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Avalanche Studios NYC Retrospective – An Ambitious Company Ruined

I’ve wanted to write about this since the studio closed a year ago. Now that Contraband is also canceled I think it’s time, especially since Contraband was one of the big reasons why I …

Iron Man had been canceled because Stockholm refused to follow a too-tight schedule, and Mad Max had been massively delayed because there were disagreements about direction with Cory Barlog, which led to his departure and a big redesign of the whole game. The biggest issues in JC3 felt like they were externally imposed (going F2P for a significant amount of time, starting from Mad Max instead of JC2, the new terrain that caused so much work for so many people) and we were finally in a state where things weren’t constantly breaking. I got to squeeze in some small bugfixes by stealing time from other projects, and at some point a frustrated technical artist was able to help out a little bit to at least do the clear easy wins, but I never got to do the proper second pass that was needed on that tool.

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