Dragon Age News Thread

Q: Anonymous asked:
 in recent news, bioware's lead writer left the studio. How damaging is to lose a lead writer compared to losing other positions in the middle of development?

A: Not very. Writing really isn’t that different from the other design roles on the team, and is really a sub-lead position below the lead designer and creative director. Remember, [the writer doesn’t dictate the story for the entire game], they create the narrative glue that takes you from gameplay to gameplay. Let’s talk a little about the “lead” title and what it actually means for a moment.



The lead dinglehopper isn’t actually the best dinglehopper on the team who does the most critical dinglehopping; it’s actually the person who manages all of the other dinglehoppers on the team. As such, the lead dinglehopper actually doesn’t do a lot of dinglehopping - the lead dinglehopper spends most of her time in meetings making sure that the overall dinglehopping is on schedule, that any other systems aren’t being blocked by the dinglehopping progress, and that each dinglehopper is assigned tasks that they are best prepared to handle.



If the lead dinglehopper leaves, someone else will be appointed to lead dinglehopper and assume those same duties of keeping everyone else on track. There are also different levels of existing dinglehoppers - there’s the junior dinglehoppers that just started dinglehopping, mid-level dinglehoppers who have been at it for a while, and senior dinglehoppers who are experts at dinglehopping and generally mentor the junior dinglehoppers. One of the senior dinglehoppers is the most likely candidates to be promoted to lead because that person will likely have been handling some of those responsibilities already.



Will the overall direction of dinglehopping on the team change because of a lead’s departure? Sure, different people are different and person A might zig where person B might zag. But does it mean there’s a disaster brewing if the lead dinglehopper leaves? Nah, it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, because AAA games are built by teams, and [those teams have a lot of strong talent spread out over many developers and not just singular rockstars].