Cita:A particularly assertive and savvy recruiter was able to populate the Homefront team with very experienced developers -- in most cases, the new hires had more qualifications than those senior to them. "One of the guys we interviewed had a more impressive resume than my own, but we felt he didn't meet our requirements," says the former staffer. "That told me that if I had the same resume [as when] I applied to Kaos a few years before and came to work for Homefront, I couldn't get my own job.

Another former Kaos employee says that longtime leadership failed to adapt processes for a larger staff and a higher-end product. The highly-qualified recruits came with high salaries and relocation fees, but management wasn't prepared to make the most of that acquisition expense. "They didn't listen to the very talented team they hired," laments the ex-staffer. "You had this level of leads with tons and tons of experience, and you had the directors with much less."

Cita:DeLise is described by his former colleagues as the studio's passionate head and heart, and a resolute problem-solver who built the studio from scratch and liked to get as much as possible done with his own two hands. That made the gap left by his departure all the wider, as many claim there was no plan for anyone to adequately take the reins from him.

From there, morale began to suffer, as management structure felt uncertain and weak amid a revolving door of GMs and similar leadership. Many staffers reported an uncomfortable environment where art and design often felt oppositional and adversarial, thanks to a widely-disliked art director who had to be fired in the middle of Homefront. The first general manager hired to replace DeLise also didn't work out. By 2010, one ex-employee estimates that up until the game's Alpha period, Kaos lost about a person per week for about the first 30 weeks of the year.

The source describes a team picture hung in a concept artist's office that quickly became a sea of crossed-out faces as the artist kept track of who had quit.

Cita:And many feel his creative input ultimately made the game better -- with one exception. It was Bilson's idea to make North Korea the occupying force of Homefront, despite how unlikely a significant U.S. invasion by such a small nation would be. Most North Korean confrontations with America have been little more than posturing.

The premise was widely questioned in the press, which caused the team some stress. According to our sources, Kaos had originally envisioned the invaders as Chinese, but THQ feared that such a portrayal would hurt its prospects for business in China, which has in recent years rapidly begun offering more and more opportunities for Western game developers.

Kaos suggested a coalition of Asian nations instead, but Bilson passionately preferred the Korea idea, and so it stood. An ex-staffer describes this as "demoralizing," in that the implausibility of the premise felt "stupid" to the team, and it was also frustrating for employees to see most of the press at that stage questioning the idea rather than looking seriously at the game.

Cita:One source tells us the minimal expectations for all members of the studio were six months of 12-hour shifts, six to seven days per week. But actually, according to the ex-staffer, most of the studio was clocking 14 to 16 hour days, seven days a week, during that six-month window. Some worked that schedule for 14 months, and jobs were at risk if the time quota wasn't met.

The staffer describes "inhuman, combative" leadership and labor under a system of fear. Many employees say their health and family relationships suffered -- and hearing THQ execs tell the media that crunch was reasonable and expected felt like a slap in the face, as the crunch came from poor management and an unhealthy environment, not because the work ethic dictated it.

Cita:And Kaos' own studio was rife with facility problems. Employees describe an "absolute dump" where, by the end, some staffers had desks beneath stairs. One men's room urinal sprung a leak, and someone's idea of repair was to stick a trashcan underneath it with a warning sign. One ex-employee estimates the urinal went un-repaired for some seven months, and that the "Urinal Bucket" became something of a symbol for the hopelessness and irrelevance the team felt when compared to THQ's shiny new Canada studio -- the one THQ would soon announce was taking over Kaos' franchise.