David Gaider on the recent BioWare shakeup
Dec 7, 2020 17:07:24 GMT
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Post by Hrungr on Dec 7, 2020 17:07:24 GMT
I missed the stream with David and Liam Esler (Summerfall Studios) on Friday, but I was gifted this summary of their discussion on the shakeup, bringing in new blood, and working with EA.
David Gaider on Mark Darrah and Casey Hudson’s departures, he said this on a recent stream: “The big news.” He knows a lot of people were pointing at his surprise on Twitter (second from the top) as if that makes their departures somehow more significant, but “honestly, don’t look at that as anything but the fact that David Gaider is out of the loop”. He still has friends at BW but no longer lives with someone who works at BW, so it’s not a day to day thing, and of course, currently the pandemic means that he’s not going to casually come into contact with them either. “So my surprise is only just, I had no idea that that was gonna happen and I reacted to it on Twitter, the same as anyone else and that’s it.” He also knows that a lot of people were like “Oh nooo!! Dragon Age, Dragon Age…” (worried about what the departures mean for the franchise and the upcoming game) and he can speak relatively freely as he no longer works for BW and hasn’t done so for 5 years now: “I have nothing to fear so what you’re hearing now is not corporate speak.” He says he would say that people should take the “omg this is the end of DA” stuff with a big grain of salt.
Some people have said that Executives don’t make games, and that is true. On one hand, Mark was the project director of DA which is a very powerful position as you set the overall tone for the game. In that position, you don’t make the game but you make a lot of important positions. Mark always had a really light hand with DA in that he liked to give a lot of authority and ownership to his leads, for good or bad. “The fact that he’s moved on and is going to be replaced by someone I don’t know, the fact that I don’t know him doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to be bad. People forget, when I left, I left DA a year before I left BW. It wasn’t because I didn’t love BW it’s because I was done. That’s what happens sometimes with people, they get done and they move on because they think ‘you know what, it’s probably better if I go’. And that’s how I thought.” At the time DG felt that if he kept working on DA he wasn’t going to produce good stuff. It was feeling like he was repeating himself and he didn’t feel like he had any stories left for the world, “so somebody else [should] come in with a fresh take and do much better”. It doesn’t mean that the new person will automatically do better of course, “I don’t know him, I don’t know what his goals are”. But DA is an established thing. “He was the EP on Anthem, and whatever he was doing on Anthem it was to make Anthem a better Anthem”. But that doesn’t mean he is automatically going to bring Anthem stuff over to DA (as again, DA is pretty established).
If he does, well, that would be different, but sometimes it’s time for a fresh voice. “Maybe it was that in this case. Maybe something went on. I honestly couldn’t tell you. Gaider is out of the loop. And nobody who currently works at BW would give you a straight answer in either case, because that’s just, you just don’t do that. You don’t give the goss on the inside, that doesn’t happen, you’re never gonna get it. Unless of course Mark or Casey decide to speak for themselves, and they certainly can.” He imagines that a lot of people inside of the company don’t actually know what happened - this often happens. Inside you’d hear the rumor mill, but the rumor mill inside a company the size of BioWare and EA is pretty inaccurate. “You’d hear things that people would swear were true, and then later on when you talked to the people actually involved they’d be like ‘no, that isn’t what happened at all’.” So, “I wouldn’t read too much into it. The writing team that I assembled is still there. PW is still there. John Epler is still there. Karin is still there. Matt Goldman is still there.”
DG didn’t always get along with Matt Goldman, but he believed that he [Matt] knew what DA was about and that he held its best interests at heart. They just had occasional differences of opinion in terms of how exactly that would be relayed [in the art direction], but he knew that deep down Matt believed in the same DA that he did. “So these are the people that will be making DA. So don’t lose hope just yet. I mean if anybody would have reason, I mean listen, if anybody would have reason to start crying into their beer and to start worrying that DA might not be awesome, it’s kinda me ok. This is my baby, I want to see it do well, if I was really worried - for the sake of the people I worked with before I might say nothing, I’d hedge my bets, but I certainly wouldn’t lie to you [us the listeners] and say positive things. So don’t go gloom and doom just yet, that’s my suggestion. There’s a lot of stuff that can happen between now and release.”
At this point LE chimed in: He thinks it’s really important to remember to give everyone a chance and remember that everyone is generally trying their best. We should give everyone who is coming into the new leadership a chance to do their best work. That work might be different from what has come before, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing. In fact, he’d argue that often, trying to repeat the same thing as before is often what makes games terrible. He’s excited to see what happens and what this brings to DA. Remember that a lot of the core team is still there. The project is unlikely to suddenly rapidly shift gears.
DG: “Unless that was their marching orders, like unless say EA came to Mark and/or Casey. Although Casey is [was] the studio director, I don’t think they’d be involved in day today, and that he’d be that involved, but who knows, who knows. Maybe they came and said ‘we’d like to change DA to [this or that]’ and Mark/Casey was like ‘fuck that, I’m out’. That’s possible but I really have my doubts that EA would reboot DA yet again, that would be really strange. But I guess we’ll see. We have this new guy, maybe he’s like ‘awesome I get to work on DA’, maybe he loves DA, I dunno. I guess it’ll be interesting to see.” New leadership! “Although I say a lot of the team is still there, they will have to do what they’re told. When DG was on DA a lot of people assumed ‘DG is in charge of everything relating to the setting and can do whatever he wants’ and that was never true. I always had people over me.”
The higher you go up in the hierarchy or food chain at BioWare (at BioWare, not talking about EA), the more of your time is taken up dealing with EA (this is DG’s understanding). Someone at the Aaryn Flynn or Casey Hudson level is spending all of their time in meetings with EA doing very high-level stuff. So like, for example, if Aaryn Flynn had something to say that would affect the game project they were working on, that was probably being filtered down from above. He would never say it directly, he’d say it to their leads, people like Mark. Then Mark would meet with the project leads and he’d say “this is coming down the pipe and we have to do this.” And by the time someone at DG’s level or below got the info they’d have no idea that it had even come from Aaryn.
LE: “There is some anti-EA sentiment in the chat and I wanna - publishing is very complex. The relationship between a studio and a publishing arm is often very complex and it’s rarely as simple as saying that the publisher is always the bad influence.” It’s always complex, sometimes it is the publisher saying that they have certain expectations, but often it’s also the studio. If a publisher sets a series of expectations, the studio then makes decisions in order to try and meet those expectations. So it’s not like there’s always one party is at fault. “That is so rarely the case.”
DG: “In my experience, the publisher is always willing to absorb, you know like, be the bad cop. They’re like whatever, it’s fine. And I find that a lot of times the problems were happening at the studio level. By the time EA gets involved, those problems were already sorta existing. I mean I think that in the past, and maybe there’s an element of this to BW too, I dunno, but in the past, EA took on a troubled studio. They bring them on and those problems still exist, but from the outside, it looks like they only existed once EA bought them and that’s generally not true.” There’s a bit of corporatization where EA do what seems natural to them, where they want to make the policies and the pipelines at the studio match that of EA. So they’re like ‘we need to change the way your management structure works to follow the way we do things’. That’s when the changes start and there is an element of “Now people whose time is taken up dealing with EA become sort’ve, as insulated from the reality of the project as the people at EA.” This insulation is where DG thinks a lot of those decisions get made. In his experience, the people at EA all mean well and are all just trying to do their best. “I really don’t think, in my opinion, that EA deserves the bad rep they’ve gotten, and I worked for them for 5 years. The kinds of things that people lay on their shoulders are the kinds of things that happen in all big companies just by virtue of them being giant behemoths where the right-hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. But they get extra visceral hate for it because the corporate stuff that affects companies happens to affect companies that gamers love and attach a lot of feelings and ownership towards. Often those gamers weren’t even aware that there were problems at a studio before EA took it over so they’re like ‘big bad EA came in and destroyed everything’.”
LE: "It’s also the job of the publisher to cop the flak and be the bad guy because someone has to be and often it’s easier and better for the publisher to take responsibility for that."
David Gaider on Mark Darrah and Casey Hudson’s departures, he said this on a recent stream: “The big news.” He knows a lot of people were pointing at his surprise on Twitter (second from the top) as if that makes their departures somehow more significant, but “honestly, don’t look at that as anything but the fact that David Gaider is out of the loop”. He still has friends at BW but no longer lives with someone who works at BW, so it’s not a day to day thing, and of course, currently the pandemic means that he’s not going to casually come into contact with them either. “So my surprise is only just, I had no idea that that was gonna happen and I reacted to it on Twitter, the same as anyone else and that’s it.” He also knows that a lot of people were like “Oh nooo!! Dragon Age, Dragon Age…” (worried about what the departures mean for the franchise and the upcoming game) and he can speak relatively freely as he no longer works for BW and hasn’t done so for 5 years now: “I have nothing to fear so what you’re hearing now is not corporate speak.” He says he would say that people should take the “omg this is the end of DA” stuff with a big grain of salt.
Some people have said that Executives don’t make games, and that is true. On one hand, Mark was the project director of DA which is a very powerful position as you set the overall tone for the game. In that position, you don’t make the game but you make a lot of important positions. Mark always had a really light hand with DA in that he liked to give a lot of authority and ownership to his leads, for good or bad. “The fact that he’s moved on and is going to be replaced by someone I don’t know, the fact that I don’t know him doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to be bad. People forget, when I left, I left DA a year before I left BW. It wasn’t because I didn’t love BW it’s because I was done. That’s what happens sometimes with people, they get done and they move on because they think ‘you know what, it’s probably better if I go’. And that’s how I thought.” At the time DG felt that if he kept working on DA he wasn’t going to produce good stuff. It was feeling like he was repeating himself and he didn’t feel like he had any stories left for the world, “so somebody else [should] come in with a fresh take and do much better”. It doesn’t mean that the new person will automatically do better of course, “I don’t know him, I don’t know what his goals are”. But DA is an established thing. “He was the EP on Anthem, and whatever he was doing on Anthem it was to make Anthem a better Anthem”. But that doesn’t mean he is automatically going to bring Anthem stuff over to DA (as again, DA is pretty established).
If he does, well, that would be different, but sometimes it’s time for a fresh voice. “Maybe it was that in this case. Maybe something went on. I honestly couldn’t tell you. Gaider is out of the loop. And nobody who currently works at BW would give you a straight answer in either case, because that’s just, you just don’t do that. You don’t give the goss on the inside, that doesn’t happen, you’re never gonna get it. Unless of course Mark or Casey decide to speak for themselves, and they certainly can.” He imagines that a lot of people inside of the company don’t actually know what happened - this often happens. Inside you’d hear the rumor mill, but the rumor mill inside a company the size of BioWare and EA is pretty inaccurate. “You’d hear things that people would swear were true, and then later on when you talked to the people actually involved they’d be like ‘no, that isn’t what happened at all’.” So, “I wouldn’t read too much into it. The writing team that I assembled is still there. PW is still there. John Epler is still there. Karin is still there. Matt Goldman is still there.”
DG didn’t always get along with Matt Goldman, but he believed that he [Matt] knew what DA was about and that he held its best interests at heart. They just had occasional differences of opinion in terms of how exactly that would be relayed [in the art direction], but he knew that deep down Matt believed in the same DA that he did. “So these are the people that will be making DA. So don’t lose hope just yet. I mean if anybody would have reason, I mean listen, if anybody would have reason to start crying into their beer and to start worrying that DA might not be awesome, it’s kinda me ok. This is my baby, I want to see it do well, if I was really worried - for the sake of the people I worked with before I might say nothing, I’d hedge my bets, but I certainly wouldn’t lie to you [us the listeners] and say positive things. So don’t go gloom and doom just yet, that’s my suggestion. There’s a lot of stuff that can happen between now and release.”
At this point LE chimed in: He thinks it’s really important to remember to give everyone a chance and remember that everyone is generally trying their best. We should give everyone who is coming into the new leadership a chance to do their best work. That work might be different from what has come before, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing. In fact, he’d argue that often, trying to repeat the same thing as before is often what makes games terrible. He’s excited to see what happens and what this brings to DA. Remember that a lot of the core team is still there. The project is unlikely to suddenly rapidly shift gears.
DG: “Unless that was their marching orders, like unless say EA came to Mark and/or Casey. Although Casey is [was] the studio director, I don’t think they’d be involved in day today, and that he’d be that involved, but who knows, who knows. Maybe they came and said ‘we’d like to change DA to [this or that]’ and Mark/Casey was like ‘fuck that, I’m out’. That’s possible but I really have my doubts that EA would reboot DA yet again, that would be really strange. But I guess we’ll see. We have this new guy, maybe he’s like ‘awesome I get to work on DA’, maybe he loves DA, I dunno. I guess it’ll be interesting to see.” New leadership! “Although I say a lot of the team is still there, they will have to do what they’re told. When DG was on DA a lot of people assumed ‘DG is in charge of everything relating to the setting and can do whatever he wants’ and that was never true. I always had people over me.”
The higher you go up in the hierarchy or food chain at BioWare (at BioWare, not talking about EA), the more of your time is taken up dealing with EA (this is DG’s understanding). Someone at the Aaryn Flynn or Casey Hudson level is spending all of their time in meetings with EA doing very high-level stuff. So like, for example, if Aaryn Flynn had something to say that would affect the game project they were working on, that was probably being filtered down from above. He would never say it directly, he’d say it to their leads, people like Mark. Then Mark would meet with the project leads and he’d say “this is coming down the pipe and we have to do this.” And by the time someone at DG’s level or below got the info they’d have no idea that it had even come from Aaryn.
LE: “There is some anti-EA sentiment in the chat and I wanna - publishing is very complex. The relationship between a studio and a publishing arm is often very complex and it’s rarely as simple as saying that the publisher is always the bad influence.” It’s always complex, sometimes it is the publisher saying that they have certain expectations, but often it’s also the studio. If a publisher sets a series of expectations, the studio then makes decisions in order to try and meet those expectations. So it’s not like there’s always one party is at fault. “That is so rarely the case.”
DG: “In my experience, the publisher is always willing to absorb, you know like, be the bad cop. They’re like whatever, it’s fine. And I find that a lot of times the problems were happening at the studio level. By the time EA gets involved, those problems were already sorta existing. I mean I think that in the past, and maybe there’s an element of this to BW too, I dunno, but in the past, EA took on a troubled studio. They bring them on and those problems still exist, but from the outside, it looks like they only existed once EA bought them and that’s generally not true.” There’s a bit of corporatization where EA do what seems natural to them, where they want to make the policies and the pipelines at the studio match that of EA. So they’re like ‘we need to change the way your management structure works to follow the way we do things’. That’s when the changes start and there is an element of “Now people whose time is taken up dealing with EA become sort’ve, as insulated from the reality of the project as the people at EA.” This insulation is where DG thinks a lot of those decisions get made. In his experience, the people at EA all mean well and are all just trying to do their best. “I really don’t think, in my opinion, that EA deserves the bad rep they’ve gotten, and I worked for them for 5 years. The kinds of things that people lay on their shoulders are the kinds of things that happen in all big companies just by virtue of them being giant behemoths where the right-hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. But they get extra visceral hate for it because the corporate stuff that affects companies happens to affect companies that gamers love and attach a lot of feelings and ownership towards. Often those gamers weren’t even aware that there were problems at a studio before EA took it over so they’re like ‘big bad EA came in and destroyed everything’.”
LE: "It’s also the job of the publisher to cop the flak and be the bad guy because someone has to be and often it’s easier and better for the publisher to take responsibility for that."
