I was working at Beenox and had the missfortune to work on the port of BO3. Seriously, seeing footage of the game gives me slight PTSD as it was by far the worst project of my career.
From what I know (being a simple peon in all of this) Activision first offered Beenox to be the main studio handling BO3's port to old gen, due to ressources being busy on other projects and the ridiculous timeframe, they turned it down. So Mercenary was given the task of porting it. Mercenary was VERY cautious in having the game stable at ALL TIME, meaning they were really, really, really, slow at doing it. Somewhere in spring, daddy Activision decided that they don't care we didn't want to do it and cancelled one of our project and switch all those people to help Mercenary, giving the Zombie part as the main focus for Beenox. Then comes the rest of the studio who just finished Skylander Superchargers are all switched to BO3 port because it's a burning pile of shit. Mercenary caught on it's own redtape, refuses to go faster in adding Treyarch's content and the content is actually 3-4 months behind what the PS4 version is. A few months before what is supposed to be the gold release, the campaign is unplayable, most maps crash on start and those who dont are a buggy mess looking worse than a N64 game. At this point multiplayer's responsibility has been switched to Beenox and HighMoon and they brough another studio of outsourcer that I forgot the name to help on the campaign. It was obvious at that point that the campaign had to go as Mercenary was unreliable, the whole studio was on the project, all doing overtime. It was just impossible to ship that shit. 1 month after the obvious, they finally told us that the campaign was cut and at the same time, Mercenary was out and Beenox had the "chance" of being the main studio of that burning pile of shit. What followed was stressed out producers and studio heads applying pressure on the employees, from the pressure they were receiving themselves from Activision. It remained like that for a couple months after release as the game needed to be patched again and again and... yeah... no way in hell there was time to add the new magical content, Treyarch didnt give a fuck about old gen, otherwise they would have done it themselves. Plus the gratifying moments where people on twitter were telling us we were worse than Hitler for doing that port, like we had anything to do with the poor quality of it.
And yeah, I WAS working at Beenox, cause that shitshow was the beginning of a mass exode of the experienced staff of Beenox, because it seems like it was the beginning of trend of not making games anymore and just being a CoD support bitch and from the look of it, we were right.
