“In truth, I’ve always had ups and downs, periods of intense productivity and energy followed by periods of low motivation,” he wrote. “I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. This time around did seem a little worse than usual, but I reminded myself that with the success of Stardew Valley, my life got very weird very suddenly. It’s probably normal to need some time to adjust. I’m not even sure if this recent funk was due to the sudden success, to my own volatile brain chemistry or simply a result of working too hard for too long without a break. Sometimes I forget that I am actually a human with the need to relax and have a little fun.”

“The thing that makes scheduling challenging is iteration,” said Rob Foote. “You have to allow for iteration if you want to make a great product.” Iteration time was the last one percent. Blizzard’s producers tried to leave blank slates at the end of their schedules so that their development teams could push, tug, and polish every aspect of their game until they felt like they had something perfect. “And it’s challenging too,” said Foote, “because people say, ‘What’s in that, it’s a lot of time, what are they actually doing?’ They’re iterating. We don’t know what they’re going to do, but they’re going to be doing something.”

“One thing we’ve never done here is sat down and written down an entire script for the whole game start to front,” said Josh Scherr, a writer who sat with Straley and Druckmann for many of these meetings. “That never happens. And the reason it doesn’t happen is because game design is an iterative process, and if you do that you’re just asking for heartbreak when things inevitably change because the gameplay doesn’t work out the way you expected it to, or you have a better idea further down the line, or anything like that. You have to be able to be flexible.”

“The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn’t isn’t the quality of the team,” said one person who worked on Destiny. “It’s their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you’re a pretty shitty hockey player, and I can only take three shots on goal and I’m Wayne fucking Gretzky, you’re probably going to do better. That’s what tools are. It’s how fast can you iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy is it as a nontechnical artist to move a thing.”

People often wondered how CD Projekt Red sharpened the writing in Witcher games so well, especially when there was so much of it. The answer was simple. “I don’t think there is a single quest in The Witcher 3 which was written once, accepted, and then recorded,” Szamałek said. “Everything was rewritten dozens of times.”