When Will DA4 be released?/ Bioware's release strategy.

honestly given what was happening Joplin would've likely both been live service and mp...at least having elements there of given that was the trend Bioware was going through at the time.

I said in the past, 2024 or 2025, but if rumors are to be believed, it's probably going to 2026, if there is nothing by then, seems like it will be time to pull the plug.

doesn't matter how much they delay, nothing good ever comes from dev hell.

lol, greatest poll of all time.

Anthem’s lack of vision in Edmonton was even more pronounced in Austin, whose developers suddenly found themselves working on a game they didn’t quite understand.

Even when they did figure out what was happening, it felt to BioWare Austin staff like they were the grunts. Developers who worked both in Austin and Edmonton say the messaging was that Edmonton would come up with the vision and Austin would execute on it, which caused tension between the two studios. BioWare Austin developers recall offering feedback only to get dismissed or ignored by BioWare Edmonton’s senior leadership team, a process that was particularly frustrating for those who had already shipped a big online game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and learned from its mistakes.

When Mark Darrah joined the project in the fall of 2017, he began pushing the Anthem team toward one goal: Ship the game.

“The good thing about Mark is that he would just wrangle everybody and make decisions,” said one former BioWare developer. “That was the thing that the team lacked—nobody was making decisions. It was deciding by panel. They’d almost get to a decision and then somebody would go ‘But what about this?’ We were stagnant, not moving anywhere.”

OH noes ... as a consultant, Mark says he does not have any hard power, and cannot stop a worker from driving off a cliff.

Time to start jumping to conclusions??? LOL

So Mark will use his soft power to influence and encourage making decisions and achieving goals ... and hopefully nudge DAD towards a satisfactory release with everyone pulling to the same goal.

He did talk about how to use soft power to avoid such things right after though.

I think there is some legitimacy to the top given that BioWare has done something like that in the past. 

As for the understanding of what Alpha is though and where it is...well what you describe I am pretty confident is at least Alpha. That all the assets have been pretty much built and that you can play the game from beginning to end but they still need to be put together. Trying to think of a good cake metaphor I guess yeah probably baking the actual cake and watching it rise but you still need to let it cool and then put the other stuff on like frosting and what not. But things like balancing and trying to change numbers around and do polishing all sounds like it falls in the realm of where they should be. 

You seem to be confusing things. Soft power is that comes from respect and how you operate, hard power operates from title or position and thus soft power if properly utilized tends to work far more effectively then hard power. 

Which I also think has been part of BioWare's problems. While its hard to say seems there has been a lot of people just throwing around their weight 'because I am the boss' especially when dealings between Edmenton and Austin. And then from there it also does not matter what power you use whether its hard power or soft power if no one is making any kinds of decisions. 

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I do want to point out that Mark has stated that DAD isn’t the only game he’s consulting for. And in this instance, it would make more sense for the BioWare team to listen to him over other teams as they were previous colleagues and know that his advice is sound. So hopefully he’s referring to a different game he’s working on.