Reading through this it's no shock EA is the culprit.
So many choice paragraphs
Visceral asked all of its employees to help out on the cop game. Switching from third-person action-adventure games to a first-person shooter had been a rough adjustment for many people at Visceral, sources said, and a lot of them still didn’t actually want to make
Hardline. Morale had sunk at the studio by then, and Visceral was already losing key artists and engineers who weren’t interested in working on the game. “EA does internal health surveys,” said one person who worked on the game. “Throughout most of
Hardline’s production, Visceral had the worst team health survey at EA, for like two years running.”
Hennig also wasn’t used to working with a corporation like Electronic Arts. Despite being owned by electronics giant Sony, Naughty Dog had been able to operate autonomously, in large part because they were widely perceived as the corporation’s prestige video game studio. At EA, however, things were different. “She was giving these massive presentations on the story, themes,” said one person who worked on
Ragtag. “EA executives are like, ‘FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.’ Where’s your version of that?”
And EA had Amy open a second studio with the sole purpose of helping make the game and decided to have them work in battlefront 2 instead.
