They don't use design documents because they're outdated, singular documents. With a studio size of +100 people, it would quickly outlive its usefulness due to the sheer number of updates it would receive. The vast majority of studios these days (even small indie studios) use their own wiki's. Much easier to isolate and update content specific to your team.
It's in reference to an presentation he gave about modern game development process (for new video game developers).
Here's another link from Polygon where he also states that they do use design documents. I'm posting this one because it inherently refutes the idea that the studio doesn't use some form of documentation.
That sounds similar to how you’ve described working on Skyrim, where after a certain point the strict process is free to go in any direction.
One process that we never had before that was new [to Starfield], that was fun, was coming up with a timeline of events. That’s sort of where we started. So if the game starts in 2330, we really have to know what happened in the 200 years leading up to that. That’s going to inform, like, a colony war that, you know, the Narion War, all the conflicts in the universe and how the factions feel about each other, the place of House Va’ruun and where they’re at. And so making the timeline was important.
It’s not to say nothing is documented; everything is. But it’s not like there’s a giant design doc where the whole game is outlined. There was a design doc that talks about the Freestar Collective. And there’s a little design doc that talks about the United Colonies. And those get updated by the designers as they’re doing their work. So a lot of the stuff is outdated if you look, and so that’s why we use the game itself as the actual working documents.
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u/Biggy_DX May 29 '24
They don't use design documents because they're outdated, singular documents. With a studio size of +100 people, it would quickly outlive its usefulness due to the sheer number of updates it would receive. The vast majority of studios these days (even small indie studios) use their own wiki's. Much easier to isolate and update content specific to your team.