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Homefront's open-ended vision statement meant that every single designer brought a hundred different ideas to the table. One artist complained that, throughout development, Kaos "designed by committee," and another agreed that each team just started throwing its own favorite ideas into the mix and then working on its own vision of how a system or game mode should work.

"You weren't building a central core experience," he said. "The weapons were what the weapons guys thought they should be. The vehicles would be what the vehicles guys thought it should be. And it became kind of a Frankenstein-ed game."

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"He was just in everything," one developer said of Danny Bilson's arrival. "The names of the characters. The backstories. The positioning of the camera in parking lots. Literally directing how the voice actors read the AI barks." You could have a voice actor read 15 versions of "reload!" and Bilson would get stuck on the 14th and how it wasn’t "present" enough.

Danny Bilson’s detractors paint him as an arrogant, ignorant meddler who parachuted into Kaos almost at random, overturned whatever the team was working on, then vanished for long periods of time. This view is particularly concentrated among line developers, who are scathing in their criticism.

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"teams were really working in silos. You could be sitting 20 feet away from somebody and have no idea what they were working on.

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"They had this awful, awful saying in-house. It was: ‘We're working on Shooter 1.0.' ... Their thinking was like, we're going after the most basic feature set for an industry-standard FPS, get it polished and get it out the door," one designer said. "And I understand that. You've got to walk before you can run. But I think they thought, we'll aim to get shooter 1.0 done, we'll finish that halfway through production, and then we'll be innovative."

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It was not long until mimicking Call of Duty made its mark on the single-player as well. One writer admits that single-player was so busy aping Call of Duty that it sabotaged its theme of resistance in the occupied United States.

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You started the game and the first gun you picked up is an AK47. When in all honesty, the first gun that you should have picked up is either a .38 snub nose or a Wal-Mart $150 walnut-stock shotgun. But we were promising one thing and delivered another."

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It may not be that moment of ‘dialed-up to eleven,’ but the whole thing will be a super solid ten. What's the difference between 10 and 11 at the end of the day? If you decide to change 10 to 11, and you miss 11, do you still have 10?"

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Morale was more than just a problem for individuals: it made for a worse game, according to the same source. "To make a good game, you need the people making it to be emotionally invested. We all got into this industry because we're huge fans of games. And we're all familiar with what makes a good game. And it's very difficult for a developer to keep that focus because you've played the same game for three years over and over and over again through every broken and bad iteration. You begin to lose focus of what made this game idea good in the first place. And so you really need to hold onto that." But when morale collapses and everyone is approaching every day like a short-timer in Vietnam, that wider focus is lost. There is no amount of perfectionism or QA that can make up for a team that’s disengaged from the project and is just trying to survive.

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