Apex Legends devs discuss how the team has never had to rely on crunch

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A number of developers working on Apex Legends have openly discussed how crunch has never affected them whilst working at Respawn. 

In a Twitter exchange that started with a statement from Apex Legends’ game director Chad Grenier (reposted by an Apex Legends news account (opens in new tab)), principal environmental artist Jobye-Kyle Karmaker retweeted the quote adding their own comments about the issues raised in the quote in a seven-part thread. 

Thread 1/7 #gamedev #gameart — Feel incredibly lucky to be on @PlayApex. It’s so nice to have leadership from @ChadGrenier & crew that value team health & that actively take steps to protect it publicly + internally. It’s especially true on the Env Art team where our leads… https://t.co/hqi2qC35ZNNovember 11, 2020

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The original quote from Grenier read: “We also refuse to crunch the team, so we’ll probably be slower at making content than if we worked 15 hour days but that’s just not something we’re willing to do.” Karmarker then retweeted this adding (opens in new tab): “Feel incredibly lucky to be on @PlayApex. It’s so nice to have leadership from @ChadGrenier & crew that value team health & that actively take steps to protect it publicly + internally.”

The thread then delves into what it is like working as part of the environment art team on Apex Legends, Karmarker adds: “our leads are very vigilant and try to mitigate crunch as much as they can.” They then gave an example of this detailing how the Apex Legends Olympus map launched and the schedule was “feeling incredibly tight,” however according to Karmarker, the environment art leads and director noticed this and made changes to the schedule to better support the team.

It seems the healthy workload isn’t exclusive to the environmental art department of Apex Legends either, as Karmarker’s thread was then retweeted by principal level designer on Apex Legends Rodney Reece (opens in new tab) who added: “Really need to second this thread. I’ve worked on some brutal crunches. But I’ve never crunched on Apex. In fact: we came in early on Storm Point [the new Apex Legend map].” 

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