They ”might have got cancelled” at any time during development. On the past crunch culture of EA, Papoutsis says games ”are forever, pain is temporary.”
”With Dead Space, any time we showed it there was immense pressure,” said Papoutsis, executive producer. ”At any minute we might have got cancelled, they might have said, ‘This isn’t making any progress, we don’t like it.’”
EA was almost legendary for their crunch culture of death where developers were worked very long hours each day for the whole week to get a videogame project finished. Papoutsis said that Visceral had ”a self-imposed crunch” that stemmed from ”wanting to do better than what we did last time.” EA has worked to lessen crunches.
”Games are forever, pain is temporary,” said Papoutsis. ”So when you’re working hard on something, in the short term it may be tough - but at the end you’re going to have this thing forever that people are going to get to enjoy.”
EA CEO John Riccitiello said recently that Need for Speed’s Black Box was worked ”24 hours a day”, which in the end only hurt the series. ”It was definitely our fault. Those days are gone. We’re back in two studios and we’ve got them on bi-annual cycles,” he added.
Visceral Games already have some plans for Dead Space 3 and beyond, but they need the 2nd game to do well among critics and fans to justify it. Dead Space 2 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC January 25th in the US, the 27th in Europe and the 28th in the UK.
