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felassan · 1 year

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Some more snippets of interest and insight from Mark Darrah, from some older Mark Darrah on Games YouTube videos where he was livestreaming playing Dragon Age: Origins some months ago. (Multiple videos are covered in this post, so the source video of each bullet point is included there) -

"I'm pretty sure that the [in-world] Dragon Age will be an age that lasts a suspiciously long time, as long as there are Dragon Ages being made. I don't think they will drop 'Dragon Age' because it's such an identifiable part of the franchise". [source]

"I totally cannot spoil what the original Black City was supposed to be. I'm pretty sure that the approach to lore in DA has always been to leave it ambiguous to allow the future to go where it needs to go. Though that being said, DA:O was definitely built with the assumption that it was not getting a sequel." [source]

"The Calling is presented as taking decades to kill you on its own. So Alistair would still be alive in DA:I and DA:D if he went that way. I think, if I remember the lore correctly." [source]

"DA:O introduces a lot of hanging plot threads that aren't necessarily resolved. Orzammar potentially sets up a civil war, there's potentially werewolves running around. There's a lot of stuff we've been able to kind've ignore, but there's a lot of stuff that's still out there. The line of succession for Ferelden is open isn't it." [source]

[on the Warden's quest for a cure for the Calling] "I don't think it's established that the cure is actually found is it. Or just that they're looking." [source]

"Likely any cure for the Calling would be to extract the Taint from the person, so you would basically cease being a Grey Warden at that point." [source]

"I think they're treating the Trespasser epilogue slides as canon." [source]

[during DA:O epilogue slides] "You can see, this leaves a lot of threads in a lot of potential different directions that Dragon Age has been dealing with since then, since 2009." [source]

"The resistance that there was for toolset for Frostbite was a feeling like, 'this engine is proprietary, it does a bunch of stuff that we don't want other people to be able to steal'. That's basically not even true anymore. There's actually a feeling now within EA that user-generated content, UGC, is incredibly good, that it's basically free marketing. Like you say, Skyrim has been going forever. So that's why, EA has a really complicated relationship with UGC. What they want is basically, everyone to make TikTok videos and things about how great the game is. They don't necessarily want you to make DLC or Twitch stream the thing but they also recognize that this is not a, you don't get to have one without the other really. Yeah, the 'cost of free ads from fans is fan DLC'. That's pretty much, sums it up perfectly." [source]

"CD Projekt uses slightly different language than BioWare did for DLCs, expansion packs etc. I would not classify the free DLCs from The Witcher as expansion packs, they're DLC. They called them expansion packs but from my perspective, an expansion pack is larger than that but it's a spectrum for sure. The thing I would say about CD Projekt in general is they're amazingly good at picking the right language. So what they did on Witcher 3 is they said, they added a tiny bit of content to each of their patches and said 'this is DLC, we're going to give it away for free, aren't we amazing?' And then they made their DLC a little bit bigger and then said 'these are expansion packs, we're gonna charge for that', brilliant. Honestly brilliant. Because it makes them, it's a great PR move, it also meant that they got a, every time they released a patch they essentially got an article on the gaming sites. It's something that BioWare and frankly DA in particular is pretty bad at, like, naming things, and using language that makes things sound better." [source]

[on The Sims] "'Buy a thing and then later they release more stuff to add to your thing', it's an amazing business model. It's also a business model that EA does not understand, they, like BioWare, suffer from being a thing that exists within the sports-focused EA ecosystem that, constantly trying to explain that 'our players are not the same as your players, you need to let us do what we know how to do'." [source]

"We had a free-to-play version for DA multiplayer, that was Hendrix. It's not on the, EA didn't want it to exist so it was only on the servers for a little while, a couple of months, but it was actually there. I'm sure it's not up anymore." [source]

"I don't know if Frostbite is gonna die. I think there's a very good chance that what's going to happen is, it may become the next sports engine. FIFA is a monolith and has taken over the driver's seat for that engine. I don't think they're gonna be very interested in switching again. Even if active Frostbite development in general goes away, FIFA will keep going and then a bunch of other games live in the rain shadow of FIFA, like NHL." [source]

"If it was up to me, I'd probably have forced Mass Effect onto Frostbite. And I would be strongly inclined to keep Dragon Age on Frostbite for at least one more game because you've built the foundation. The best engine to use is the one you just used. But I don't know what's gonna happen after DA:D to be honest. BioWare seems to be addicted to throwing away work they've done in the past. And it was never up to me." [source]

"Frostbite isn't a recruitment negative but certainly it's a lot easier to find people that already know how to use Unreal. What you actually see in programming is some people, it's not a universal, but some programmers, they don't wanna work in Unreal because they feel like someone else gets to do all the cool programming bits." [source]

"The question for Awakening is should it have even been an expansion pack, or is a different solution to have made it, say, 40% bigger and made it a full-sized game. This is, I think, the reason why expansion packs are so rare these days is because, it's easy to imagine a path from an expansion pack to a $60 or $70 game and then you're getting somewhere between 80-120% attach as opposed to 30% attach. I suspect this is the primary reason why expansion packs have kind've faded away, because 'I'm gonna ship every year' is fairly accepted within games these days. So honestly the pitch for Joplin's live service was 'we're not gonna do a live service, we're gonna do a game, and then we're gonna do another game in 18 months and another 18 months after that. And maybe we'll do one piece of DLC in there, but we'll just be like dunk-dunk-dunk' and the economics for that are great. So that's why expansion packs are gone I think." [source]

"That's the fundamental problem of DA:O not knowing it's gonna have sequels, it leaves the world in a very quantum state. There's still stuff that's hinted at in those [epilogue slides] that are happening sometime in the future that I think are gonna probably at this point be ignored. Probably the biggest issue of DA:O is that it leaves the world in a state that probably wasn't intending that there would be a sequel." [source]

"When we were discussing doing a remaster for the trilogy, my pitch was to essentially retcon it [DA:O, DAII and DA:I] into a trilogy, to make it the 'Champion's Trilogy' or something to that effect, where you group the three games together, imply that they were always intended to be a trilogy kind of, and then that does a couple of things. It packages them into something that stands on its own a bit better, but also lets you potentially change what you're doing with the player character going forward. If you've decided that, okay, we've changed player character every single game up until now, but maybe we're not going to do that going forward, by packaging them together in a remaster you kind've give yourself permission to do that. Certainly DA:D is gonna have a new player character, given that the one from DA:I is missing a limb." [source]

"We probably oversold the Wardens in the marketing for DA:O. Because essentially, what we did was establish them as the coolest thing in the world and then yeah, so the series has definitely been dealing with the aftermath oh 'but not Wardens? Therefore not cool' forever since then." [source]

"But a new player character means you have a harder job every single game, because you have to get people interested, you don't get the shortcut of 'Shepard is Shepard, you know Shepard'." [source]

"Anders is the one that made us rethink how we introduce romances, because a lot of people ended up in romance with him that didn't mean to. We'll see if they come back to that in DA:D, but I think that because of Anders in DAII, DA:I was definitely trying to not 'accidentally do anything to you'. But it does mean that it is very player-controlled and very player-initiated. But maybe they'll be willing to go back to that a little bit." [source]

"Tevinter Nights does a really good job of staying away from violating canon. The thing with, the further you go away from what's in the games the more you are, the less well it's gonna do, so that's not necessarily a problem but it is something to keep in mind that you don't, you're trying to make money with your novels. Setting it in a time period that people don't know is great for the core fans but isn't necessarily gonna do super amazing. The advantage that Tevinter Nights is, because it's an anthology, you're able to just, everything kinda just stands on its own and therefore you're able to just stay away from the major characters to a large degree." [source]

"Varric's definitely not quantum, he's in good shape. Dorian, I feel like Dorian is guaranteed to be around [as in quantum], but maybe not, maybe I'm wrong about that. But the games have gotten better or at least more conscious of what they do with companions as it's gone on, in terms of trying to, being at least aware of the fact that you might want these people to come back, so maybe at least understand the quantum you're putting them in. There's a bunch of followers in DA:I that you might just not recruit. Like Blackwall's pretty easy to miss. Dorian can show up but he doesn't die if you don't recruit him, he's alive. The biggest thing for quantum is 'are they alive', in which, in DA:O there's a lot that don't make it. Then you have to deal with, well they might be [killed/not recruited?] or something but the biggest thing is, if they're alive you can probably make it work." [source]

"I have a feeling that Desire Demons are going to be just, ignored, or, honestly I mean one way to, I think, Desire is seen in a very narrow light in DA:O. I think if you go, if you move into Desire being a much broader concept, you have a lot of options there. I think if you approach Desire in a broader sense I think you have some opportunities. But then you kind've end up with the DA:I problem with the Fear." [source]

He also talked more generally about DA:O and the franchise and things in general. These bits are collected under a cut due to length -

"Orzammar is definitely the place in DA:O that actually looks like Dragon Age. Everything else is kind've generic late 2000s fantasy, pretty much the same as The Witcher. For example, Ostagar has a more generic fantasy visual" [source]

"You know, other than DAII, DA does involve a lot of crossing the entire country to turn around and go back doesn't it" [source]

Chat asked "How well does the vanilla game DA:O play on modern hardware?" Mark replied, "I'm playing it on modern hardware, I don't have everything cranked way up and currently I'm running it in a window. It's running really well. The only thing that happens is if you turn the graphic settings up too far it will blow up because it will run out of memory. It's a 32-bit game and so if you cross 4 gig it will explode. But there are some mods out there that get you around that. That's the only problem with it is that, if you turn it up too far it will become unstable. I'm worried about stability problems during the [Battle of Denerim] part of the game" [source]

"I always found Redcliffe Village in DA:O a bit confusing to move around" [source]

Chat observed that the soil in Redcliffe would be be bad because of all the darkspawn and undead that were there. Some users theorized that the people there moved to a different part of the nearby land to make 'Redcliffe' again. Mark commented, "One of the reasons we felt okay pretty much redesigning Redcliffe in DA:I, because it's kind've broken. You know, we don't show it completely destroyed here but certainly it's hard its struggles" [source]

"I don't know who came up with the ogre-sync kill. Sync kills are really cool for bosses, they become a lot less cool for things when they're constantly happening but they're usually, unfortunately sync kills are often something that end up being de-prioritized as a feature, because they don't actually have a gameplay effect so they're kind've just aesthetics. So they often actually get cut for time reasons" [source]

Mark mentioned that he "certainly [has] some degree of lingering crunch trauma" [source]

[during the Battle of Denerim, when many creatures are on-screen] "DA:O does a good job of selling large groups for a game of its time. We must be doing a trick, something to get all this, because this is way over the creature count limit for DA:O. It's possible that we made special creatures that are way cheaper. Or it's a mixture. Waves is part of it. They aren't dropping any loot so there's definitely something going on" [source]

"Shouldn't there be people in the Wardens who have a bit more training in dragon killing?" [source]

"We probably should have auto-levelled unlevelled party members before the Battle of Denerim" [source]

[on the elves in the alienage during the Battle of Denerim] "Where'd they get the bows? Pretty sure it's frowned upon for elves to have weapons in alienages" [source]

"People do play DA solo which makes it difficult to have any sort of puzzle or anything that requires a group" [source]

[on Sandal] "I told the team if you put him in DA:I you gotta put him in everything because he basically then becomes a central figure of the franchise. So they gave him a rest. So you can blame me for him not being in DA:I" [source]

Chat asked "I'm curious why BioWare never brought back the army spawning mechanic from DA:O to DA:I, I always thought it was epic and underrated". Mark said "We talked about it in DA:I, it was actually a UI thing, we didn't have time to do the UI properly. I mean there's a lot of reasons why you don't get to play with your Inquisition well in DA:I, like to play with the organization, which is actually too bad" [source]

[while fighting baby dragons during the Battle of Denerim] Chat asked "Why are the baby dragons there in the first place?" Mark said "Someone wanted another addition to the combat. But it doesn't really make a lot of lore sense" [source]

[on lock bash] "I like what we tried to do in DA:I, giving you different things for different classes. Didn't really get used effectively. But it does strike me as weird, it didn't at the time, but playing through this, is like, you go into a space, all the chests are locked, you kill everyone, no-one has a key. Like, whose got the key to that chest?" [source]

"DA:O really does do some impressive army stuff given the chunkiness of its engine" [source]

[at end of DA:O] "Probably should have shown Morrigan leaving" [source]

"Alistair would be a fine/adequate king. He just needs a policy wonk to give him ideas" [source]

[during DA:O epilogue slides] "These are the ones that set up the quantum for the rest of the game" [source]

[during DA:O epilogue slides] "It's interesting that we called Dagna a mage" [source]

"I think DA:O still holds together. I mean it wasn't a very attractive game in 2009 and certainly it doesn't look better now than it did then, but I think it holds together. Some of the storytelling choices are problematic from a now perspective, almost everything in the Pearl, and then the whole broodmother bit could be, I mean it's a bit too far, it was probably a bit too far even at the time honestly. The combat holds up pretty well, because it's not 'push a button and immediately do an action' it has aged pretty well. The animations are kinda clunky and things don't line up very great but that's not that bothersome. It would be much more noticeable that it was a problem if things were a bit more direct" [source]

"DA:O has WASD in large part because Oblivion had WASD controls. I remember the transition and being kind've confused as to why you would do that, but yeah it's the right call. In the time that this was in development it became pretty universal" [source]

"How involved was I in Anthem? I was in charge of Anthem for the past 16 months. So a damaging amount" [source]

"Will I do an Anthem stream? I will probably do at least 1 Anthem stream. I might play through the story, I'm not gonna play multiplayer. I might play through the story and play it in pure dark pattern, forcing it to let me play it by myself, but we'll see" [note this video is several months old] [source]

[on Awakening] "Other than Destiny, this is pretty much one of the last expansion packs there ever really was with a retail presence. It's honestly a way better business than DLC. DLC you're attaching, maybe 10% of your people are gonna buy it, whereas expansion packs, 30%. You can spend a lot more money and make a lot more money with an expansion pack" [source]

"I think the idea for DA multiplayer getting harder when somebody died was to try to make the match start to end so that you weren't waiting. I don't know how effective that is, probably not very, but I think that's the thinking" [source]

"I don't think we really were, pretty much I think DA became a series when BioWare got bought by EA. I don't remember the exact moment but you can see by the slides at the end of DA:O there's a bunch of stuff that isn't really completely thinking about the fact that we're gonna have to pick up this ball in future" [source]

"Frostbite shares a lot with Unreal as well from a tools perspective. It wasn't done quite as intentionally. It's funny because the tools for Eclipse for DA:O, there was a specifically-designed wall between the two project streams to prevent this engine from taking too much from Unreal. There was a worry that Epic was going to get mad at us and sue us. Which given everybody elses' engine development was probably unfounded" [source]

"I imagine that a Blight probably increases Warden recruitment. I think it makes sense that people would be interested [right after a Blight was stopped] because you're the heroes on the block, but given what the Wardens know about Blights and things you would think that the responsible thing would be to actually cut recruitment way down, keep the order alive and then as they sense a Blight starting to come, ramp the recruitment way back up again. But I don't know that they know that a Blight is coming early enough to do so, so I guess the worry would be that if they don't keep their order relatively large then they wouldn't have the forces necessary to fight a Blight. Though of course you wouldn't expect another Blight right now, we just finished with one [Mark was playing Awakening's opening sequence at this time]. I think it's, there's darkspawn to fight and despite what they may claim, it's about being big enough to have a political impact on the world so that everyone doesn't ignore their existence and then they show up and no-one remembers who they are. Duncan talks about knowing it was coming but everyone not believing him so it does imply that they know at least some time beforehand. But you probably don't wanna wait til 1 year before it starts happening before you start rebuilding your forces" [source]

"The reason why Awakening was able to ship so close to DA:O was because DA:O moved a huge amount really late in development to do the consoles. So Awakening was pretty much mostly built in 2009, you know in the last 9 months of DA:O development, which was mostly porting it to the consoles. There's no way you were getting an expansion pack out within five months of that size without [this]" [source]

"Awakening is a masterclass in 'people who are familiar with the fools using the tools at their disposal to do some amazing stuff" [source]

"One of the challenges with expansion packs is they kind've have to fit inside the umbrella, even if they're taking place afterwards like this one does [Awakening], they can't raise the stakes too much. Whereas if it was a full-fledged sequel it could kind've do something new, kind've has to. Which is part of the problem with Awakening, given where DA:O leaves the world it's kind've hard to, we didn't really know where we were gonna go for our sequels yet, so that's probably why" [source]

"The problem with not sequel-ing Dragon Age is then what you would have been doing is probably trying to make a fantasy RPG in a new setting and then having this impossible comparison to DA constantly happening, and every single difference being a potential criticism, you can see why that, being a potential big problem. Much as I wouldn't want to wish it upon other dev teams, DAII is what allowed DA to be a series, because it kind've is the one that eats the rock of 'this is not like my previous game' and it kind've gets rid of the worst bits of continuity errors. And so to a large degree I would say that by DAII being this sort of thing that's rushed out to fill a financial gap, it allows the series to become a series. But you know, I wouldn't say that's the fix that everyone should take" [source]

"The problem you have to remember with DAII and 'more time' is very quickly you run into Skyrim releasing, and releasing DAII then, regardless of much much extra effort you put into it, after Skyrim is not a good thing. It has to kind've live there in a pre-Skyrim world. There is stuff that can be done for sure, but there's a limit to what you can do" [source]

"Mass Effect has, Shepard is too tightly associated with ME, so what do you do? Do you just keep bringing him back and making clones of him or something? That was definitely a problem in the case of Mass Effect: Andromeda because you had a younger player character, so therefore the tonal differences were seen as problematic. So it's something that you definitely have to think about" [source]

"With Justice, you do a pretty good job of explaining away anything that happens to Anders" [source]

"Oghren is here in Awakening in part because of again, quantum. Because Wynne could be dead, Leliana could be dead, Alistair could be dead, Sten could be dead or not even recruited. So you don't really have a lot of choices if you wanna bring a companion back." Here chat mentioned that Oghren can be dead. "Oh, so they do [in-game] respond to it [if Oghren was killed in DA:O]. He must have been the least quantum then. The place that you were most likely to kill Leliana in DA:O was at the Urn of Sacred Ashes, and I think we just sort've were like 'the Urn's right there so. She's fine'. Yeah, there needs to be a warrior [in Awakening]. I mean, we could've made a brand new character but. Sten was really likely to die. Lots of people didn't even recruit him. Hers [Leliana's death] is probably the most plausible retcon" [source]

"One of the things that kind've frustrates me a bit about the lore in DA moreso than ME is because it's so quantum, is the linear stuff in the comic books and novels have had, just picked canons on occasion. Which I get because you wanna have Isabela or Sten in the comics, but it does mean that it undermines the player agency there because it's like 'what you did isn't real, because here's what's real because we put it in a comic book'. I really don't like that but given the branching in the games you would've just had to have stayed away from those characters completely, which undermines the storytelling, so I don't know. I don't know what the answer is honestly. It's a good point that it's hard to imagine that Leliana's gonna be like 'sign me up for the Wardens' [source]

[on secondary media] "I don't disagree that you could do lots of prequels, but I think there's a limit" [source]

"The biggest reason why the darkspawn design changed from DA:O to DAII is that the DA:O darkspawn, mainly honestly the ogre, but they don't quite fit into our artistic palette, and there was a strong push from the art team on DAII to move the art direction into something that was ownable and so that's the main reason. It's really just an ownability perspective. But you can kinda see it in Awakening, because like The Withered is starting to look a lot like the DAII darkspawn, or at least he's headed in that direction" [source]

"One of DAII's big art direction things, Eclipse is really good at pushing polygons, so a lot of things in the art direction of DAII are pushing polygons. So they're spikier and they just have a lot more polys in them because it's one of the things it's really good at" [source]

"If you were doing a remaster you would keep the same engine. If you were doing a remake you would switch engines. It's not a remaster if you're switching engines, that's for sure" [source]

"I still maintain that Dog was essentially put through the Joining, but whatever. Technically probably everyone who has had contact with darkspawn blood is not a Warden, but it is a bit, I do think it's one of the things where the Taint and the Blight is a bit, is presented as being more bad than really is pulled off in the games" [source]

(pls note that in places there is a bit of paraphrasing of the info, the best source is always the primary source with full quotes in their original context)

#dragon age: dreadwolf #dragon age 4 #the dread wolf rises #da4 #dragon age #bioware #video games #alistair theirin #fav warden #long post #longpost #morrigan #queen of my heart #anthem #mass effect #next mass effect #mass effect: andromeda #tevinter nights #random spaces sry bc the bullet point list text blocks got too long

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