In a recent video posted on YouTube, the ex-BioWare Mark Darrah he lashed out at the so-called magic of Bioware, calling it a “shit system“. The development studio of Dragon Age and Mass Effect is known precisely for having created role-playing games with unique characters and worlds, created through long periods of crunch, justified by the” magic of BioWare “, an expression used by the developers to describe how their games find a definitive shape only in the later stages of development.
But for Mark Darrah, it’s just a way to hide the studio’s problems. According to him, the magic would refer to a graph in the shape of a hockey stick, in which progress is almost invisible for most of the curve, which is flat. Continuing on the same path, the games would take thirty years to launch, according to him. At a certain point, however, there is a “crucial moment” in which the games take shape and in a short time a lot of progress is made. The magic of BioWare would be just that crucial moment.
So, it would simply be another way to make it clear not to worry, because things will go smoothly anyway. Here comes the crunch: To rectify the situation, employees are asked to work for long periods at impossible rates.
Basically for Darrah we are faced only with a wrong way of managing development, certainly not a magic. This would explain for example why there is still nothing to see from Dragon Age 4 or why the company’s titles are often postponed.
Their developers are forced to adapt to this system because BioWare’s games have often turned out to be commercial successes, even if recently this thing is failing, after the debacles of Mass Effect: Andromeda and, above all, Anthem.
Of course Darrah doesn’t see mismanagement as a BioWare problem alone. In the video he explicitly talks about Cyberpunk 2077, developed by CD Projekt Red following similar practices.
#magic #BioWare #system #Mark #Darrah