According to Mark Darrah, sometimes you have to abandon a concept to take a different path at the fork, and since he did a lot of things at BioWare, there is something to what he says!
Darrah left BioWare in 2020, but came back to see Dragon Age: The Veilguard through to completion. Development began in 2015 under the codename Joplin, but two major/minor BioWare failures with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem doomed the project. It was canceled at the end of 2017, and Darrah was the producer in charge. Between 2018 and 2020, he was in charge of the Dreadwolf project, and it was from that game that the Dragon Age episode released on the last day of October was finally assembled. Maybe that’s why Darrah believes that sometimes it’s better to take a big delay than to plan for a lot 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. Because you know, ‘OK, right, we’re not shipping in a month, we’re shipping in 25 months. Then let’s take a step back and re-examine what we have and potentially undo some of the decisions we made earlier when we thought we were making a different game and go a different way. If, instead, your game ends up moving two years, but it moves three months at a time, when does that re-examination take place?
For two years you’re always three months away from the ship with little delays. Not only have you not been able to step back and take a different path, but as time goes on, you’re digging this debt deeper and deeper and deeper. You’re putting band-aid on band-aid on band-aid, and not only do you not feel like you have the ability to step back because you don’t have the time, you actually make it harder and harder to step back because with every additional band-aid, with every patch, with every thing you do to try to make what you have work, you make it harder and harder to take a different path. You add to the pile of assets that you may have to give up,” Darrah said.
As for Joplin, he said they made it harder and harder to do what should have been done in the first place: set it on fire to start the other direction of the fork. Sometimes it’s best to put it in reverse, fail at everything, and then go another way…
Source: PCGamer
