Former BioWare Dev Mark Darrah On Crunch, Electronic Arts, Unionization, & More

Former BioWare developer Mark Darrah joins us for a talk about crunch, workplace culture, accessibility, Elden Ring, and much more.
Mark's channel:
/ oldgamedevadvice
Mark's Twitter:
tinyurl.com/5n6c9e7v
1:31-Why did you get into game development?
4:12-Crunch
14:05-On Activision-Blizzard & corporate culture overtaking studio culture
15:50-Crunch continued
21:06-Toxic workplace cultures at game studios & why they’re tough to fix
29:13-Unionization in the games industry
36:36-Rising game budgets and why they’re getting bigger
48:00-Elden Ring and game budgets
52:59-Accessibility in games
1:10:38-Relationship between the creative and business sides of game development & corporate directives
1:14:43-Anthem
1:22:16-EA doesn’t understand what BioWare is
1:28:20-Indie development & being bought out by larger companies
Patreon: / thegamingdiscourse
Music:
"Gaming Discourse Intro" French 57
"Carefree" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
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IMPORTANT NOTES & TIMESTAMPS: -We had some technical issues so there’s no video (we blame Skype). We plan on doing more interviews like this in the coming months, so we’ll likely go to a different service for video chatting. -We also had some audio issues toward the end of the interview (Zoom here we come) and static overtook some great answers. You can hear this a bit at the very end, but I didn’t want to take that part out as part of the audio is good but the end isn’t. The audio that was completely unusable I transcribed so you can read it below. 1:31-Why did you get into game development? 4:12-Crunch 14:05-On Activision-Blizzard & corporate culture overtaking studio culture 15:50-Crunch continued 21:06-Toxic workplace cultures at game studios & why they’re tough to fix 29:13-Unionization in the games industry 36:36-Rising game budgets and why they’re getting bigger 48:00-Elden Ring and game budgets 52:59-Accessibility in games 1:10:38-Relationship between the creative and business sides of game development & corporate directives 1:14:43-Anthem 1:22:16-EA doesn’t understand what BioWare is 1:28:20-Indie development & being bought out by larger companies Tyler: “If we were to make a spectrum of more ‘hardcore’ RPGs and more ‘arcade’ RPGs, I’d imagine that Dragon: Age Inquisition would be on the more hardcore side, but that may not be a good way to define it” Mark: “It’s interesting because Dragon Age has a party you can directly control. It’s in the DNA of Dragon Age; the concept of a party. And having a party lets you do all kinds of interesting things from a storytelling perspective. It makes combat easier to balance. It’s got a whole bunch of benefits. But it inherently makes the game conceptually more difficult to understand. I can, having never played an RPG before, get behind the wheel of Skyrim and get pretty far into it. If I’ve never played an RPG before and I get behind the wheel of Dragon Age: Inquisition, there’s a lot more heavy lifting there. I have to understand that I have relationships with different people. Now, maybe you could just ignore the party and let the AI take care of it and you would probably do okay there. But then what happens if you accidentally switch to Varric and then you're just, ‘what? What just happened? Now I’m a dwarf?’ And I’ve seen people come into that. I don’t know if it’s more ‘hardcore’, but it definitely assumes a greater knowledge of role-playing games I think, or maybe just of BioWare games.” Tyler: “Is there one misconception that if you could just sit everyone down in front of you on Twitter and they were just going to listen and you had one thing that everybody needed to understand about game development, what would that be?” Mark: “I guess I’m going to say there are two. The first thing I would say is that I don’t believe there are lazy devs. I think that’s a common thing that, you know, 'why are these devs so lazy? They didn’t put multiplayer into this game.' Game development is incredibly difficult. It’s frankly a miracle that any game ever gets finished. So when you say, ‘why are they so lazy,’ there was a reason that didn’t happen, and it wasn’t because they were lazy. It was some sort of other reason. It could’ve been too expensive. It could’ve been too difficult. It could’ve been because it wasn’t possible with the technology they were using. For whatever reason, it was very unlikely they didn’t do something because they were lazy. And I guess, sort of related to that, my second thing is it’s very unlikely that it would’ve been (quality assurance)’s fault. They probably saw the same bug you saw, it just didn’t get fixed. Someone like me saw that bug in a triage and decided to let it ship, probably.” Tyler: “So let’s say you’re given a chance to make a game. Somebody comes to you and they’re just giving you like a two billion dollar budget, or just something crazy. What is a dream project for Mark Darrah? What is something that you would just jump at the chance of making?” Mark: “I don’t know that I would want to do anything of that scope anymore. I think that a game with a two billion dollar budget would eat itself. For now, for me, I think I’m going to be focused on much smaller things that are more focused on singular, ‘pick one thing; do it extremely well,’ and maybe build the game around that. I think that maybe that’s the lesson from Elden Ring is to be excellent at a couple of things and competent at the rest.”

[@sunnysmith5943]

This is such a criminally underrated channel.

[@htf2387]

Super insightful interview. Keep up the great work

[@vpchu1004]

Fascinating interview. It's interesting to get some perspective on the types of decision-making that happens when they're developing a game. Hope to see more of these in the future.

[@naleigh6240]

Great interview!

[@Phreno_Xeno]

The disappointment of a game, or book being over isn't a negative experience to me. It is more of a wistful feeling of summers long gone, and loves lost. It is a beatiful thing if a piece of media can leave one with that feeling. Much better than being left with just, meh it is over, I guess.