Some quotes from Mark Darrah’s recent streamed video, "20,000 Subscribers Q&A". rest of post is under a cut due to length.
Mark Darrah: “Certainly while I was working with BioWare I wasn’t posting [on YouTube] any high value, high clickbait stuff.”
Q: In DA:O, why does mage class seem more complete than rogue and warrior?
A from Mark Darrah: “The design space that DA:O was being built into was heavily influenced by 2nd edition D&D. So in that case the reality is [warriors] and rogues were less, they were thinner classes, simpler classes, and the mage was the stronger, more fully-implemented and considered class, much more complicated, in terms of spells and such. Also of all the DAs, DA:O is the most grounded, the one that’s worrying the most about everything making perfect sense within the overall lore of the game, so warriors and rogues in DA:O basically don’t have talents/skills that violate physics, whereas as we move into DA2, DA:I and DA:TV you get a lot more things that are not really possible for someone to physically do. When you try to live in that super physically grounded space for 2 of your 3 classes, there are going to be a lot more limitations in terms of what you are capable of doing that’s going to make sense compared to the class that is able to bend reality, stop time, cause gravitational anomalies. That’s a big part of it. It’s a combination of just the space that it was in as well as the attempt to keep it really grounded. I don’t think it was a technical limitation thing at all.”
Q: Which one of the games that Mark worked on was the most challenging?
A: “I guess, emotionally, probably, I would say Joplin. That was a, what, 3 year long process of fighting against an organization that had no people to give me and trying to get resources, but I think all games have challenges.”
Q: What were the plans for Flemeth?
A: “I’m not gonna really be able to answer any DA lore questions probably, both because I wasn’t directly controlling the lore at any one moment but also because I don’t control that IP and the reality is is that it still remains controlled by BioWare and they may still have plans that remain. I would say Flemeth’s role changed over the years and serves the needs of any one moment. I think that one thing that I heard in terms of why early MCU worked when other attempts at cinematic universes failed was that Marvel was basically doing what they needed to do at any moment and retroactively making the lore make sense. […] And I do think that to a large degree, yeah, you can’t plan out too far. You can have a scaffolding, bits of light in the dark that you’re aiming towards, but the reality is is as you go, make games, interact with your fiction, and as the fans interact with the fiction, you’re gonna change what you’re making and that’s going to change your path. So your plans are always open to change. So what’s the plan with Flemeth, I don’t know, to actually just answer the question, but also I would say it’s whatever it needs to be to tell the story that’s being told at any one moment.”
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After receiving the Game of the Year award in 2014 for DA:I, a couple people recognized Mark and came up asking for autographs. At the DICE Awards, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was winning everything and when GOTY came up he was 100% assuming it would win that too, but then DA:I won. “So if you see my speech at that awards it’s clear that I’m completely surprised that I’m even up there.” “DA:I was made by a huge huge huge team, all of whom were relevant to the game winning GOTY.”
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Q: Does Mark still think the transition from low/dark fantasy in DA:O to high/epic fantasy in DA:TV was the right direction for the franchise?
A: “Yeah, I do, because the reality is DA:O looked like 3 other games that shipped that year and you need your game to be able to stand apart. Now, can you make a dark fantasy game stand apart from other dark fantasy games? Sure, absolutely. But you see this in the Soulslikes, a lot of Soulslikes look very similar to each other because they’re not only taking that dark fantasy aesthetic as well as the gameplay, and they kinda blend into one thing, which isn’t a good way to build up an IP. But yeah, the other thing that I’ve said, and definitely stand behind, is if you are making a dark fantasy setting, and I don’t mean just the visual aesthetic, I mean the actual tonal aspects of the game, then, yeah, that’s, can be hard on the team, it can be oppressive, wearing upon the team. But going back as well to the question before about classes in DA:O, I would argue that they kind of aren’t, but they are more grounded, so if you wanna open up the abilities of those classes, you need to edge into high fantasy. But some of this is also just the reality of the setting. As you move in Thedas, north into Tevinter, you’re gonna move into higher magic areas, it’s just the way the nature of the setting is, so yeah, I do think this is the right direction for the franchise. Now, are there issues in tone for DA:TV? Yeah, but that is for reasons related to this but not directly caused by this. There’s a lot of dark fantasy right now and you do ideally want to stand apart. The ideal place for your IP is to be the thing that everyone is looking for but is being under-served, so I do think there’s an argument to be made that in 2018-2022, people were looking for lighter, more colorful things, and then that pendulum has swung back pretty hard. So because DA:TV took so long to make and come out, it is a little bit off-kilter in terms of what the general expectation is from the fanbase. But yeah, you wanna stand apart in a way that’s acceptable.”
“With people talking about DA:TV being too quippy, DA has always been quippy, super-duper quippy. But the expectation of the audience has changed underneath it to a certain degree. When I someday get to talking about DA:TV in my Memories and Lessons vid series I’ll probably talk about this, but, we went through this entire cycle with Marvel while this game was being developed. You had Thor: The Dark World come out just before DA:I came out, and people did not like how dark and broody that was. Thor: Ragnarok came out in ~2015, people loved that, that lighter more colorful, quippy, interesting style of storytelling. But then before DA:TV shipped you got Thor: Love and Thunder and people were like so over that style of conversation and dialogue, and the game was in development through that entire period. When you are working for that long it’s hard to be on target. It’s hard to be that cognizant of what the tastes are gonna be that far in the future. […] ‘Swooping is bad’, I’m gonna call quippy, from DA:O.”
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“Definitely there is interesting space to be explored still in DA. I mean I was kind of joking when I tweeted about it in 2016, but I do think that a Final Fantasy Tactics-style game in the DA universe would be interesting, still have the opportunity to do storytelling, just something with a bit more of a tactical bent.”
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Q: Which locations does he think are best in DA:O?
A: “Visually I don’t think that DA:O holds up pretty well, it’s looking pretty ugly. I do think Blighted Denerim [from endgame] is still pretty neat. I think Orzammar, Orzammar is an interesting look for dwarves, feels dwarfy but feels really ownable, and DA:O doesn’t have a ton of ownable visuals.”
Q: Is there a better publisher out there for BioWare?
A: “I mean, not really relevant, because EA, just because of its psychological nature is never letting BioWare go. […] I mean Microsoft would probably be better. One of the money groups from China, maybe, that are very hands off. Probably there are ones that would be better partners, but it doesn’t matter, nothing’s gonna change.”
Q: What plot threads from DA:O, DA2 and DA:I would he like to see wrapped up in some way?
A: “I think it’s fine the way it is. I’m able to allow those threads to exist and continue to dangle.”
Q: If ME5 does well, what does he think BioWare and EA will work on next?
A: “So this is massively speculation: I think it’s gonna be ME for a while. If ME does really well, I think they’ll make another ME. Will there ever be another DA game? I don’t know who at BioWare pitches another DA game, and that’s what it’s gonna take. Someone’s gonna have to be willing to step forward and say, ‘I want to do another DA game, here’s what it is, here’s how we pitch it’, and I’m not sure who does that, because the people that are there are mostly ME people, so I’m not sure how that happens. In terms of new IP, the incubation on new IP is really really long and EA kinda went through that with Anthem, I don’t think they’re gonna have a lot of interest in that. Now, can BioWare do it semi off-book, have a couple people working on it for a couple of years and then reveal it in a much more done state? They could, maybe they will, I don’t think so. I think for at least the next two games, so a really long period of time, it’s gonna be ME.”
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Unreal is a powerful but deceptive engine. If you’re working with Frostbite, “it’s covered in razorblades but visibly so, so if you’re working with it you always know you’re working with something dangerous, and if you respect that, and I would argue that ME:A and Anthem didn’t respect it but DA:I did, if you respect it you can get lots of amazing stuff out of that engine. Unreal looks like it’s covered in fluff and foam and is safe and beautiful, and you’re working with it and everything’s going great and then at the end it explodes in your face because the performance is really bad. A lot of teams have gotten themselves in trouble in the case of Unreal by disrespecting Unreal.” “Frostbite is an F1 car and Unreal is a Nascar. An F1 car can go so much faster than a Nascar, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with an F1 car you’re gonna ram that thing into a wall at 300 miles an hour. Whereas a Nascar, you can kinda drive it like a car, you could go get groceries in the thing. Frostbite is optimized for one thing, at least historically. Unreal is optimized to be an engine, so it’s easier to use. Unreal has a huge performance problem, but it’s not that it’s worse, it’s just that it’s deceptive. Whereas Frostbite will destroy you if you don’t respect it, but it’s hard not to know that with Frostbite. Unreal will hurt you if you don’t respect it, but you may not know that with Unreal.”
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Q. Why did Anthem and ME not respect Frostbite?
A. “I would say that it might be because DA:I didn’t have much trouble, but that’s because they did respect it. There’s always a feeling, when you are in early development, and you’re watching another team struggle to ship, it’s very hard for that team not to feel superior, because everything’s going great for you, you’re in prototype land, and that other team is struggling, so you must be better than them, so you don’t need to worry about what they did. Some of it’s that. DA:I didn’t have trouble because it worried about it.”
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Mark isn’t still consulting with BioWare. His consulting with BioWare ended in ~April 2024 or thereabouts. “I am not consulting with BioWare, I suspect, given more recent videos I will not be consulting with BioWare, I may have burned that bridge. Not fully intentionally, but, you know, it is what it is.” […] “I mean, who knows. I guess if Andrew Wilson or whoever eventually replaces him came up to my house and threw a bunch of money at it, would I say no, probably not, there’s probably a price, but no I can’t imagine myself going back to BioWare at this point. I honestly can’t imagine myself being a full-time employee at any large studio at this point, to be clear.”
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Q: Does he think Joplin would have been done better if it had been allowed to develop in its own way instead of DA:TV?
A: “It’s hard to look back at something that will, in the same way that I talked about, like the ghost of Casey Hudson, and Anthem, being able to coast on a really good deck for so long, I do think that Joplin is gonna live as this mythological game in a lot of peoples’ memories. The ways that a Joplin happens are basically in a world that it ships in February 2019, it takes Anthem’s spot. In that world that is a game developed on a pretty tight timeline, not from the ship of DA:I I suppose, it’s more than 4 years, almost 5, but still, pretty tight timeline. It’s gonna be a compromised game for sure. I guess my short answer is yes, my long answer is but we’ll never know and it’s very easy to pretend like it definitely would be yes.”
Q: What’s it like seeing a BioWare game released from the outside now?
A: “I mean really this is more of a DA - I kind’ve felt with the MEs that I always felt like I was a bit on the outside. Like, you knew it was coming but it felt like I was an external player, I didn’t feel like I was super involved, I guess ME:A a little bit. But because I was the EP of DA for so long and then because I helped get DA:TV into a shape where it could ship at all, it’s hard to watch them navigate launch in ways different to the way that I would do it, and look and see and feel like, ‘oh, if only you did x or y or z, or whatever I would’ve done’, things would’ve gone better. Would they? I don’t know. It’s very hard not to Monday morning quarterback [that idiom means ‘a person who passes judgement on and criticizes something after the event’] a game that I was so inside the franchise for so long, and I honestly have to say I didn’t like it at all. I don’t like feeling like I would have steered the plane in a different way. I think with the next ME it’ll be fine, but for this game I didn’t like the feeling of watching things happen that were different than what would’ve happened if I was in charge and not being able to do anything about it.”
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“[reading from chat] ‘So when ME came in to carry [DA:TV] to the finish’ - I would say that’s an overstatement. […] The writers’ strike didn’t affect [DA:TV], because as far as I know, almost no writers in the game industry are members of the screen writers guild. […] The voice actor strike I think didn’t affect the end part [of DA:TV], I don’t think it had a huge impact on DA:TV at the end of the day, I think they largely were able to work around it.”
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“[the state of DA:TV] wasn’t worse when I left it. But it had moved forward less than I had expected when I was gone, ‘cause I left early 2021, so Christian Dailey was in the process of moving it from a game with multiplayer to a singleplayer game, which is absolutely the right call, and arguably probably a thing that I was probably not psychologically capable of doing, so that was Christian’s big gift to the franchise, was to say, ‘no, we are a singleplayer game, we are going to abandon all of the live service aspects of the game’. The team was definitely struggling with making a MP game. So that was happening when I left in early 2021. Adamant [meaning the fall of Weisshaupt quest?] was the lead mission when I was leaving and it was in, you know a, beyond white box state. When I came back the game was playable from start to finish. The lead mission was still Adamant, and it was in a well beyond white box state but not an orange box, not the next state, and that’s almost 2 years later, so it had made progress but what had happened, which is something that often happens with BioWare games, is a bunch of, they’d filled the pool a lot. They’d made a ton of content, they’d moved a bunch of stuff forward all at once, but they still didn’t have a beautiful corner, they still didn’t have something that really looked amazing and looked like shippable content.”
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Q: Why would a studio make a live service game even when they haven’t done so before?
A: “Bungee had never made a live service before Destiny. The reality is that for the longest time, basically until this year, the way that publishers looked at live services was, even if they only have a 10% chance of success, a successful live service makes so much money, and from the perspective of a publicly-traded company, so much ongoing consistent revenue, that it’s worth trying and failing 3 times if one hits, because if one does, we like that revenue model so much better than the boom and bust of SP games. I don’t agree with that but that’s why the industry went live service crazy for so long. A change [in that aspect of the industry] is starting to happen [though].”
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“Larian is very much like BioWare if it had never been, if it somehow had not gone bankrupt and never got bought by VG Partners [Elevation Partners?] in ~2006. They are what BioWare would’ve had to have become to have survived after that time period. Instead they got bought twice and then had access to bigger money and better economics and became bigger and more polished, whereas Larian had to remain really small and scrappy for a long time, so it’s like a mirror universe version of BioWare in a lot of ways.” Larian reminds him of BioWare from 2000.
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“I will probably be haunted by the fact that I didn’t ultimately just say no to taking over Anthem. What happens if I’d said no? I don’t know, honestly. Maybe Casey Hudson takes over Anthem and it slides out of 2019. I could’ve said ‘no, you just told me that you were all in on DA, I told you this was gonna happen, and I’m saying no’. Do I even keep my job? I don’t know. Related, probably the thing that helps, there’s a couple of variations around like what happens if you force the ME3 team to make ME:A instead of moving most of it to Montreal? I don’t know, Casey quits earlier, I guess. What happens if you actually convince the organization to switch Joplin and Anthem and push Joplin into 2019 and Anthem is whenever it is, again, I don’t know and I don’t know how in the world you actually make that happen, because EA really really really really really really wants Anthem, because they believe that it’s going to be their Destiny and is going to make tons of money, a billion dollar franchise from BioWare, so I don’t know how you convince them to do that without literally showing them what actually happens.”
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“I think BioWare only really realized that it was storytelling through characters pretty recently.”
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“I can’t really tell you anything about the [Red Rook Book].”
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“There is definitely some stuff in DA I think was interesting, stuff to do with what happened to a Warden that killed an Archdemon, there was some interesting space that we wanted to explore there that didn’t make it in.”
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“DA2 was basically allowed zero time in pre-development, we went from working on DLC, an expansion pack, we had some concept art for stuff that looked more like DA:I than DA2 to be honest, to - we had a meeting and they needed something that covered the fact that SW:TOR was moving yet again, and then we basically jumped into production straightaway. For DA:I it was probably less than a year. For something like DA:TV, because of the nature of its starvation diet, it was essentially, to its detriment, in its early version and pre-production for years and years, and I don’t think that’s good for any team. Not voluntarily, but I failed [at getting it] going to gate 2, which would be the gate at EA when you’re starting the process of entry into production. I failed it because we didn’t have people, like I had no plan. Part of the gate is, show your staffing plan that gets you from one to the other, and it’s like, well you took all my people away, I don’t have a plan, so we can’t pass this gate. So DA4 was in that state for a long time, way too long.”
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“ME5 is in development now and if it does well there will be another ME. Will there be another DA? Like I said before, I don’t know who pitches that within EA right now.”
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“My pitch for DA to be a billion dollar franchise – basically EA wants all their franchises to be billion dollar franchises. DA probably can’t, to be honest, be a billion dollar franchise. Basically the pitch was: make Joplin and use Joplin to get the game engine into a state where we can develop more quickly, then make another game 18 months later, then another game 18 months later. So you ship Joplin whenever, and then 1.5 years after that you ship another game, and then another 1.5 years after that. So you have 3 games in the course of 3 years. And then in between you have a single piece of big DLC, 1 piece, that’s it, just to keep the channel refreshed. So you would release the game at 60-90, whatever, dollars, you would release $25 DLC or something that’s essentially an expansion pack. Something that if you imagine it the size of the 3 big pieces of DLC from DA:I, approximately, smooshed into one thing, and then the next game comes out, and you’re just like [boom boom boom boom]. That was the pitch. Why they said no? They wanted everyone on Anthem. They said they wanted DA to be a live service, but it’s because they wanted everyone on Anthem.”
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Q: What made him return to BioWare to consult on DA:TV?
A: “Partially it’s because it’s what I do now, help projects ship games. When they hit alpha I came to them, like, you know, you’re gonna have a lot of bugs, do you want someone to help you with the triaging process? They said no, then a couple people left, a couple months later, and then they called me and said do you wanna come and help, and I said yeah. That was probably the main thing. At the time, my feeling was this is a franchise I put a lot of myself into and I want to help it ship as best as it can. In retrospect, from my perspective, because I was a part-time consultant my influence was more limited than I was used to for that franchise, so am I glad that I did it? I don’t know that I am because I feel like I had influence on it, I made the game better, my ability to do everything I wanted to do was definitely limited, both due to the nature of the contract, but also due to the nature of how I plugged into the team. At the time, it was because I wanted to help them ship, and I did, would I do it again, I dunno.”
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“Do I think that DA could produce another game? It’s possible. EA owns a lot of IPs, many of which are never going to ever be made into other games. Does DA end up on that pile? It might. Maybe there’s someone at BioWare that I’m forgetting that could pitch another one. We’ll see.” “EA doesn’t sell IPs. My opinion as to why is, a lot of corporate culture at EA is about people trying not to get in trouble. If I’m the person that sells off Wasteland and then the people I sell it to make a game that sells 25 million copies and wins GOTY, I’m gonna get in trouble, so I’d rather do nothing and keep that IP locked away in a closet and not get in trouble. This is a terribly toxic corporate culture. This is the culture EA operates under near as I can tell. They don’t, won’t sell IPs. It’s not really enough money for them for it to be worth it in most cases, for the same reason they won’t sell studios away either, they’ll just quietly let them disintegrate or quietly turn them into insourcing studios.”
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“Yeah, I mean, BioWare got itself into a position. The thing I can say about DA:TV is it moved its date in ways that I never felt were possible at EA, but I do think that those moves came with a butcher’s bill that had to be paid at some point. But I don’t know exactly how that happened, I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems like they were able to move that game, it moved a lot after I started helping them again, past, across fiscal boundaries, which in my experience at EA was virtually impossible. But I wonder if that came with a, ‘and, we’ll do it, but… dot dot dot’.”
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[on localization] “One of the things that has been a thing for DA more than for ME is that puns are a big thing, you have to explain the pun in the voice acting rules so that the localizers know what you’re going for and either write it away or write something new in. Really experienced translation teams may preserve the pun or create one that’s equally funny.” […] “DA has never done special translation for the Nordic countries, Sweden, Norway and Finland, so it’s English, and it sells really well in those territories, given how big those territories actually are.” […] “In the past DA was selling about 50% in languages other than English. I don’t know what the data is like these days.”
Q: Why were later DA books like Tevinter Nights not officially translated into different languages anymore?
A: “I’m sure it was purely financial, just that they weren’t selling enough to justify being translated, I can’t think of any other reason, I mean those things were run basically as tiny little businesses, so if they were gonna sell well in another language I don’t know why they wouldn’t translate them.”
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“You can kind’ve see it, right, like the beginning of DA:TV is like the end of a game, so that’s the game that’s missing [as a potential bridge game between DA:I and DA:TV]. If that game existed, things would be slightly different. A Joplin that ships in 2019 probably ends with something a lot like the beginning of DA:TV. You stop Solas from killing everyone and the old gods get out, and if it’s done the way that I was pitching, you probably, this was not the plan, but this is probably what ends up happening – you probably end up with Joplin is stop Solas, then Joplin 2 is stop Ghilan’nain, and then Joplin 3 is stop Elgar’nan, and then you end up with a Rook trilogy or something like that.” […] “There is some Ghilan’nain stuff in the concept art.”
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“I don’t think there’s anyone at BioWare that’s going to pitch another DA game, so I don’t see, at the time being, at least for the next several games, there’s not gonna be a DA game. If ME5 does well, there’ll be another ME. If that ME does well, there will probably be a third ME game. If that does well, maybe they’ll be allowed to do something else, but even then, I don’t know who at BioWare is going to be pitching a DA game.”
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Q: Could someone pitch independently to license DA for a new DA game?
A: “First of all, it would probably need to be someone like me. You would need to make a game studio and ship at least 2 RPGs that were well-respected but limited by budget, then you would go to EA and say, hey, EA, you know who I am, I’ve shown that I can ship games and I want to make a DA game. We’ll make a DA5. Will they do that? Probably, yeah, they’d probably be willing to do that, but you’d need to have the track record. They’re not going to just let anyone, or even me, walk up and say, give me DA, I’m gonna make a DA game, for the same reasons as I said before. People don’t wanna get in trouble. If they licensed the IP to me and my studio blows up in spectacular fashion, they’re worried they’re gonna get in trouble.”
Q: Why did DA choose to have a new PC with each new entry?
A: “Basically because of DA:O. Because there’s a reasonable chance at the end of that game that you’re dead, so for DA2 we basically needed a new PC. But also, the franchise, we really strongly sold Wardens as super cool in DA:O, but that was never really intended to be the anchor point of the IP.”
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An easily recognizable brand like N7 in ME would have been good for DA. “The problem is, N7/ME is Syd Mead, very retrofuture, cool, slick, design aesthetic. N7 and things like that rise naturally out of that. Whereas DA is fantasy. So you see some of the icons and graphic design in DA2 is interesting and looks nice. But when you put N7 on a hoodie it’s cool but it’s stealth nerd, you can wear it and people just say oh cool hoodie, is that a new designer? No, it’s a video game I like. There’s the blood dragon, the Kirkwall symbols, there’s lot of cool stuff that exists within DA but when you put it on a piece of merch at best it looks like a leather jacket a biker would wear. It’s the nature of fantasy vs sci-fi to some degree.”
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Q. If a DA:O remake happened, what parts of the game would need to be reworked?
A. “If you’re doing a remaster you do nothing, just make it prettier, maybe put a thing up saying ‘this has got stuff in it that probably doesn’t fly in 2026/27’. […] I feel like the broodmother stuff is worse than City Elf origin. City Elf, at least the guy dies at the end. I kind of feel like it works today, because you’re sort of saying, this is a thing that happens, but you’re kind’ve trying to take control of it. I’d have to play it again to remember. But yeah anything you touch is gonna make some people mad so you gotta go in knowing that.”
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“For Dawn of the Seeker, someone wanted to pay us to make a cartoon, so we made it, basically. The idea for all of the biz dev stuff that happened between DA2 and DA:I was supposed to be, let’s bridge the gap between the two franchises, let’s explain, fill in the world between the two games. DotS explains a bit more about Cassandra. The biz dev at BioWare is very successful but basically always operates under the stance of, we will only do a thing that makes us money, and if it isn’t detrimental to the IP. DotS for some people I guess gets to the point of being detrimental to the IP, I actually think it’s fine.” “Felicia Day was, we were making that piece of DLC – I think the DLC predates her thing. We had a relationship with her one way or another, so that one was, I think we did still make money, but yeah I mean that was, someone was interested in working with our IP, we respected them, we wanted to do something.” On Dragon Age: Journeys, “I’m pretty sure what happened to that was that the Facebook game landscape basically imploded around then, but I don’t remember for sure.”
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“We picked the [some specific storythreads from DA:O to pick up on in DA2] that fit with the thing we were making. We were moving up into Kirkwall, werewolves wouldn’t have made a ton of sense, but also the ones that were easiest to deal with. Werewolves is a giant quantum problem, like you could solve the werewolves, in which case there are none, or they could literally be taking over Ferelden, that’s a big delta. Whereas mages-templars at the end of DA:O is a thing that exists, it’s not really that different. So basically we dropped the ones where the deltas were too massive. Like there’s still supposed to be a civil war coming in some of the endings, or have already happened at this point, depending on what you did in Orzammar. I think that’s just been quietly buried, because [shrugs] what? Like, if it has to happen, basically that’s the short answer. If all universes were the same, then that’s a thread that continued. If there were vast deltas then that’s a much bigger problem.”
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“I think there was another expansion pack being worked on for DA:O. I don’t remember this but David Gaider does. I’m pretty sure David is right, that it was happening, I just don’t remember it. There was some writing done, I guess, and I’m guessing it was probably gonna have the broadstrokes of DA2, you know, with the mage/templar stuff happening in Kirkwall. I don’t know if it was in Kirkwall or not, to be honest.”
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Q. Why was Dragon Age Keep done away with [for DA:TV]?
A: “Yeah, why – so, yeah, I told them, I mean I can tell – basically because the game was too close to ship and they didn’t think they had time to do it. That’s the answer, but they did. It wasn’t, and they did, and they should’ve.”
Q. Was Trespasser a response to fans?
A. “Partially it was, because there was a backlash to the post-credits scene, so it was partially done to address that, but not completely. That was always sort’ve the place we were going.”
“Yes, Varric was meant to die in DA2 DLC that never happened, that is correct. But the writers have kind’ve been trying to kill him for a while, to be honest. [laughs] So yeah, he was gonna die in Exalted March and then he was gonna die in DA:I. […] I don’t exactly know why, I think the writers, I guess the answer is they could see the emotional impact of killing someone who’s liked as much as Varric, but I think you pick up the pieces. You probably end up having to replace him with a similar – basically, you need a ‘I got your back’ kinda, like that’s the lesson of DA2, is, in your group of followers you need a follower who is, I’ve got your back no matter what, kinda bro til the end time – doesn’t have to be a guy. And so I think if you killed Varric in DA2 DLC, you basically end up having another character that has to fill that role, joins your group really early and kinda hangs around.”
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“Heroes of Dragon Age was developed by the same team that made the Star Wars mobile game. I don’t know how big the team was. It was done out of Capital Games, Sacramento, California. It was part of BioWare at the time.”
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“After we got bought by EA, salaries got a lot more in line [increased] with everywhere else [outside Canada]. Salaries are still way less than Seattle or California for sure. I’m pretty sure that BioWare Edmonton is on the same paygrade as EA Vancouver, but even still that puts it as a mid-cost location compared to LA or San Francisco which are high-cost.”
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Q. Does he think that DA:TV leaned too heavily into progressive views?
A. “No. Someone made an argument to me in a comment somewhere that DA:TV isn’t woke enough, and I do think there might be something to that view.” […] “It’s not a medieval setting, it’s a medieval fantasy setting, so I don’t have a problem with [the language in the game].”
Q. Does he think BioWare is in danger right now?
A. “I’m not sure what you mean by that. Is BioWare in danger of being closed? Maybe. Is BioWare in danger of losing control of their IP? I don’t know what that would even mean because they’re owned by EA and EA owns the IPs.” […] “Every studio is one bad deliverable away from being closed.”
Q. Can he describe the journey of including the Executors during the development of DA:TV, and did they ever have a larger involvement?
A. “I don’t know. I don’t think they did, but I honestly don’t know.”
Q. Can he expand on what he meant by ‘DA:TV would have been better if it was shut down completely’? [from the MrMattyPlays interview I think this was]
A. “So what I mean is that, so I think people misinterpreted what I said in that interview. What I mean is that between the time that I went onto Anthem and when I came back, DA ran on its own. It had a team on it but it didn’t have an EP. We pretended, but no, it didn’t. It had a team, and there was some dysfunction on that team that was running without a most senior leader for 1.5 years. That was bad, a bad thing to do. I don’t think a project should run for that long without its senior leader, or without at least a senior leader. So what I mean is that when I went onto Anthem, everyone that was on DA should’ve gone onto Anthem, despite the fact that there were people there that the Anthem team didn’t want because they would have been disruptive. They should have gone onto Anthem, we should’ve just figured it out. The entire project should have stopped. So Joplin ended, and then Morrison just simply wouldn’t start until we came back from Anthem. That’s what should’ve happened. And I think in that case what probably actually happens is, when we come back from Anthem, you probably don’t start Morrison, you probably restart Joplin. Because you see, like, oh, maybe we don’t go all in on live service. Whereas what happens instead is you get 1.5 years of Morrison building up momentum of live service elements that the project has to live with for the rest of its existence.” […] “The people that basically stayed on DA when everyone moved onto Anthem were the senior leaders, so like, what happens when you have, you already have a lead designer, and you bring another lead designer on board? There’s a disruption, an impact in there that you need to figure out how to deal with. In the case of DA:TV, when the ME people came on, you basically just said, too bad, this is happening, we’re doing it. Was it disruptive? Yeah. Did it get the game shipped? That too, so I just think you cannot leave a game running without its leadership, it’s just a recipe for disaster.”
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DA:TV spent more than BG3’s budget.
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“A lot of the criticism of EA is overblown. But the reality is that any big company that acquires any smaller company will over time absorb and assimilate their culture. This happened at Blizzard. It took a long time, Blizzard had really strong walls up, but they’re basically Activision now. And now Microsoft is probably gonna do it to Activision. Those cultures are going to blend into one thing. Over time, the senior people within the studio organization start to act in a way they know is going to be acceptable to the other parts of the larger organization, without even thinking about it. Eventually studios bought by EA will become like EA. Studios bought by Ubisoft will become like Ubisoft. It’s just the nature of the way peoples’ minds work. EA is a big publicly-traded company that cares about quarters and that isn’t great for game development. Should EA be a red flag? I don’t think so, but yeah, big publicly-traded companies with quarters, not great for video game development. Acquisition makes a really big strong magnet that pulls the culture.”
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“Saying yes to taking over Anthem is gonna haunt me for the longest time probably, I shoulda said no. DA2 isn’t the best game I ever worked on, but it did what it had to do, and it got done, so it's hard not to be proud of that.”
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“What most people don’t know is that BioWare was acquired twice. It was bought by a company VG Holdings which was a venture capital company, partially invested in by Sting [Bono from U2?], weirdly. As I understand, BioWare was basically out of money when it got acquired. If it had never been acquired, maybe it ends up fire selling itself to somebody else, but if not, I think it probably runs out of money before ME1 and DA:O ship. Or some kind of compromised DA:O ships to try to keep the lights on, maybe.”
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“I made a deck, I call it my most sarcastic deck ever. The cultures of the two teams [ME and DA] are fairly different. Casey Hudson and I lead in pretty different ways. I’m more collaborative, he is more visionary. The truth of the matter is that the games are very very similar. The deck is about how ME:A and DA:I are very similar games that were built on entirely different tech stacks because we don’t like to think that they’re the same game. I think admitting that they’re basically the same would’ve saved BioWare a lot of heartache, because what ends up happening is, if you think you’re very different, this is what happened with Anthem as well, then you end up exploring a lot different space but all you end up doing is going in a big circle to get back to where you started. If you’d just said, ‘ME:A is DA:I but’, and then listed your changes, you would’ve saved yourself a lot of time, instead of saying, it’s totally different and then wandered back towards DA:I over a big huge time period. In terms of EA support, EA always understood ME much more than DA, partially because of the thing that was asked about before, it had better branding, it’s just a more mainstream brand.” “ME appeals to a different audience to DA, the actual overlap is only about 50% between the two franchises. As I recall, the data on DA:I was that the other EA game that most people playing it had played was Battlefield. That’s probably just because it sold so well, but I’m pretty sure the overlap is only about 50-50. I don’t know that the executive understood the different audiences clearly enough. Well, shooter. I think the fact that it’s a shooter is what helped a lot too.”
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“DA:O to DA2’s [identity change] was in part because we were just being pushed to be a more mainstream title. Y’know, ‘push a button, something awesome happens’. It’s funny because DA2 is basically built with the exact same skeleton as DA2, it’s just, putting the knobs in different places results in a very different game. DA2 to DA:I’s [identity change] is more of a response to the reception of DA2, so that’s why it’s top down, more of that stuff that’s more DA:O. And then for DA:I to DA:TV, it’s living with the fact that it was a live service game, a live service whatever. It was a live service looter sorter for the most formative parts of its development, and that is kind of why it is that way. But DA has always been on a journey of discovery, it’s never really been comfortable in its own skin, or been allowed to be, to be honest.” “Some studios, historically, BioWare included, have leaned away from using RPG as a label. For some people it’s actually a reason they won’t pay attention to a game. But I think that stigma’s largely gone away.”
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“Why are they remastering Command & Conquer but not DA:O? I’m pretty sure it’s money. And I don’t know who’s doing the Command & Conquer remaster, but for DA:O to be remastered, it would have to be done by BioWare, and they’d have to do it within their own budget envelope, and they probably do not have the money to do it. So that’s basically what it comes down to. I’m pretty sure EA would say yes, if BioWare said, we want to do it, and we can pay for it, I don’t think they would shut it down, it’s just that BioWare has to find the money to do it themselves, and they don’t have that money.” “Would EA ever do a remaster of DA:O? I don’t know. Right now, like I just said, BioWare would have to do it themselves out of their own budget.”
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Q. How does BioWare get money?
A. “It’s weird. Basically, studios have budgets, they have a budget envelope. And they kinda get to operate with that envelope and then they are pitching, like, they can’t do whatever they want, they are pitching games, those games have to be greenlit and so on. But to some degree, the envelope and the games they’re working are somewhat independent. So if they want more budget, they have to argue for that, and EA doesn’t like that, they don’t like giving studios more money, so typically the answer for getting more money is no. If you wanna do more stuff with your existing budget, hooray, go ahead. If you want to do less stuff with your existing budget, well, as long your financials work out at the other end, we also kinda don’t care. But if you wanna get more money, then that’s really hard, it’s really hard for EA to say yes to that.” “[if BioWare decided they wanted to make a small type of game, AA budget], the problem with that would be to get EA to greenlight that. So if they carved, whatever, 15 million dollars out of their studio envelope – so basically, stole it from ME5, basically, is what would be happening right now – and said we’re gonna do a DA tactics game. They could start it, but to get it into production they would need to pass the formal gates within EA and the problem is the problem that a lot of AAA is having right now. The difference between sales between best game and second best game is quite dramatic. So when you’re getting into genres that are less well known, you’re running the risk that the sales organization at EA is gonna put a sales projection on the thing of like 500,000 copies, and then your finances may not work, and then you’re not gonna get greenlighted. So, yes it could be done, but it’s still gonna have to go through the typical greenlight process in order to go forward.” “I tweeted about a DA tactics-style game when I was really frustrated during Joplin’s development, basically saying, would people be interested in a DA Tactics? But we weren’t really investigating it. Again, because budget envelope is budget envelope, you’d have to steal that money from somewhere else and somehow get EA to greenlight it. Like, when I was pitching Mass Effect: Corsair, the DS space-flight combat traitor game, we were getting sales projections of like 50,000 units. So you can’t make a game that’s gonna sell 50,000 units at EA. There was never a DA tactics game ever actually pitched.”
Q. Was there ever any talk of a talking darkspawn companion in DA?
A. “I think so, I remember a piece of concept art, but I can’t remember what game it was. Maybe it was DA4. But I do feel like the answer to this is yes, but I don’t remember when.” [looks at chat] “Oh, okay, so it was Joplin, okay. That was where darkspawn was.”
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“EA will never consider selling the DA IP.”
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“Did BioWare have the talent to make Anthem? No. But the promise of that game was so big that that was largely overlooked.”
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Q. Does he think the current BioWare team would touch a future DA? Is the rivalry that big?
A. “I don’t think at this point it’s the rivalry, I just think that someone at BioWare would have to pitch doing another DA, and I can’t imagine, of the people who remain, who that person would be.”
Q. What happened to modding support after DA:O?
A. “I mean in DA2, it was just, we didn’t have time to do anything else, it was just, ship game. We did talk about doing mod support both for DA:I and for Joplin, but it’s Frostbite, and we needed to get the Frostbite team on board, and for DA:I, they were not interested at all. And for Joplin, Joplin never happened, so. Would it have happened? Probably not. It was basically because Frostbite.”
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“I will do a Memories and Lessons video on DA:TV eventually, but I probably have to give the game a bit more breathing room before that happens.”
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“EA doesn’t sell things. There is no chance [of ‘rescuing’ BioWare from EA]. BioWare will be part of EA, unless EA gets in such a state that either it’s spinning studios off for some financial reason, or it’s selling things because it’s about to go bankrupt, which doesn’t seem likely at this time.”
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“I don’t know, and I can’t prove this, and the person that had pushed this is gone from EA. My belief is that DA was pushed to be a live service because they needed an excuse to pull all the people onto Anthem, and they wanted it, because they wanted everything to be live service, but it wasn’t specifically that they wanted a DA to be live service. They wanted everything to be a live service, and they wanted everyone on Anthem, but I can’t prove that.”
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BioWare hasn’t had a relationship with CD Projekt since before Witcher 2.
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“[before Joplin got scrapped] gameplay would’ve been more like DA:I. I’m pretty sure we were probably still gonna drop tactical view, because it wasn’t used very much in DA:I and it is an expensive feature in terms of level art. So we were probably gonna end up losing that feature again anyway, but gameplay-wise, yeah, more like DA:I than like DA:TV. Tone, I mean it was kind’ve probably similar, we were headed in that direction, it was a heist kind of game so there would be, it would be quippy, that’s sort’ve the nature of that kind of setting/story.”
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“There is a very vocal group [of fans] on [about] DA:O, it’s very CRPG, it’s very hardcore, core game, so it made a big impact, and for some people it’s their first DA, which makes sense, it’s the first one, and so therefore it’s always gonna be the [airquotes] true one, but I don’t know that it actually is true that [that group of fans] is the most vocal group.”
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“I don’t know anything about where the cover of ‘Heroes’ [the song in one of the DA:TV trailers] came from, honestly, I mean I assume they paid for it, but they probably don’t have rights to release it on its own.”
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“Harding was just written as a, ‘we need someone to introduce these levels’. And then became a character who became a follower in DA:TV.”
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“Some of DA:TV’s reception, I do think that BioWare should have been communicating more clearly about what the game was and wasn’t, and that would have helped. I do think that, by not having the Keep for example, it not only didn’t have its core as its defenders, some of its core were actually on the other side of the conversation. So there are problems in the game, for sure, but also, I think, it could have done a couple of things in terms of interacting with the community, but also a couple of relatively small features that would have made a big difference.”
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“There were times when EA or BioWare management temporarily froze hiring. Were there any significant layoffs connected with these hiring freezes or shifts in company strategy? I suspect that’s probably what happened more recently with BioWare. Usually, hiring freezes are done because of corporate level, it’s done at the corporate level, because they are looking at the finances of the entire organization, not typically for an individual studio, but I don’t know exactly what happened with the more recent layoffs at BioWare.”
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“The branching narrative of the final conversation in DA:O, it’s got 3500 paths through the thing, so that’s probably the most complicated branching dialogue that’s ever existed in BioWare’s history.”
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“If ME5 does well, I think they’re gonna do another ME, and them probably another ME, and then we’ll see.”
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“I’m not looking to go back to BioWare.”
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“[on BioWare becoming independent] I don’t know how that would even work, to be honest.”
Q. Is David [Gaider?] right about DA being on the chopping block?
A. “So basically, EA kind’ve wants to only be making 6 or 12 games and every time it’s made a list of those games, DA has barely made the list, so, there you go, so yeah, kinda, it’s kinda been barely making the cut for a while.”
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“I don’t think, Exodus and the Expanse game succeeding or failing doesn’t affect BioWare in any way. To be honest, having some other successful studios in the space, probably good for them. It shows EA that similar studios can be successful, and maybe it also can help file off a few rough edges. I hope both of those games do great, because I actually think it’s good for BioWare.”
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“The most costly game that I worked on was probably DA:TV. I did do a little bit of work on SW:TOR which certainly was the most expensive game before then, but I suspect DA:TV probably crossed it in budget. Excluding inflation, maybe not, but with inflation, almost definitely.”
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“BioWare doesn’t always handle turnover and ensuring skills are passed onto future developers/the next gen great. Ideally you shouldn’t have single points of failure, so that if someone leaves, there’s someone else to pick up the slack and train the next person, but yeah, not always amazing.”
