers needed.
He also claims that the design and programming teams were at odds over certain features and that upper management often sided with the designers. “From my perspective, it looked like production management was allowing the designers to do whatever they wanted, and that’s one of the main reasons Rome II went so wrong,” McKinlay writes. “The designers told us not to improve [the AI] in a way because they believed that players enjoy being able to dominate the AI and that we shouldn’t deny them that.”
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“The Total War team was very hierarchical for its size,” writes McKinlay, “and key design and management decisions were made by a handful of people at the top, with no real oversight from the wider development team.” Total War’s “leaders,” writes McKinlay, “seemed to frown upon critical feedback and treated it as unwelcome. It was common for key decisions to be considered final by the time they were communicated to those of us on the front lines, if they were communicated to us at all.”
As for the Rally Point video mentioned above, McKinlay was mocked and harassed after it aired. He says this culminated in death threats, but adds that he felt he had “no real reason to fear for my safety.” While he says he doesn’t believe Creative Assembly intentionally stoked these fires, he believes “that narrative was actually quite convenient for Creative Assembly, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I was made a scapegoat for the project’s failures.”
McKinlay eventually left the studio during the development of Attila after friction with the design team over feedback and being “scrambled by management,” which he said was “clearly intended to [him] for the convenience of leaders who wanted to continue doing things their way regardless of the consequences for others.” McKinlay left the team soon after because he felt he had “made enemies in the team leadership and that this was likely to affect my chances of promotions and the like later on.” In McKinlay’s view, he left the team after “it became clear that the leadership was going to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.”
Towards the end of the article, which is far more detailed and delves deeper into the details of the actual game design than it would make sense to summarize here, McKinlay asks the following question:
One question that arises is how well these experiences represent the Creative Assembly of today. Given the recent issues the studio has faced, it seems clear that studio management and creative leadership continue to be a source of major problems, but I want to make it clear that it is not my place to say how similar the specifics of recent problems are to those I experienced. One thing I will say is that several of the people responsible for the problems described in this statement either still work at the company or were until the recent layoffs, which I think says a lot about the ongoing problems with the studio’s management culture.
“Despite ongoing problems with the games and a number of spectacular embarrassments, the series continued to be profitable,” he concludes. “This fact was used against developers like me who argued for better practices, and was often used by creative leadership as a yardstick to validate the success of previous projects and decisions, regardless of other reasons why they might have failed.”
It’s worth noting that this is a developer’s view of an entire studio, and one who hasn’t worked there in ten years, although the recent Hyenas saga might suggest that some of the issues McKinlay raised still exist. McKinlay isn’t entirely negative about his time there either, still mentioning friends at the studio.
Another former CA employee has backed McKinlay’s account. Will Overgard, CA’s community coordinator from 2012 to 2015, shared the post on Xitter. “I still feel guilty for what happened to Julian, so read his statement for me,” Overgard writes. “I’m incredibly proud of my contribution to CA… but I was involved in destroying someone’s career, and that horrible feeling has never gone away.”
We have asked Creative Assembly for comment.