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I've seen a lot of people on here not understanding how crunch can lead to a broken game. And that's okay, because you haven't experienced it! So I'll try to explain using my own experiences. (thread)
I was a junior-level writer on a big AAA game for about 7-ish months, during the big crunch to finish the game. I worked on little side quests, ambient dialogue, datapads, stuff like that. I crunched for nearly the entire time I worked on the game.
During that time, there was so much to do, such an overwhelming amount of work, that most of what I wrote had to be considered "finished" at the first draft. There was no such thing as getting feedback and doing a 2nd draft to make it perfect.
I simply had to send it off and hope for the best, and then move on to another task. Because there was ALWAYS a next task, and a huge list of them after that. And I was exhausted. My brain went on autopilot so often I don't even remember some of the things I wrote.
I'm very proud of the work I did under these conditions, but it was by no means my best work. How could it be?
Now, I was a contractor, so I was protected from the worst of the crunch because they didn't want to pay a ton of overtime. After a certain amount of overtime hours, they sent me home. But there were members of my team working 80 hour weeks. Imagine how much worse it was for them
Now extend those 80+ hour weeks to other departments. The worst damage I could've done was a boring quest or some flat dialogue. But imagine a programmer working under those conditions. Or a tech animator.
Imagine if, instead of dialogue having to be sent off quickly by an exhausted developer, it was lines of code or a character rig. If those tasks that keep piling up are bugs sent by the diligent QA team.
Imagine this going on for months, even years. It becomes a deathmarch.
Imagine you have to mark some pretty major bugs "will not fix" because you're already working 16 hour days 7 days a week and there just isn't time and the execs say your game has to be out the door in time for Christmas.
You have no control over any of this. There's no such thing as staying late to make it perfect because you're already staying late. There's no such thing as delaying because it's not your call to make. You know it's a mess but there's nothing you can do.
And then the game comes out and it's broken because of course it is, and you know you'll have to start the deathmarch all over again to fix it. That's what they're all going through over there right now.
And it's no way to make a game. People praise a game like Red Dead Redemption for being amazing and assume crunch is what it takes to make a great game. But much more often the story ends like this. And it sucks for everyone, including you, the player.
