Why I Left Carbine's WildStar

Background: Joining Carbine (2005)

Tim was hired as programming director at Carbine Studios — a division of South Korean publisher NCSoft — in late August 2005, while simultaneously closing down Troika Games. NCSoft's North American office was in Austin, headed by Robert Garriott (brother of Richard Garriott, who was working on Tabula Rasa there).

In many ways, Carbine was one of the best companies Tim ever worked at. The talent was extraordinary — he describes working with the best graphic programmer, network programmer, concept artist, animator, and social designer he'd ever encountered. They were building an original IP from scratch, and the pay was the highest base salary Tim has ever earned in his career.

His initial job was to staff up the programming department and build an MMO engine from nothing. After three years, the engine was excellent — but there was still no setting, no story, and no classes.

The Crisis and Transition to Design Director (2008)

In early summer 2008, NCSoft's head office sent a new studio head to evaluate progress. The programming and art departments showed well, but design was in trouble — lots of starts and stops, no classes, no coherent direction. The studio head fired every designer except one (the item designer).

A job posting for a design director went unanswered for two months — nobody had heard of Carbine, and design directors don't just float around looking for work. The studio head then asked Tim to take the role, prefacing it with a stark warning: the studio would be shut down if he said no.

Tim agreed, knowing he had a strong person to replace him as programming director. Then came the catch: he had 90 days to create an entire setting and class roster for a presentation to all NCSoft companies in Seattle.

The 90-Day Sprint

With help from new hires (some of whom arrived after the mass firing and had to be onboarded into a completely changed department), Tim's team created nine classes — the same classes that shipped with WildStar. They also produced a setting outline. NCSoft approved it and said to keep going.

Tim then introduced several major design elements that all made it into the final game:

• Player housing — fully decoratable interiors with exterior plots for farming, archaeological digs, and more
• Character paths — inspired by Richard Bartle's player taxonomy (fighters, explorers, socializers, achievers), paths were orthogonal to classes. They let players tell the game what kind of content they enjoyed
• Double jump on the Explorer path — actually an artist's idea that Tim immediately adopted, contradicting claims that he never accepted artist input

The Art Director Conflict

The original art director was let go within the first year or so (Tim was never told why, which he found odd for a fellow director). His replacement became the source of escalating conflict.

Hostility and Misinformation

The new art director appeared to dislike Tim and spread a narrative that Tim "hated artists" and never accepted their ideas. This filtered down to his team — one artist walked into Tim's office and said "I heard you sucked as a designer." When Tim pointed out his 27 years of design experience versus the artist's zero, the artist left upset.

The same artist later came to show Tim the double-jump mechanic, shocked when Tim enthusiastically adopted it. The artist admitted he'd been told Tim never took artist ideas — despite the Spellslinger class itself originating from a concept artist's sketch and gameplay ideas.

Escalating Power Struggles

The art director imposed increasingly authoritarian rules:

• No one from any department could speak to his artists without going through him first, with him potentially present
• Yet he insisted on unrestricted access to designers and other directors
• He made unilateral design decisions — at one point removing an entire class from the game without Tim's knowledge, eliminating the only magic ranged damage dealer

The studio head refused to back Tim, repeatedly saying "you're in charge of design" while allowing the art director to override design decisions and then telling Tim to fix the resulting problems. The studio head even ran competing "design strike teams" using Tim's own designers. When Tim's team won a blind popular vote on the results, the studio head still went with the other team's approach.

The Breaking Point (January–June 2011)

The Off-Site Meeting

In January 2011, Tim called out the art director for being disingenuous in an email, posting the original agreement as proof. The art director stormed out of the building screaming. The studio head ordered an off-site meeting the next day.

Tim came prepared. He had years of meticulous digital notes. He searched his records for every interaction with the art director, printed the results — "it was really thick" — and spoke without pause for four hours. No anger, no character attacks, just a systematic recitation: "you did this, you said this, you emailed this," point after point after point.

The art director took a break, came back, and had about 45 minutes of complaints about Tim — some valid, some that Tim was already planning to change, some that were reactions to the art director's own behavior.

Nothing changed afterward. The art director continued exactly as before. Tim stopped fighting.

Fun QA and the Final Straw

In June 2011, NCSoft's internal "Fun QA" team — which evaluated games roughly two years from release — delivered their review. The studio head told the directors it was "100 design complaints, all design complaints."

What actually arrived was:

• 56 pages of design review — mostly positive, with questions Tim had answers for
• 79 pages of art complaints — washed-out colors, poor prop placement, mean-looking characters, low-resolution textures, bad lighting, and one character race that NCSoft Korea said would be culturally unacceptable

Tim went to the studio head's office, shut the door, said "you lied to me," handed in his resignation, and left a couple weeks later.

The Exodus

Within 24–48 hours of Tim's departure, three other key people also quit — independently and without coordinating:

• The audio director
• One of the original senior programmers (who predated Tim at the company)
• The lead concept artist

All cited the same reason: the constant fighting and tug-of-war had become unbearable.

Aftermath and Lessons

WildStar shipped in 2014 but struggled commercially and eventually shut down. Tim notes this was only the second time he ever walked away from a game in development (the first was Fallout 2), and both games still shipped.

The Core Lesson

Tim identifies Carbine as the biggest example in his career of what happens without a singular creative vision:

"Without a singular vision that everyone — directors and everyone — buys into, it will lead to ruin. No amount of money, no amount of time will make up for the fact that if you don't have a very clear vision, you're not going to succeed."

He tried being the vision person and was prevented. He tried supporting others as the vision person, and that didn't work either.

Personal Cost

Tim says "Carbine broke me." He went to Obsidian Entertainment afterward and refused any role above senior for five years. He stopped taking detailed notes. He didn't want to be passionate about games for a while. He describes his recovery using the Japanese art of kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold, where the cracks remain visible but the object is considered more beautiful for having been broken.

Eventually the crack "got filled in with something," and he could lead again — which is when The Outer Worlds happened. But Carbine remains a period he doesn't like thinking or talking about, and one he documented more thoroughly than any other in his career.