#mark darrah

[dragonageconfessions]

CONFESSION:

My confession. I recently discovered Mark Darrah's youtube channel and Its really made me understand game development better. I especially appreciate his sharing of his Dragon Age Memories. I've come to see things differently and I've come to understand why some things/elements/aspects I would like to see can't be done yet because the technology is not there to include it. Its also made me filter out a lot of people in the fandom who post conspiracy theories and really bad takes on Dreadwolf, etc. Its made me realize how many in the fandom come out of the woodwork thinking they know everything about game development when they really don't

[anneapocalypse]

"So there was a controversy that caught me a bit by surprise. When the leak occurred that we were doing qunari as a playable race, there was an immediate backlash because the assumption was that we would only have male qunari. This was never the intention, but because the news was coming out through a leak, it was missing necessary context about the fact that we were doing male and female qunari. So we actually had to get ahead of this, or try to regain control of this narrative at PAX, because the narrative out there was that we were going to put out a game with male-only qunari, which was never the case. So one thing I would say is if you're getting news through leaks, chances are that you're going to be missing a piece of context. Sometimes that's going to mean that you're misinterpreting the news that you're hearing."

--Mark Darrah, Dragon Age: Inquisition - PAX 2013 (Mark Darrah Reacts)

[mrs-gauche]

An important announcement from Mark Darrah

[thebookworm0001]

[fenharel]

really insightful and nuanced take on the whole discourse around bg3 in case anyone is interested

[exhausted-archivist]

"No, I'm not gonna do your little FedEx quest." - Mark Darrah

This was mentioned in his new video Non-Standard Game Over when talking about how Hawke can tell Flemeth no in the prologue. Honestly the best summary of the interaction.

[byfeldonscane]

At this point, whatever shackles EA had placed upon the multiple dev teams that have tried to make the fourth Dragon Age title have ostensibly loosened, if not fallen off entirely. No longer will this be a live-service, multiplayer title, à la Anthem, and no longer will it feature in-game purchases. Dreadwolf is shaping up to have its very own vision, long-fought, and with that comes a great deal of positive potential.

[bunabi]

girl what happened to just creating fanwork to satisfy your needs

going directly to the developers for canonical changes to the work has gotta stop like what happened to boundaries

[bittershroom]

Mass Effect 2s vision statement was ‘ The Dirty Dozen In Deep Space’ 

[dragonageconfessions]

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Memories and Lessons from Mark Darrah

This is long but its every interesting and worth watching when you get the chance.

[anneapocalypse]

Mark Darrah's Memories and Lessons on Dragon Age: Inquisition

Former BioWare developer and Executive Producer Mark Darrah talks about the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

A summary of major points:

If Dragon Age 2 had come out any later, it would have been post-Skyrim, and regardless of what changes had been, it would have been difficult for that kind of game to hold up in comparison to Skyrim.

Dragon Age: Inquisition exists and was developed in a post-Skyrim world. Skyrim changed the gaming landscape.

Frostbite was basically the only choice for DAI. Unreal was not on the table as an option for them at the time the choice was made.

Frostbite was great for art and level design, but at the time it was not ready for RPGs—so the art team was able to get to work right away, while the dev team had to get certain systems built before they could really begin.

In the early days, they had a hard time boiling down DAI into a 30-second pitch or vision statement.

Q3 2013 was the planned release date for DAI. It actually shipped a year later. Execs at EA wanted a launch title for the next gen consoles, and they wanted to replicate the fast and cheap turnaround of DA2. Darrah says that he and the devs never believed in that date—they expected to go back and push for more time later—but they to agree to 2013 in order to get started. This also meant that they had to scope the game as if it would ship in 2013, planning for a much smaller game than the eventual finished product. Notably, he says that while the devs had always wanted to put playable races back in after DA2, it was due to the executive pressure to ship in 2013 that they initially scoped the game without them, with the hope that they could add them in later.

Mounts were a table stakes feature for fantasy games at the time. DAI had to have mounts to check that box, but chose to deprioritize them so they didn't take over the game. (Darrah has another video on why mounts are harder than you think.)

Darrah describes DAI's structure as "multi-region open world" and thinks it's a good model if you want your story to take place over a large geographical area.

At the PAX 2013 demo (which Darrah has also made a detailed video about), they still hadn't really nailed down how the player would control the Inquisition's power across territory. They didn't ultimately want it to be a heavily tactical game to the detriment of the RPG elements. Eventually they found a balance in the War Table, though Darrah feels it's a little short of what they wanted. He thinks it would have been great to go further letter the player play with Skyhold as a fortress, and as central to a quest.

Scout Harding was a late addition to the game, designed to introduce the areas, give some life to each new area, and establish the Inquisition's presence there.

Darrah calls the Hinterlands "basically a trap," because it has so much relatively mundane content and doesn't adequately urge the player to go advance the plot. After launch, they immediately realized the problem and began adding in some content to give some sense of urgency to advancing the plot.

As they were populating the regions with content, they actually played Skyrim to see what made the open world work even in large, isolated spaces. Darrrah notes that you're never far from some sign of life in Skyrim—a note, some kind vignette that tells a story, etc. He calls these "designer hugs," and says that it's a lesson they learned pretty late in development.

DAI's tactical camera is "a bit of a compromise." Unlike DAO, it doesn't have a freely-moving camera, something that makes level design more complicated as you have to make sure the camera doesn't show anything it's not supposed to. Darrah doesn't expect that we'll see tac-cam in Dreadwolf, but adds, "I guess we'll see."

"Operation: Sledgehammer": In late 2013, after getting their extra time, all the writers plus Darrah and Laidlaw got together to try and scope the story into something they could finish and which made sense. He thinks it's really the characters that make DAI, not the story. He acknowledges that Corypheus's plan isn't really very well established. "Characters are what drive BioWare games, not plot," he says, and the story needs to make enough sense to hang your characters off of it.

Darrah considers the Hissing Wastes a great example of size for the sake of size, and specifically for the purpose of being "bigger than Skyrim." They were also in a "pissing contest" with The Witcher 3 over things like number of possible endings (which the DAI team was counting in terms of the number of possible combinations of end slides). Darrah thinks that sharing your numbers is often a bad idea and potentially misleading. "Size != quality."

A lot of core features weren't put into the game until after they had declared Alpha.

DAI was always intended to be a multi-gen console launch. EA was worried that the uptake rates on the next-gen consoles would be slow, and that a next-gen-only launch would hurt sales. Compromises had to be madeto be sure the game could run on last-gen, losing things like density of NPCs and eliminating even the possibility of mounts for companions. Darrah still thinks the multi-gen launch was a mistake, but it's a difficult decision to reverse late in development.

Darrah maintains that the base game is not incomplete on its own. Corypheus is the villain of the game; the game ends with defeating Corypheus. What is revealed about Solas in Trespasser and even in the post-credits scene is additional. But he thinks that the backlash to Trespasser will have made BioWare gun-shy to ever do another post-game DLC, which he thinks is kind of a shame.

Story DLC is not cheap to make, and has a tendency to fall into "attach rate hell" and be less profitable than the base game, even lower the overall profitability of the title by percentage.

Darrah suspects a lot of his viewers don't even know a multiplayer mode exists in DAI.

The Mass Effect 3 team felt that the MP mode helped them to more easily refine the combat for the whole game, but it also had drawbacks. The multiplayer mode was perceived by players as mandatory because when the game shipped, you couldn't achieve max readiness without playing. This was actually a bug and not intentional, and was later patched, but it generated a negative response.

DAI's multiplayer mode (or DAMP, as it was called) did not help the combat in the same way, because due to the different ways that Dragon Age utilizes party members compared to Mass Effect, the mechanics had to be rebalanced for DAMP where players only controlled one character. The team also overcorrected for the ME3 backlash, and DAMP had very little visibility.

For a brief time, DAMP was free to download and play in hopes that it would be an onboard ramp to new players. EA didn't love that strategy, and it didn't last long.

EA has tried Origin subscriptions and early access as a subscriber perk as a means to generate additional revenue streams. Darrah does not like early access; it allows opinion on a game to solidify before the game is even really selling.

DAI's branding moves away from the red and white color scheme of the first two games. Darrah thinks they lost a certain distinctiveness, but understands the decision.

Collector's Editions of games are becoming less common in an increasingly digital world, with some titles offer "Collector's Editions" that are really just the collection of special merch without the actual game, allowing the game to be acquired separate however the player chooses. Darrah likes the DAI Collector's Edition but thinks it lacked the one big standout item, like a statue, that many such editions have.

Dragon Age: Inquisition received a number of Game of the Year awards in 2014, but that year also turned out to be a tough year for games, with fewer GOTY awards given out overall than other years. A lot of intended launch titles for the next gen consoles had been pushed back to 2014, and then pushed back again. Darrah also wonders how much The Witcher 3 changed based on the reception to DAI.

Darrah is overall really proud of DAI, saying that of the games he's led it's the closest to what they were going for.

Things Mark would change, with a remaster or a time machine:

Make it smaller. Cut the Hissing Wastes, one of the areas in the Dales, and possibly another region, and it wouldn't really affect the quality of the game.

Tune down the Power required to progress the plot.

Don't make the Hinterlands the first open area, or at least create a stronger push to get the player going to other areas, and progressing the story.

Time machine option, where anything is possible: Use Unreal instead of Frostbite. Building on Unreal doesn't necessarily make DAI better, but it might lead to better development for Andromeda and Anthem.

Darrah predicts two more videos in his "Memories and Lessons" series: one encompassing Anthem, Andromeda, and "Joplin" (the codename for the scrapped early concept for DA4), and another video for "Morrison" (the codename used for what is now called Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.

[mrs-gauche]

I can't stop thinking about this joke my friend made yesterday. We were chatting about Mark Darrah's return to BioWare and how he had made a comment saying that his role as consultant was now primarily focusing on, quote, "lore and landing" and what that even means, when my friend was like

"Picture Darrah's first day back, standing in front of the whole dev team, pointing at the game's title: So first of all, that is not how you spell Dread Wolf -"

[s1ithers]

da2 friends i've got to stump for the full dialogue interface mod (shows you the actual line & gets rid of the tone indicators) my god. whole different game. the closest i've ever played my girl to how i envision her, million times more organic experience

my middling warm take is that hawke isn't really any more of a 'set character' than the da:o origins, but having to choose lines out of one of three labeled personality buckets makes it seem like they are. genuinely adore the personality-tracking mechanic but i wish it did it quietly under the hood

[alistairkisser]

listen we all complain about the writers of DA a lot but there are many other people on the development teams who contributed to making the games terrible and i think we should give them their time in the spotlight also