I worked on a commercial MMORPG project for a while. The game assets were hosted on an unversioned asset server instead of in Perforce. The same asset server was shared by every branch and release of the game client, which made backward and forward compatibility a major hassle. None of the artists understood what the big deal was. I feel like I should write a post-mortem of that project some day.. :)

Kotaku has a great post-mortem on the development of Bungie's Destiny game, including fantastic horror stories about the design tools:

  “Let’s say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches,” said
  one person familiar with the engine. “They go into the editor. First they have 
  to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. 
  They get [into the office] in the morning. If their importer didn’t fail, they 
  open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that 
  node two feet. And then they’d do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a 
  half-second change.”

http://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-...