A Dutch News site posted a short interview with Horizon Forbidden West's director Mathijs De Jonge.
In it he mentioned the amount of different nationalities currently working at Guerrilla Games, the choice to create to Aloy as a counter to the male-driven and gritty and gray Killzone series, and the studio opting not to go for crunch.
After the many stories about studios basically abusing their workers by forcing crunch in the last couple of years, I figured a much needed positive message would be good.
I'll link to the Dutch site here, so people can use a translator for the rest of the short interview, but I will also post the DeepL translation of the most important part.
In it he mentioned the amount of different nationalities currently working at Guerrilla Games, the choice to create to Aloy as a counter to the male-driven and gritty and gray Killzone series, and the studio opting not to go for crunch.
After the many stories about studios basically abusing their workers by forcing crunch in the last couple of years, I figured a much needed positive message would be good.
I'll link to the Dutch site here, so people can use a translator for the rest of the short interview, but I will also post the DeepL translation of the most important part.
Mathijs De Jonge: "That happens very little with us. We are very aware of the disadvantages of crunching, so we take that into account a lot in our planning. To give an example, at Christmas we said that there would be no work and that everyone could just have a two-week vacation. The company was closed, you couldn't even go there to work."
"Some people like to keep working, they don't necessarily want Christmas vacations. That's allowed, we're not going to stop that. But from the company's point of view, we send a very strong message."
"Forbidden West might have come out at the end of last year, but then we might have had to work overtime. People also need to be able to relax and take vacations, for example to be with family and friends. That also played into the decision to only release the game now."