In 2014, Hal0 co-creator Marcus Lehto left Bungie to start a new studio and begin a brand new project. That studio turned out to be called V1 interactive and that game is going to be Disintegration, a character-based shooter that is getting a beta later this month. Lehto spent 15 years working at Bungie as the art director on Halo: Combat EvolvedHalo 2 and Halo 3. Now he has revealed the working conditions at Bungie that caused him to leave.

During a roundtable interview for Disintegration, Lehto discussed the way periods of extreme crunch at Bungie led to his departure. The negative effect extended periods of working long overtime hours had on his work life balance was tremendous. At V1 Interactive, a key goal Lehto has is to avoid crunch culture and make sure everyone on the team is healthy and happy.

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"One of the reasons I left Bungie is that many of us have seen the bad side of extended crunch periods that would go on for months and months ... and what kind of human toll that took," Lehto said. "We don't want to experience that, we don't want to replicate that at all again. So at V1, one of our primary goals with the studio is making sure that we create an atmosphere where everybody is intimately involved with what we're working on, so there is a lot of responsibility on everybody's shoulders. "

Disintegration Steam screenshot

Lehto has spoken before about the crunch at Bungie, which has been a pretty widespread and known issue in the industry for many years now. In 2017, Destiny 2 was the first Bungie game not created through "full, enforced" crunch, according to Bungie's head of engineering Luke Timmins. These 50+ hour workweeks nearly killed the studio when it was developing Halo 2 years ago. Those practices didn't get fully absolved despite attempts to curb crunch and burnout until Destiny 2 launched and the wording still implies that there were probably still employees that did have to crunch on the game.

V1 Interactive's Disintegration comes out sometime in 2020 and is being published by Private Division, a branch of Take-Two interactive, the publishers of Grand Theft Auto. The game was announced with a cryptic trailer in July and since then more gameplay has been shown in trailers. The shooter will combine FPS and strategy mechanics in a class-based game that will include both a campaign and multiplayer mode.

Disintegration is set for release in 2020.

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Source: GameSpot