This weekend, many gamers will be fully immersed in the old western world of Red Dead Redemption 2 after years of waiting for the sequel. However, much of the conversation and excitement for the game has been somewhat dampened by reports of unhealthy working conditions at Rockstar Games, and crunch periods for the game leading to 100 hour work weeks. These reports came around the same time as many were enjoying the newly released Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, another big budget open world game. Now, Ubisoft has spoken about the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey crunch period, and how it was kept under considerable control.

Patrick Klaus, the managing director of Ubisoft’s Quebec studio, recently spoke with Gamasutra about the development for the game. In light of the recent controversies surrounding the work environment at Rockstar Games, Klaus had many words to share regarding Ubisoft’s practices on Odyssey. According to Klaus, the crunch period for Odyssey was managed fairly optimally, especially when compared to the alleged crunch period for Red Dead Redemption 2. As he says:

While we can always do better, I can tell you hand on heart that [Assassin’s Creed Odyssey] hasn’t required a massive crunch, like maybe some of the triple-As from five or ten years ago. We can still always do better, but we have managed pretty well to succeed in delivering a game of huge magnitude which is hitting a good quality [level], while making sure that our teams are not burnt out and disgusted with working in games.”

Klaus acknowledged that avoiding such intense periods of crunch work are what prevent their workers from experiencing burnout, and by extension, reducing the amount of employee turnover. The senior producer on Odyssey, Marc-Alexis Côté, also spoke similarly about their crunch period, saying how it was an active decision to reduce the overtime in crunch periods, which were much worse at Ubisoft roughly a decade ago. “Not every studio will grow in that way, not every team will grow in that way,” Côté began, “but it’s one of the commitments we made to our team when we started.”

Hopefully though, other studios with ridiculous crunch periods will learn from Ubisoft’s example that a polished big budget game is possible to make without mountains of overtime during a given week. Odyssey certainly seemed to do just fine without horse shrinkage physics in cold weather.

What do you guys think about the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey crunch period? Let us know in the comments below! Be sure to stay tuned for the latest Assassin’s Creed news, such as one fan’s impressive Kassandra cosplay, here on Don’t Feed the Gamers! Follow us on Twitter to see our updates the minute they go live!