[screams] i feel like i am going insane because so many people are trying to tell me that the "devs don't care" and it's. that's patently not true? y'all are just saying shit because it gives you an easy and convenient scapegoat to yell at/about? people are peddling misinformation about so much of the writing team is new to dragon age and doesn't understand its themes and I'm like how can you even say that about people like Karin West-Weekes and Lukas Kristjanson and Mary Kirby and Sheryl Chee and John Epler?? hello??? do we live in a parallel universe where these people have not been involved with the story since Origins??? You really think John Dombrow, who wrote the Tuchanka / Genophage Cure arc in ME3, doesn't care about complex stories that deal with horrific systems of oppression and even genocide? Or Trick Weekes, who wrote Mordin in ME3 and Solas in Tresspasser? John Epler loves the story of the Grey Wardens so much that he's been sitting through months of tattoo sessions to get a Grey Warden arm sleeve. Many of the devs I follow for news talk about how working for BioWare and the stories they love is their dream come true - including Corinne Busche, who is an Origins girlie through and through.
I don't get it. We literally have a supercorporation who has participated in mass lay-offs and consolidations of studios and IPs, who has a long history of killing creative talent of studios and devs because they want things a certain way, who literally laid off 20% of BioWare's workforce in 2023 (right around when they were supposed to have released this game if the insiders are correct), who have expressed that they are doubling down on "established blockbuster IPs" as part of their corporate restructures. I remember Sheryl's response to it: "They've cut off our legs and we still have to run a marathon." I remember Gaider commenting about how one of the reasons he left was because he felt like the c-suite was actively devaluing the writers and their contributions to the game.
I am absolutely haunted by this BlueSky interaction between John Epler, Ann Lemay, and Trick Weekes, regarding critique of this game and how they fundamentally agree with it.
John Epler is the Creative Director. Who is telling him that things have to be a certain way? Really. Truly. Let's follow that thought train down its logical track to the corporate structure of hierarchy. Corinne Busche and Gary McKay, the Project Director and the Studio Manager, respectively? The executives in EA?
And yes! DA4 has also been the victim of some absolutely horrific choices made by trend chasing, that was not the choice of the devs! We can literally point at Casey Hudson and his return to BioWare in Spring 2017 as the Studio Manager as a major reason for why the cancelled singleplayer DA4 was rebooted in 2018 as a multiplayer GAAS game. If you dig into Hudson's own history, he has always been bullish on MP -- Mass Effect was originally envisioned as something pretty damn close to what Destiny ended up being, and it's not a coincidence that the ME3MP was developed as integral to the story outcome of the trilogy - and thank FUCK Legendary Edition reworked the trilogy so you didn't need the MP. Anthem was also Hudson's pitch, and it's really easy to see how this feeds into being one of the reasons DA4 ended up being built on Anthem's game engine. It's... really not a coincidence that when Hudson left BioWare again in Dec 2020, within two months the studio announced they were going back to a singleplayer model for the game.
I feel like a broken record, too, because I keep going back to this Bloomberg article that interviewed John Epler, wherein Epler says:
Busche joined the studio around four-and-a-half years ago. In a roundabout way, her arrival, along with studio general manager, Gary McKay – the latest in a conveyor belt of recent leadership changes at BioWare – lines up with The Veilguard finding its route to the finish line. “Before Corinne joined the project, it felt like we were building three parallel games that didn’t always touch in ways that worked,” Epler says. He’s been on The Veilguard since the very start, in 2015, and recalls chatting with Busche during their first Zoom call. He hung up and thought, “Oh, thank God. Finally, an ally in making this game what it needs to be.”
Busche didn't become the game director until Feb 2022, a year after the game was rebooted for a second time, and I can't help but niggle at the comment "three parallel games." Because this is so true. You have the extremely tight, local vision of DA4 Joplin, which many of these devs had worked on from 2015 to the cancellation of the project in October 2017; you have the GAAS multiplayer DA4 Morrison 1.0 reboot version that went from 2018-2021; and then you had the second reboot of DA4 Morrison 2.0, which went from 2021 to 2024. Realistically, this game was made in roughly 3.5 years, it was meant to be released in 2.5 years with a playable build, and shortly before they missed that internal deadline-that-they-insist-wasn't-really-a-deadline, they had the August 2023 layoffs which cut the studio by 1/5. (And let me tell you, when I realized that Lucanis -- whose romance I haven't yet tried but who I frequently see cited as rather severely lacking in actual content -- had lost TWO writers in the last four years (Courtney Woods in 2020 and Marky Kirby in 2023) a lot of things started to make sense.) You know how they got to this point? They were building on multiplayer systems for ~three years, off the Anthem system! I've said this before but the writing of DATV feels like they had to take a story and wrap it around a combat system, instead of taking a narrative and then developing a combat system around that narrative. And in the context of all this was the fact that these late changes occurred during the COVID-19 Pandemic, in a time where corporations literally told us how little they cared about their employees lmao.
Catie / Ghil'Dirthalen, who was on the Community Council and privy to a small piece of the behind-the-scenes, posted about some of her experiences on Reddit. There's a lot of nuggets in there, but I specifically want to extract this one:
"So, we were brought on in early 21, meeting perhaps 3-4 times a year. I'm forgetting the exact timeline, but the first year or two was a mess to be honest. The leadership at the time would throw images and ideas at us with little to no context and I (perhaps the others, I don't want to speak for them!) was left begging and grasping at straws at what we were doing. I remember one meeting we were asked about our opinion on the dagger with absolutely no context to what it was or why. Just if we liked it or not. I remember typing up a long, frustrated rant about what all this was for. Maybe we did say something meaningful in those early sessions, but I don't remember it. My notes that I have from that time are me trying to gather lore clues from concept art that was used in presentations, in an effort to give something meaningful.
And then I have no idea what happened, but Corinne took over, and things suddenly started to make sense. Our very first meeting after she took over we were FINALLY told who the companions were and a brief overview on each of them and their romances. Before that, we just had a wall of concept art with no context, that while I could piece most of who was who from TN, it was kinda useless. From there, we were actually given context and info and even play time with the game and this is when I started to feel like we were finally doing anything, and could see our input making changes."
I personally think the devs literally had to frankenstein this game from three different visions of a game, and stitch them together into something that was roughly coherent. I think they were also forced by budget and deadlines to severely curtail what they put into this game, and I straight up would not be shocked to find out that there were mandates from on high about what could and could not be in this game, and to lower the writing to a level that gives it the broadest accessibility and appeal. ("Hang on you can't fight elves, that would make you the bad guy." / "Ok now go do some corpo-spin on why.") Catie / Ghil'Dirthalen put out a video on The Devouring Storm where she casually dropped that she and some friends had been data-mining DATV and had over 2,000 (word doc) pages of cut content, where that was surely not all of it. And I am SCREAMING over that. The evidence that they cut and cut and cut and cut some more is obvious, and it reminds me soooooo much of the story problems with ME3, which IMO spent too much time/budget on the multiplayer combat systems and levels and it ended up severely fucking their ability to tell a good story -- with cut content that actually explains a good many of the narrative deficits. (But not all of them; the writers also get to own some of the frankly fucking atrocious writing/narrative choices, and I feel the same for DATV.) They wanted The Keep. They wanted the Inquisitor's class to matter. At one point they wanted us to have an epilogue. They had more romance scenes planned. Choices you made in DA2 were supposed to impact Isabela in DATV. The bones of all of these really dissonant and fricative stories are THERE and you can practically taste them, but they weren't allowed to be animated with flesh and blood.
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