Dragon Age News Thread

“When BioWare got bought by EA, they were publishing north of twenty to thirty games a year. Now it’s - seven? - I don’t wanna actually put a number on there but yeah, it’s the sports titles, Sims, probably a shooter, and then once in a while a BioWare or Respawn game comes out.”

Q. from the hosts: “Do you reflect fondly on the days when you and your peers could just, from a AAA perspective, sit down and create a game like Dragon Age: Origins, and do you see that that’s kind of faded in a way? Is that a lot less feasible in today’s market?”

A. “It may be a lot less feasible. But honestly I think, what happened with Dragon Age is that Dragon Age always had the misfortune of never being understood by EA and always being sort of pushed to chase a broadening. So you see this in - so, Dragon Age: Origins, just an RPG. By Dragon Age: Inquisition, you’re definitely into action-RPG space. And if you actually look across the RPG space as a whole, I think that’s actually kind of happened everywhere, where there’s been a push towards broader, more accessible features and language. I mean, there was a time when we wouldn’t even say the word ‘RPG’ out loud because it was seen as being too niche. Now, I think, that’s definitely past, people say 'RPG’ now, but I mean honestly, in a lot of ways, the path from Baldur’s Gate 1 to Dragon Age: Inquisition, I think it’s pretty evolutionary. It’s a series of steps towards more action, more accessible features and bits. I think the question is, you can’t sit down and make Baldur’s Gate today as a AAA game, and it was a AAA game, if such a term even existed back then in the nineties, because it doesn’t have the market, and back then it didn’t have the market for the budget you’d spend these days - the industry was just so much smaller. I question whether or not you could sit down and make a Dragon Age: Origins in terms of, that hard, some of the themes in it also just - even at the time it’s actually not the most attractive game, it was already looking years old when it came out, so as a AAA game I think, yeah, Dragon Age: Origins snuck in under the wire honestly, in terms of what it was. But in terms of scope, in terms of size, I think you can still do that, it’s just you gotta maybe aim a little bit differently. You could definitely, you could pretty much make Dragon Age: Origins if you just went out and set out to make a game of that size and basically of similar fidelity, just let the hardware crank it up a little bit, you could probably make that game, well under, these days, well under thirty million dollars. So aim right in the middle of AA and you could definitely make something of that size. The Witcher 3 is huge, Dragon Age: Inquisition is huge, Bethesda is a special entity, but Skyrim is hugely huge.”

“One of the realities is there aren’t that many AAA RPGs or even AA RPGs because they’re the most expensive genre to make, especially from a content perspective, and the longest to make, so you kind of get news by managing to exist.”

“We got bought by EA in 2008 and Dragon Age: Origins had started development in, like, 2002. Originally Dragon Age: Origins was only gonna be on PC.”

[on changing look of qunari from Dragon Age: Origins to Dragon Age II] “Dragon Age: Origins doesn’t really have, it has an art direction, but basically it’s generic fantasy. Every RPG that came out around Dragon Age: Origins pretty much looks like Dragon Age: Origins. So, Dragon Age II, the goal was to make it look like something. And you may not like what it looks like but it looks like something. So it stands on its own, you can look at a screenshot of Dragon Age II and know it’s Dragon Age II. The intention, as I remember, was always that the qunari were going to have horns. We couldn’t do that in Dragon Age: Origins. So Sten just basically looks like a guy and, very much like, with Klingons in Star Trek, I feel like the retcon is almost exactly the same retcon. ‘Yeah, yeah, there are some qunari that don’t have horns’. So it was, I believe, it was always intended and we were able to do it in Dragon Age II. So it was partly driven by art direction and partly driven by a desire to do that in the first place.”

Q. “Was the idea for Anthem born out of BioWare at its heart wanting to try something new, or was it purely driven by looking at games like Destiny, which seems to be the most apt example, or other games where you could drive a long term monetization of this service genre - like how did Anthem come to fruition in its original scope and idea?”

A: “Yeah, so, first thing actually, Anthem started development well before Destiny came out. So Destiny, I would argue, Destiny should have had a greater influence on Anthem than it did. Because I think that there were people in the leadership of that team who refused to make any sort of connective statement like, they would push back on any statement like ‘It’s Destiny with flying’, or anything like that. And I feel like those kind of statements can be incredibly valuable, but, so I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because as we’re getting close to the, I have to do the Memories and Lessons from Dragon Age: Inquisition, but then the one right after that is probably going to be Anthem. So I’ve been thinking about, 'why did this game exist in the first place’? So, the team from Mass Effect 3 didn’t, the leadership team at least, was looking to not be on Mass Effect anymore. So they were basically looking to pitch something new and this was led by Casey Hudson. And there was a, like, Casey has a whole thing of like, a pyramid of process, but basically the goal was to make something that was not Mass Effect, that was different. At the time at Ea, and this is where I’m not sure of the reality, but at the time of EA this is when you have, you know, Frank Gibeau saying, ‘We will never release a game that doesn’t have a live service’, whatever pro-multiplayer, anti-singleplayer rhetoric was being said out loud, that was inside of the company times ten. So the thing that I don’t know the answer to was, I don’t know if Anthem is the game that Casey, or [Anthem’s codename] Dylan, which was the game at the time where Casey, what Casey was pitching in the early days was, ‘This is a new way of telling story, it’s going to be multiplayer in its conception', he had a bunch of kooky distribution models as well that went away, but the goal was ‘We will solve multiplayer storytelling’. And then a bunch of other stuff. The thing that I don’t know is whether or not this is a story that Casey crafted because it was exactly the right story for EA in that moment, or if this is the game that Casey secretly always wanted to make, or some sort of combination of those two things. But the reality is is that it was exactly the right story for EA in that moment; it was BioWare, a game that will win awards, and get lots of positive press, and it’s also gonna be a live service and it’ll make, and this is a time when foot was [gestures upwards], they were just figuring out the possibility of these long-tail live services. So the reality is is, y’know, Dylan got pitched with a well-crafted story that hit the thinking of EA almost perfectly, then Casey leaves in 2014, that story is sooo powerful that I’m trying to get, y’know, Dragon Age 4 funded and the ghost of Casey’s story is beating me in these pitch meetings. So I don’t know, the short answer is I don’t know if this is exactly what they were trying to do, I think a lot of the art direction, I think was very much in line with what they were trying to do, in terms of the – and I know that the design director was, loves Diablo, so it is in some ways trying to be, it lines up with things that people in senior positions like, but it’s not the game that I would’ve set out to make in, like, I guess, 2012. But it was definitely the game that EA wanted to hear that we were making.”

[on Anthem] “Basically when I took over the project, is when, or slightly before maybe, is when that hockey stick [the hockey-stick shape theory is something he talks about on his YouTube channel] flipped. So a couple things on that. One, I would say different genres have different expectations of everything kind’ve meshing together. And this is where, so, this is going to be, I don’t know, me bragging about how I’m terrible, I guess. Arguably there’s only probably, I might be the only person in the entire game industry who could’ve shipped Anthem on its timeline. But the, just the nature of my relationship with the team, but just the way that I think about finaling, but the reality is is that was a mistake. What you actually would’ve been better off, Anthem would’ve been better off with was someone who was incapable of shipping it on its timeline, actually fail to get it across the finish line, so that it then had to step back and maybe do some other stuff. But going back to different genres, RPGs are basically large collections of good-enough features. They’ve got lots of things that are pretty good and then the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In some of these other genres, looter shooters, even normal shooters, that central core has to be rock solid, and I would say, y’know, combat in Anthem at launch is better than good-enough but it’s not, but better than good enough isn’t gonna cut it in that space. The not so classic, but the weird example that I would use is, back on Jade Empire, this was when in the early days when Dead or Alive was out as a fighting game at that time, and then there was another fighting game which was a contemporary of Dead or Alive which was called Kabuki Warriors. So Dead or Alive is y’know, an 80%-rated game, and Kabuki Warriors is a 50%-rated game. Working on Jade Empire and playing both these games against each other, and you could tell that Dead or Alive is the better game, but from inside the RPG space it doesn’t look like a 50%-rated game and an 85%-rated game, it looks like an 85%-rated game and a 75%-rated game. And to a large degree that’s Anthem, is that it’s good but good is bad in this space.”

[on Anthem] “I was the Lead Producer on Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. So that game didn’t position itself very well, and so a lot of BioWare core [fans] bought that game and went ‘This is basically, this is a game for kids’. Of course it was. And y’know, it’s got the mechanics but it’s just not there enough. So the lesson that I learned there, and Casey was doing the same thing, was to try to position Anthem as accurately as possible as we could from a storytelling perspective. I think we actually overdid it, arguably, like I think there’s, it’s certainly not BioWare’s best story, but there is a story in there that’s okay. There were conversations about how it had gone too far, but the reality is is I think the way that, if you wanted to get it up to the level of ‘This is a pretty good BioWare story’, what you don’t have is followers. You have your crew, I mean you have Owen, and it’s kind of almost there, and so you can kind of imagine maybe you could do it, but the lesson there was probably the lesson we should’ve learned from Jade Empire during development where we actually didn’t have a follower originally, and we realized we couldn’t do, the storytelling was just falling flat, because BioWare stories are told through the characters and the character development, much more than through the actual story. I mean, the actual story of most BioWare games is actually pretty stupid, when you sit down, but so is the story of Star Wars, you know, it’s like, farm boy blows up a moon with his feelings, like it’s stupid, but it’s great.”

[on Anthem] “There was a live service team [on Anthem]. It was probably a lot smaller than it should’ve been. So, a couple of things on that actually. So, one, your launch matters a lot, for, if you’ve got a box title, if it’s free-to-play, I think you’ve got a lot more permission to build from nothing. So Destiny has one massive advantage on its launch over Anthem, which is Destiny hadn’t launched yet, so Destiny is competing against a concept that is coming into being - I mean arguably Borderlands I guess - so it has kind’ve the space to flail around for a little bit. Anthem doesn’t get that because Destiny already exists, The Division already exists. Now you could argue that, ‘but Destiny already exists, The Division already exists, you should’ve known what the hell you were doing’. You absolutely should [learn from the mistakes of other developers]. One of the major problems, so Dragon Age: Inquisition spent about 30% of its tech budget on tooling. On Anthem, for reasons I’ll never fully understand, that number is way less than 10%. So you’re going into a live service that are not up to the challenge of delivering content quickly. You have to remember that a big part of the Anthem team was in Austin, where they support Star Wars: The Old Republic, so this is a time that, while they haven’t done this particular kind of live service, they are familiar with live services, they’re screaming that this needs to be happening, but partly, it’s partly that team is getting starved to death in an effort to ship in the fiscal year, partially the tools aren’t there, and then the other thing that really hurt Anthem in its launch, and this is gonna make a bunch of people potentially hate Dragon Age, is, so, BioWare, within EA BioWare is different than most of the other studios. Most of the other studios are essentially serial, and what I mean, and the reason why this matters is this; if you ship, I’ll use examples that actually happen, if you ship Sims 4 and it falls on its face, which it did, then what are those people gonna do? Well, they’re gonna fix Sims 4 cause there’s nothing else for them to do. Your only other choice is to fire them all, and EA has decided that it doesn’t like being that company so much anymore, because it makes them get on lists of 'worst companies in America’. If you ship Battlefield 4, same exact thing happened, fell on its face, what’s that team gonna be doing? They’re gonna be fixing Battlefield, because the next thing they’re gonna be working on would be also Battlefield, so step one, fix the thing you make. If you ship Mass Effect: Andromeda, and it’s not really that good at launch and needs some work, what are those people gonna be doing? Well they’re going into Anthem. If you ship Anthem and it’s not really quite there, there’s an intense amount of pull coming from the Dragon Age [4] team saying ‘We’ve been starving to death since 2014, it’s 2019, where are our people?’ And they’re pulling people and increasing the pressure on this team to slow down. Then you got EA who’s, which is basically a hedge fund that has a video game hobby, saying ‘Spend less money on this dog’, so the problem is is what happens at most studios at EA, if they have a mistake, is there’s a tension that occurs. The corporate is saying ‘Spend less money’ and the studio is able to say ‘What do you want us to do, fire these people? Because then we won’t be able to make the next game?’ and then they kind of reach a point of some sort, like even Battlefront 2 was able to, y’know, spend the time and the money and try to fix it. But at BioWare, often those two forces are pointing in the same direction, saying ‘You know what, let’s just move on to the next thing’, so unfortunately BioWare’s very structure means that it is, isn’t really well-structured to fix its own mistakes, because there’s a pressure, or several pressures to move on to the next thing.”

Q. “Sounds like you’re speaking almost directly to Anthem 2.0.”.

A. “Yeah, it’s partially that. So, again, it’s because, it’s not that me, now running Dragon Age [4] is saying ‘shut that thing down, give me all the people’, but it is me saying ‘I need more people to ship this game’ and EA saying ‘well you’re not allowed to spend any more money, so how are you gonna do that’? ‘Oh well, you know, you got this collection, you’ve got this cost center’, and certainly it doesn’t help that Anthem is completely client-server with relatively expensive servers, and so every single month it’s still running it’s costing money, whereas Destiny, much more sustainable network model so, I mean, yeah, it’s peer-to-peer, I mean it’s brilliant peer-to-peer engineering on Destiny, so I don’t know that I wanna try to replicate that at launch, I think that, technically Anthem’s launch is at least pretty solid. To go peer-to-peer, then you might add additional stability issues on top of everything else.”

Q. “‘Sticktuitiveness’ [stick-to-it] is difficult if your studio does multiple things, right? […] The companies that tend to stick to [games] have those success stories, even if, when they launch, there’s lots of examples where they stuck with it and it turned that corner. It seems like BioWare’s a victim of their own success, they had too many successes for EA to be willing to stick by Anthem long enough that it would’ve probably eventually been successful.”

A. “Yeah, and EA doesn’t like sticking. I mean you can even see, even with a big huge success for EA, Apex Legends, that team had other stuff to do. They didn’t wanna support Apex Legends in live service, they wanted to move onto Star Wars or to whatever else. […] If Anthem had had, like, come out and knocked Destiny off its throne, then yeah, then maybe there’d be 300 people in Austin supporting Anthem in its live service, but it didn’t, and so they, I mean EA doesn’t wanna spend money, ever, so.”

“The game that is the most the game we were trying to make is Dragon Age: Inquisition. We were setting out to make a bigger game with more exploration and bring a lot of things back into the franchise, I think that game is the one that is most that.”

[on having to use Frostbite for Anthem] “So yeah, that decision was basically forced upon the team, but, so people ask that question and I feel like it’s asked from a position of, in a perfect world where any option was available, Dragon Age: Inquisition should have probably been on Unreal, and then everything should have been on Unreal going forward after that. But, two things. Mass Effect: Andromeda uses almost nothing that Dragon Age: Inquisition made and Anthem uses almost nothing that Mass Effect: Andromeda made, so we made three games in a row, on Frostbite, that pretty much started from a blank paper with Frostbite in front of us every single time, which is ssssuuuper stupid. But the question is, is like, okay, so was Frostbite forced upon Anthem? Yes, but in the world that existed at that moment, I know that there are people who were on the development teams in the early days before I was on the team who were trying to, they were arguing for, 'it should be on Unreal’. The reality is the political situation at EA at that time is, you had two options: you use Frostbite or you write your own thing. There was no appetite for Unreal at that time within EA, so it’s like, yeah it’s on Frostbite because the other option was much worse than Frostbite, which was writing your own engine. Now, should Anthem have built upon what has come before it? Of course it should have. That tiny percent, 8% tool spend is a lot more acceptable if you’re building upon the tools spend of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda. Now, very different game, there’s lots of arguments why you wouldn’t do that, those arguments are usually wrong, but there’s lots of arguments there that we made so yeah, I mean, Patrick Söderlund was a rising star within EA throughout the 2010s and that political force meant Frostbite was ascendant in that time period, I mean Spore was resisting moving onto Frostbite and they lost that fight, so.”

Q. “So when you left BioWare in 2020, obviously it’s fair to say that the new Dragon Age, BioWare’s currently working on a new Mass Effect, new Dragon Age, was already in, what should I call, pre-production?”

A. “Yeah, it was, yeah, cause it entered production after I left I think, or right around when I left, I think it was after.”

Q. “Okay, so we’ve talked a lot around our fondness, and I know we’re not alone, of the classic BioWare experience and you’ve talked a lot about what’s happened in the 2010s with Anthem and through Dragon: Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda we didn’t even touch on, which is its own thing obviously, but, y'know, are you, I don’t know if this is gonna be fair to say or not, but I’m just gonna say it, are you, how confident are you that BioWare as a studio can kind’ve recapture, and that’s the word I’m gonna use, recapture that feeling of the classic RPG experience with the new Dragon Age and new Mass Effect that we’ve kind’ve talked about loving so much from our past, do you think that’s gonna be done?”

A. “I mean I think it depends on what you mean by 'classic RPG experience’, but if you mean, you know, get back to character-driven storytelling, I think that, I absolutely am confident of it, and one of the, I guess, good things that comes out of Anthem is it shook EA to its core in terms of, maybe everything doesn’t need to be a live service, like, I mean, we’ll talk, I’ll talk about this when I talk about Dragon Age 4 - when I talk about Anthem I mean, in my videos - but one of the, so Joplin, which was my original pitch for Dragon Age 4, the live service was 'okay, no live service, what if we just do, we’ll do a game and then twenty months later, I will release another game, another Dragon Age, we will just smoosh the development process down, not do all this monkeying around, we’ll do, maybe, one piece of DLC, that’s it’, that was the live service pitch for Joplin. In 2017 after Casey came back and it’s like, well we need to get people on to Anthem, one of the arguments used for that was Dragon Age needs a live service, it needs to figure out a live service. And the reality is without multiplayer, some sort of ongoing multiplayer, a live service is really hard, I mean, I can’t think of a game that’s done it, I’m sure there’s - [hosts mention Assassin’s Creed as an example] - yeah, that’s true. But it’s really hard because people wander off and they, and once they’ve wandered off they’re not coming back, whereas with multiplayer you’ve got, it’s stickier, and it’s also like the problem with DLC is, you’re into attachment hell [conversation topic shifted here.]”

[discussing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and its 'climb anything’ & similar mechanics] “The very verb-driven design where, I can, I have certain verbs like 'burn’ and I can interact with anything in the world using those verbs, that is a factor of its incredibly long development cycle and frankly its art direction. The fact that I can walk up to an apple tree and hold a torch under it and get a cooked apple in the sort of cartoony style of Breath of the Wild, sure, makes perfect sense. If I tried to do that in a photorealistic game that’s gonna feel really stupid. […] We looked at, in early Dragon Age 4 days, we looked at a verb-driven mechanic system and it’s just like, but, you just quickly realize that the fidelity requirements isn’t possible, basically.”

“For BioWare I think the voiced protagonist is forever because it’s become too much about cinematic presentation, but I’m kind of on the fence on it as a feature over all.”

“I’m not a big Geralt fan, I get why he’s, I just don’t know, so, I have a very complicated back-history with CD Projket because CD’s Projekt’s relationship with BioWare has been - messy. Well if you go back to The Witcher 2, they said some things in the press that I would say that as a professional game developer they shouldn’t have. They basically, like, shat on us for no particular reason, but also wayyy back, way back in the past, when I was a lead programmer on Baldur’s Gate 2, I got an email from these people that were porting Baldur’s Gate 1 to Polish and they just wanted to know how the font worked. I had never heard of these people, that was CD Projekt. So it’s weird.”

“One of Mass Effect’s sources of its longevity is Shepard, and one of the problems that Mass Effect: Andromeda had was, it’s not Shepard. What I would argue is Shepard is a nineties action hero built by people who watched movies in the nineties, and Mass Effect: Andromeda, Ryder, he is an action hero from the 2000s, built by people who watched movies in the 2000s. Shepard is stoic, he’s just stoic competence porn. And Ryder is more emotionally complicated, more emotionally damaged, more uncertain, and the problem with that is that for a lot of people, do you really wanna play Guy Who’s Not Sure He Wants To Be Here? I provided this feedback during the development. It’s younger, it’s a younger, it’s skewing way younger, he skews as a hero from a CW show, and, but that was on purpose, they were trying for a younger, and I think there’s an audience who like it better because they can identify with that and they’re like, yeah, if I was in this situation this is how I’d feel, whereas Shepard’s just like, 'just gotta go to work’, like he’s, he’s from the movies that I watched. […] Casey’s favorite game is Star Control and Mass Effect 1 is definitely trying to be Star Control, and it comes through, somewhat.”

“Most of the games in BioWare history that did really well, did really well by getting bigger and going later. So Mass Effect was very late, but also, in its late stage added a bunch of people to it. It’s just that before the acquisition (by EA) BioWare was adding people by hiring people and getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then after the acquisition it can no longer do that so the games that come out right after the acquisition, there’s a bit of cannibalisms that happened there where a bunch of projects - the handheld group got consumed. Revolver, which was the Jade Empire sequel, got consumed. Agent which was a game as well got consumed, everything just got eaten to shore up Mass Effect and Dragon Age. And so then when you look after that point, well, there was no more cannibalisms to be done, there was no more, it was harder to slip because you couldn’t slip, it became almost impossible to slip a year, because of fiscal boundaries you could slip three months, six months, maybe nine months, but it became really hard to slip more, constraints became a lot tighter. I do wonder if the golden age of BioWare didn’t predicate on basically spending whatever it took to make it go.”

“EA sits on so much IP, it’s ridiculous.”

“Right before I left the handheld group [handheld games development group within BioWare], we started working on Mass Effect: Corsair. It would’ve been a, you would’ve basically flown around in a ship and it would have been some sort’ve trading/space combat game, but the reality on that one is the economics of DS development unless your name started with 'Ninten-’ and ended with ’-do’, were really bad, so there wasn’t - and also it was impossible to get EA to give it more than a sales target of 20,000 units, so that one was, that one, unfortunately, had to die. I think that game would’ve been great but y'know it was very early days. […] In the case of Mass Effect: Corsair, that was probably, that was never gonna fly, EA was not behind it at all, the economics for the DS were tough so that one was just probably obvious.”

“Blackfoot was the code name for the first game on Frostbite at BioWare, it was a Dragon Age multiplayer game that ended up just getting eaten by Dragon Age: Inquisition when Dragon Age: Inquisition kicked off.”

Q. “Well with that, thank you Mark, hopefully, we can have you on again in the future, maybe we will circle back with you once we see more of the new Dragon Age and we can get your commentary on it, that would be a fun conversation to have.”

A. “Yeah, absolutely, I’m looking forward to seeing more from that team for sure.”