Chris Kaleiki, a 13-year World of Warcraft veteran developer now in charge of Notorious Studios, has explained why he left the AAA space to make smaller games.
Kaleiki recently sat down with 12DOVE for a comprehensive talk about Notorious Studios' debut game, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which he bills as a AA game sitting somewhere between indie and AAA. The conversation frequently gravitated toward some of the key distinctions, in Kaleiki's view, between indie, AAA, and that nebulous space in between the two. Those distinctions played a big part in his decision to leave Blizzard back in 2020.
"When you're a game developer in AAA, you're doing all the things that game developers do, like design and put stuff into the game and iterate, but it's a very different experience to what we're doing now, which is starting our own game and working from scratching, starting up all the foundations and creating philosophies and pillars of what we should be doing for the game," he said.
It sounds to me like a big reason Kaleiki left Blizzard was due to the heavy compartmentalizing of developers into specific teams working on very specific parts of the game, leaving them without a comprehensive understanding of what's being made.
"I saw the studio model and their motivations and what kind of games we wanted to make were changing," Kaleiki explained. "I thought, 'I haven't really changed much but the studio has,' and that's kind of why I left.
"Like I was saying earlier, I didn't really feel like a game developer in some way. I felt like I was a World of Warcraft class designer or game designer, but I didn't really know the full gambit of the entire game development process, which I do know now."
Kaleiki also agreed with us that "it becomes harder for these larger AAA studios to maintain this connection to the player as they grow, because it becomes a challenge of scale."
Distilled into the simplest possible terms, the concept for Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is an RPG that plays like "World PvP: The Game" and feels like a mini MMO channeling "early Blizzard." It's due to hit Steam Early Access on February 12.
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