"You are laying band-aid on top of band-aid on top of band-aid."
BioWare veteran Mark Darrah, who left the company in 2020 before returning to shepherd Dragon Age: The Veilguard to the finish line, has recently been posting videos about his time in the industry: And the latest is about delays.
Darrah’s take on delays is simple: If you really need one, it’s better to bite the bullet with a hefty delay and recalibrate what you’re doing with the project, rather than ploughing ahead and going through lots of little ones.
“If your game ends up being two years late, but you know it’s going to be two years late, that opens up your probability space massively,” says Darrah (thanks, GR+). “Because you know, ‘OK, right, we’re not shipping in a month, we’re gonna ship in 25 months. Then let’s take a step back and re-examine what we’ve got and potentially undo some of the decisions that we made earlier when we thought we were making a different game, and take a different path.’
“If, instead, your game ends up moving two years, but it does it three months at a time, when does that re-examination occur?”
This may well strike some as relating in a roundabout way to DA: The Veilguard itself. The latest Dragon Age began development in 2015 under the codename Joplin, but suffered from BioWare firefighting with both Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem before, in late 2017, being cancelled entirely. Darrah himself acted as executive producer on both Joplin and Dreadwolf (which would become The Veilguard) from 2018 until 2020, departing BioWare at that time until his return in 2023.
Long story short, DA: The Veilguard had a long and sometimes rocky development, which of course is not uncommon with such a large and complex videogame. The communication from BioWare and EA sometimes wasn’t great, and the game undoubtedly had several delays that weren’t made public. But it did have that major reboot where BioWare re-examined what it was actually going for.
“For two years, you’re always three months from ship [with small delays],” says Darrah. “Not only were you not able to take a step back and back up and take a different path, as time goes on, you’re digging that debt deeper and deeper and deeper.
“You are laying band-aid on top of band-aid on top of band-aid, and not only do you not feel like you have the ability to back up because you don’t have time, you’re actually making it harder and harder to back up, because with each extra band-aid, with each patch, with each thing you do in order to try to make what you have work, you’re making it harder to take a different path. You are adding to that pile of assets that you might have to abandon.”
Then we get to the part that, one might suspect, relates to the abandoned Joplin project. “You are making it ever more difficult to do what you probably should have done in the first place, which is burn it down and take the other fork in the road. Sometimes the right path is to throw the thing in reverse, lose everything you’ve been working on, and find another way forward.”
It’s hard to argue with Darrah’s logic, though the elephant in the room here is the money. Publishers want games to ship, and of course developers do too, but they’re not always on the same page about delays and rebooting projects. The relationship between BioWare and EA has seemed fraught at times, most notably with the cancellation of Anthem 2.0, which was apparently “really fun… when EA canned it.”
DA: The Veilguard ended up as a pretty good RPG in the end, though there was perhaps the sense the wider industry had moved beyond the BioWare model, and unfortunately it didn’t sell particularly well. BioWare paid the price, suffering wide-ranging layoffs. As Darrah has said previously when addressing layoffs and the “cruelty” of seeing fans celebrate them, “You are crossing a line, and you’re probably attacking the wrong person anyway.”
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