Mark Darrah, former BioWare Executive Producer with over two decades of leadership experience across Dragon Age and Baldur’s Gate, sat down for an exclusive interview reflecting on his role as a consultant on Dragon Age: Veilguard, internal structural shifts under Electronic Arts (EA), and the evolving landscape of AAA role-playing games.
Speaking exclusively to Eldorado.gg just days before the studio shutdown, former BioWare Executive Producer Mark Darrah adds that he’s “feeling a little sense of dullness” about EA shutting down BioWare. “The sword of Damocles has been hanging over the studio since Mass Effect Andromeda.”
Mark Darrah on Games via YouTube
He also revealed deep frustrations with his consulting role on Dragon Age: Veilguard, explaining that internal leadership repeatedly sidelined his guidance.
‘I’m used to being in the driver’s seat, and now I’m tied up in the trunk shouting directions through the walls of the car, and that’s what it felt like,’ Darrah said, adding that narrative and design issues were met with temporary Band-Aids rather than core fixes.
Darrah added that Casey Hudson, game director on the Mass Effect trilogy and the upcoming Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, has the challenge of simplifying the game’s storytelling.
“I think to some degree, you could argue that maybe BioWare has gotten a little self-indulgent in its storytelling,” Darrah said. “And I think that Casey maybe sees that a little bit as well. So there might be a stripping it back a little bit more towards a simpler hero’s journey. I don’t know. Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth.”
Key takeaways
- Consulting constraints on Veilguard: Mark Darrah felt sidelined as a consultant on Dragon Age: Veilguard, stating leadership applied temporary Band-Aids to writing and structural issues left over from its live-service origins.
- Missed opportunities in Dragon Age: Darrah argued that BioWare could have followed a path similar to Baldur’s Gate 3 but instead prioritized accessibility and simplified RPG mechanics.
- Corporate misalignment: EA leadership’s focus on sports and mainstream action titles created an ongoing disconnect with complex fantasy RPGs like Dragon Age.
- Anthem’s failure and live-service challenges: Darrah explained why Anthem struggled to compete with established games like Destiny, arguing that new live-service titles must offer significantly better experiences to attract players.
- Mass Effect’s greater franchise value: Darrah believes Mass Effect is a more valuable IP than Dragon Age because its distinctive universe has broader appeal beyond its original creators.
- AI productivity myths: Darrah noted that generative AI adoption will likely start in coding, but cautioned that AI rarely cuts development costs as studios traditionally respond by increasing game scope and complexity.
Full interview with Mark Darrah
Q: What led you to create your YouTube channel and talk so openly about your experience at BioWare, especially regarding Dragon Age?
MD: For me, it was about passing on what I’ve learned. The video game industry is still a pretty immature industry. I mean, I guess you could argue it’s been around for about 50 years, but really, it’s been a business for more like 35 or 40 years.
I think we still have a lot to learn. When I left BioWare, one of the big things I wanted to do was pass on some of the things I’d learned, usually by walking into a hole, then putting up a little sign that says, “Hey, look out, there’s a hole here.” If that means the people who come next can get a little further and avoid those holes… they’ll fall into their own holes, I’m sure. But we can, over time, make this work better for everybody, make better games, and have more sustainable development practices.
Q: The industry seems very different now compared to your early days at BioWare Edmonton, with mass layoffs becoming widespread. How has the industry changed, and what has stayed the same?
MD: I started in 1997 in Edmonton. It had basically no game industry. We were all by ourselves. So it’s hard to speak about the industry as a whole at the time. People weren’t very mobile. In the ’90s, people tended to go places and stay there for a relatively long time.
But in those early days, at bigger publishers, there was a track record of finishing a game and then laying the entire team off. That eventually stopped for a while. Starting in the 2010s, for about 10 years, big publishers decided that it made them look bad, which it did, of course. EA won worst company in America two years in a row in some poll, and they decided they didn’t want to be that anymore. They stopped shutting down studios, they stopped doing mass layoffs as much as possible.
Now, we are in a place where layoffs for the last four years have been super high. So we hired a ton of people in 2020 and 2021 because short-sighted people thought, ‘Wow, video game spending is up massively for some unknown reason. Who knows what could possibly be happening right now in the world that would cause people to play a lot more video games and spend money on less things.’ They thought this would definitely continue for all time, so they doubled the size of teams.
And that’s not to say that all the layoffs that have started happening then are just that, but I would say that that is one of the major root causes. We’ve been kind of oscillating like crazy as we overhired, put all this tension in the industry, and we’ve not stabilized since then.
Q: You returned as a consultant on Dragon Age: Veilguard. What responsibilities did you have in that role, and how much influence did you actually have over the final game?
MD: I was only part-time as a consultant. So, about right around 20 hours a week. When you compare that to what I was working as an Executive Producer, which would have been 60 hours a week, 50 hours a week when we’re in the middle of a project going to 80 hours a week, my ability to influence the project just from a time perspective was limited.
I was definitely much more on the outside looking in than I expected to be in that role. The person in charge wanted to make sure that I didn’t disrupt the leaders who had been put in place after I had left, which certainly is a valid concern. If they had wanted to, it would have been very easy for them to bring me in to essentially kick the leadership out of the way and have me land the plane directly. I’m used to being in the driver’s seat, and now I’m tied up in the trunk shouting directions through the walls of the car, and that’s what it felt like.
There were lots of things that I made recommendations on that were not listened to. And in fact, in some cases, I would make a recommendation, it was ignored, and then a different group that was also helping would make the same recommendation, and then it was listened to. So it was definitely a frustrating experience for me.
Q: What made you want to accept this consulting role on Veilguard after you originally resigned from BioWare in 2021?
MD: Partially because it was the business that I was doing. I was now working as a consultant. So partially it was just… why would I turn this down? It’s a lucrative job in the area that I work.
I actually did reach out for them originally. When they hit alpha, I offered to help with some triage, work through bugs, and help them make sure their practices are in place. They said no. And then a few months later, they reached out to me. At first, it was partially because the project had gotten itself through to alpha.
And I would say that – I won’t be modest here – in terms of people in the video game industry who are capable of getting a game from outfit to ship, I’m one of the people with the most experience doing that, especially with the BioWare team, so I was best equipped to help them out.
My role that ended up resulting wasn’t necessarily one that could take advantage of that fully, but I think it was. I just have an emotional attachment to the franchise as well, and I thought it was an opportunity for me to provide support without having to bear all of the burden on myself. But a lot of everything that I’m saying are motivations. A lot of that didn’t end up coming true.
Q: When Dragon Age: Veilguard released, critic reviews and user scores diverged significantly over narrative tone and inclusive options. Did you anticipate this reaction during development?
MD: I certainly did provide feedback to the team that they should be expecting some of the reaction that they did end up getting.
I would actually argue that the user scores and the Metacritic scores actually both make sense. The game, taken on its own merits, standing on its own, is like a high 70s, low 80s game. The game, taken from the perspective of a very core Dragon Age fan who wants decisions to be respected… they are going to be upset by some of the things that I feel are lacking or that were set aside by the game.
So I think actually, even though the two numbers are very different from each other, I think you can rationalize both numbers simultaneously.
Q: Looking at the player feedback and backlash, is there a particular storyline or decision in Veilguard that you believe has aged poorly and should be reconsidered?
MD: I don’t really look at games in that way, so I would say no. You always have to look at where you are and move forward. I’ve answered questions like this in the past, but to be honest, to a large degree, I don’t think that’s usually the right way to look at a game. That’s the game you have, and what do you do now? If you’re going to make another Dragon Age game, what do you do from this perspective? Do you start from Veilguard? Do you decanonize it and move backwards? I think that would be a very dangerous thing to do.
So I think you are where you are, and you have to figure out how to move forward from that place.
Q: Given that a new Dragon Age seems unlikely soon, could another RPG developer like Larian Studios buy the Dragon Age IP or create a spiritual successor?
MD: Whenever someone is looking to acquire an IP and decide they’re going to build another one, the question that they have to ask is, first of all, how much is this going to cost? What’s the minimum amount of money EA would be willing to sell the Dragon Age IP for? And I have no idea. And then once you do that, what’s that IP worth in terms of additional sales?
So let’s say Larian decided they were going to buy Dragon Age and make another game. The question they have to ask is, if we were to do that, is it going to sell enough more copies than us just making Wyvern Era, a Dragon Age game with the serial number filed off, call it a spiritual successor to Dragon Age. Does it sell enough more to be worth the acquisition? And I would say for most companies, for Dragon Age, the answer to that is probably no, because I think that the IP certainly carries a fan base, carries a legacy, and it carries an existing audience. But unless you’re like David Gaider or someone with a track record with the franchise, you’re not going to get those people coming along to a new Dragon Age game for free. So then, if they’re not for free, then what are you really getting out of the IP?
Whereas I would say Mass Effect as an IP, without the people attached to it, is more valuable than Dragon Age. With Mass Effect, you’re getting the worldbuilding. It’s not that there’s not a ton of worldbuilding in Dragon Age, but the worldbuilding in Dragon Age versus the worldbuilding in any Lord of the Rings game, or a Baldur’s Gate game, or a Witcher game, they are similar enough that it would be tempting to just do it again, just make another one, just make another new fantasy IP.
Q: What do you think happens to BioWare as a studio if the next Mass Effect game fails to perform commercially?
MD: Historically, so if we weren’t in the New World, what would have probably happened is that everyone that was on BioWare pretty much would have been moved on to other projects, but they would never officially close the studio. That’s the way that historically EA has closed down studios in most cases. They just sort of stripped them down and then let them down to like a few people, five or six people, and then let those people eventually quit as they can’t get anything greenlit. And then the studio just ceases to exist. They never officially shut it down, they just sort of let it cease to be. So that’s what I would have said before the acquisition.
Post-acquisition, there’s a different world. Nothing good within EA happens if Mass Effect doesn’t do well, but one possibility is maybe EA decides to sell the studio off because it’s a potential PR win rather than shuttering the studio. If you sell it off or give it its independence, it looks better. Even though it’s basically kind of the same thing, it looks a lot better. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork required in selling off a studio. It’s easier to let a studio evaporate than to shutter it. And it’s certainly easier to let a studio evaporate than to sell it off or give it its independence. But I could see there being some motivation there.
In a world where EA is carrying $20 billion in debt, there’s certainly some motivation to try to get some money rather than just letting it evaporate.
Q: If BioWare were to be sold by EA, which game developer or publisher would best fit the studio’s culture and identity?
MD: The reality is right now there’s basically no one that’s looking to buy. If it was literally anyone, someone like Bethesda… Oh, that’s Microsoft. Someone like Larian, maybe. Maybe there’s a world where Larian tries to acquire some of the knowledge within BioWare and essentially merges them into one.
Obviously, Larian is much larger than BioWare at this point, but maybe there’s a world where you end up with Larian almost imagining itself as two lobes: There’s the traditional sort of Divinity, Baldur’s Gate path, and then they sort of graft on a BioWare lane. I don’t know. To be truthful right now, it would be to imagine that things would be much better within any of the potential buyers.
Q: Do you mean that prospective buyer publishers would restrict BioWare financially or structurally?
MD: I think honestly both. At the companies that would actually be potential buyers, the publishers, the financials have infiltrated and corrupted the game-making so much that whenever I think, ‘Well, what if they were bought by Sony? By Microsoft?’ All that pops into my mind is that it comes with all of this restriction and burden from a financial side.
Q: Looking back, was there a specific point during development when you realized BioWare was building Dragon Age: Veilguard for a completely different audience?
MD: A lot of that comes from the period when Dragon Age 4 was a live-service game. When you look at Veilguard, and you think about a lot of the things that people are reacting to: The lack of conflict, that everyone’s kind of on your side, the more action-y combat, the more mission-structured games… those are all legacies of the period when it was a live service. Because if you’re making a live service, everyone needs to have the same followers, or how do we play together? Or at least that’s an argument you can make.
Combat needs to be more action-y because we can’t be pausing the game all of the time while we’re playing multiplayer together. We need the missions to be more self-contained because we need a structure where people drop in, play a few missions, drop out.
So this is 2017, 2018, when the game is restructured to be a live service. Then what happens coming out the other side is that the team never stops and says, ‘Right, we’re not making this game anymore. We need to burn some of this down and redirect our attention to some of the other more core fundamentals.’
And sometimes that was even being raised by the teams. There are several times that I even saw when I came back as a consultant that people recognized something was bad and needed to be fixed, but they were going into certification in six months, so they thought they didn’t have time. And then we didn’t go to certification for 18 months or 12 months. So there actually was time
Someone in my comments said, you know, never time to fix, but always time to fix it twice. There’s a lot of stuff that happens on Veilguard that’s exactly that. Rather than putting the correct solution in place for a problem, two Band-Aids were applied. One Band-Aid was applied because the team was told they didn’t have enough time or the solution wasn’t approved, and then that was inadequate. So a second Band-Aid was applied. But the time taken to apply those two Band-Aids was probably about as much as would have been required to do it right in the first place, but the time was never given to do it right in the first place.
This isn’t EA saying, ‘you’re not allowed to do this.’ This is leadership of the team saying this and ultimately spending the time anyway, just spending it in a much less effective way.
Q: Which specific game system in Veilguard suffered the most from these repeated ‘Band-Aid’ fixes instead of a complete redesign?
MD: One of the biggest ones is the lightness of the writing. You can call it the Marvel-esque writing. That was a known problem going into Alpha in late 2022. And it was solved with three or four different passes, as opposed to taking the time and ripping apart entire plots and redoing them. It wasn’t deemed that there was time, but ultimately, yeah, there totally was time.
Q: Is the internal skepticism towards Dragon Age at EA driven by financial performance, or is there another reason corporate executives undermine the franchise?
MD: I don’t think people at EA hate Dragon Age for any reason that has anything to do with the franchise.
There are lots and lots and lots of people at EA that don’t understand Dragon Age because it’s seen as nerdy. It’s seen as not mainstream, regardless of it being, you know, Inquisition being the best-selling game, at least at the time, of all BioWare games.
So there’s a lot of people that don’t understand Dragon Age, but there’s no animosity there. There’s just a lot of confusion, I would say.
Q: What is it about Dragon Age that EA leadership fails to understand when planning the studio’s roadmap?
MD: Fundamentally, there are a lot of people within EA whose background either is not in games at all, or it’s coming through sports. So they understand games through that lens. I think you can use that lens and look at something like Battlefield, and it works pretty well. If you use that lens and look at Mass Effect, it works kind of okay. When you use that lens and look at Dragon Age, it doesn’t work at all. Interestingly, until it started making just buckets of money, EA had the same problem with The Sims. They didn’t understand it. It was this weird franchise. And then it was suddenly this weird franchise that made a ton of money. They still didn’t understand it, but they knew it made a lot of money.
Q: Do you think EA or BioWare could realistically adopt generative AI across pipelines to reduce costs and maintain fragile franchises?
MD: Maybe. Certainly, EA seems to be interested in AI as a development tool. I think there is a possibility there. Right now, I guess we’ll see what happens with Epic saying it’s going to be all in on AI for this Marvel Star Wars shooter.
Right now, the game-playing public is vocally rejecting widespread AI use. However, I don’t know if we actually know for sure if those are just words or not. If a game comes out and it uses massive amounts of AI and isn’t hiding from that fact, does that result in less sales? And even if it does, does it result in significantly less sales?
If it does, then I think we will see the industry back away. If it doesn’t, and we’ve certainly seen cases where very active theoretical boycotts turned out to be nothing, like people saying they were boycotting Call of Duty, for example, still had it among their five most-played games. If that is what it ends up being, then I suspect that the games industry will end up probably going off the deep end into fully embracing AI.
If it doesn’t, that wouldn’t be surprising. We’ve seen highly vocal boycotts amount to nothing before—for example, people who claimed to be boycotting Call of Duty s
I would say that RPGs would be a weird place to go deep as a starting place, but that doesn’t mean that somebody wouldn’t try.
Q: Were EA and BioWare exploring or implementing generative AI tools while you were consulting on Veilguard?
MD: So when I was there, I don’t believe it was being used at EA yet, but they were in the process of trying to figure out if they could use it. So I would be surprised if they weren’t using it for code quite a bit within EA at this point.
Directly on the games, I don’t know, but back-end stuff, I’m sure it’s being used. This is where I think that maybe what will actually happen is: I think the average person who doesn’t want AI to write games or to make the art for games cares a lot less when it comes to code. I think that we’ll see AI-coded games first, and then if that becomes acceptable, then it’ll slowly grow more and more.
It’s not necessarily something that I’m super interested in, but it’s also something that I don’t need to be super interested in, I guess, given where I am in the industry at this point.
Q: Do you believe AI adoption will genuinely streamline game production and make development cheaper?
MD: You keep seeing these studies that talk about seeing no productivity gains and also seeing massive productivity gains using AI, often in the same industry. And when you dig in, what seems to be a very typical trigger as to which side of that divide you’re on is that if the corporation is mandating AI use, they actually usually do not see productivity gains. In fact, they end up having productivity decline, and it costs them a bunch of money, and then they end up retreating from it.
If they provide AI as another tool in the toolbox and don’t have any mandates, they’re just like, ‘Here’s a tool you can use, maybe we do some training.’ Those are the places that have seen productivity gains.
So my feeling as to where we may end up landing is that we end up landing in a place where AI enters these generative tools end up being tools, not replacements, but tools. Though the reality is that historically in the video game industry, when things have gotten faster, we don’t make games cheaper, we just make more stuff. And I think that’s a big reason why we are where we are right now. We’ve just added more and more, gotten bigger and bigger, pushed fidelity higher and higher. And sometimes we’ve gotten there because things have gotten cheaper to make. Sometimes we’ve gotten there because we’ve just gotten more expensive.
So, my knee-jerk reaction is if suddenly you snap your fingers and everyone was AI-assisted, and they were three times as productive, my expectation would be games would just get three times as complicated, and you would be no further ahead. In fact, because of the complexity, you would just inject it into everything, you would actually be behind where you are right now. Things would get bigger faster than they got cheaper, and you would actually not end up any better off.
Now, we are seemingly seeing some signs of us retreating a little bit from that, but it’s hard to say that when we have GTA 6 coming out with its massive budget and basically all games in one box.
Q: Is the AAA industry simply waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 to establish new operational standards?
MD: Yeah. Historically, Rockstar, for a company that basically makes so much more money than any other company for each release they do, has less influence on the way the games industry works than you would expect. Mainly because their budgets are so big.
It’s the same thing that happened with Breath of the Wild. If I’m a game developer, a big AAA studio, and I see GTA 6, I’m just going to look at it and go, ‘Wow, I sure wish I could do that, but I can’t because my budget is one tenth the size of GTA’s.’ So while that’s cool, it’s unrealistic.
Q: During your time at BioWare, were there any transmedia expansions like TV shows or films planned for Mass Effect or Dragon Age that never launched?
MD: Mass Effect has constantly been trying to get a movie made. I think they’ve currently got the IP out for a television show. That’s the one that probably got the furthest and didn’t happen. I think there was even a script that existed for Mass Effect, but it never happened.
Dragon Age… I think for the reasons we talked about before, in terms of the IP being less distinct, it’s been harder. We definitely were always being shopped around, but it didn’t get nearly as far as Mass Effect did.
The Witcher TV show got made, but you kind of see what happened there. Season one was like, ‘We spared no expense.’ Season two was, ‘We spared many expenses.’ So there’s clearly a problem. And Witcher is way more successful of a fantasy IP than Dragon Age.
Q: While EA views Dragon Age as niche, games like Baldur’s Gate 3 prove deep fantasy RPGs can reach massive mainstream audiences. Why didn’t BioWare follow that path?
MD: You can absolutely see that with Dragon Age. You can imagine a world where BioWare follows a line that leads from Dragon Age: Origins to something that looks a lot like Baldur’s Gate 3. But instead, it is pushed onto this road that is about trying to be simpler, to be more accessible, to be more appealing to a wider audience, and you end up, instead of going from Dragon Age: Origins towards Baldur’s Gate 3, you end up on a track to Dragon Age 2 and to Inquisition.
You see that path, with Dragon Age specifically, not BioWare, of trying to live in a world that a publisher doesn’t really get.
Q: If Bethesda asked you to direct a new entry in The Elder Scrolls franchise, how would you approach their traditional design formula?
MD: I’ve been thinking about this, not specifically Elder Scrolls, but I’ve been thinking about what happens when people take over franchises.
I may be quite different from other new leaders. When I come onto franchises, because about half the time I’ve come onto games, they were already in development and I helped them through to their ship date. I tend to want to support what’s already there and push it in the direction it’s already going. Sure, we’re going to guide that, but I’m not going to try to take a hard right.
Whereas I think most people, when they take over a franchise, they want to make sure that everyone knows that they were there. They want to put their fingerprints all over the thing and make sure that everyone knows that this was a John Smith production, and it’s got John Smith’s fingerprints all over it.
So if I was coming into an Elder Scrolls and they were asking me to take over this Elder Scrolls, all of my instincts would be to guide whatever is there to ship.
If they brought me in and said it’s a blank sheet of paper, ‘You’re going to make an Elder Scrolls game from the ground up,’ that’s really intimidating because this is a franchise with a really long history of being something that is very different than what I’ve worked on for my career. They’re not known for followers, despite having them in Skyrim. Not known for the open world, exploration, that sort of thing. My temptation would be, if I’m taking over a project, it’s going to end up looking almost exactly like The Elder Scrolls.
So if I’m put in charge of Elder Scrolls VI, I’m going to just ship the thing. If I’m put in charge of Elder Scrolls VII, then I would be actually really tempted to say, it’s not Elder Scrolls VII. It’s like Elder Scrolls: Guild Hall or something.
Q: So you would structure it as a narrative spin-off title?
MD: Yeah. So it’s like, we’re going to make a game, and we’re going to push it in a very different way. We’re going to be much more character-focused, much more driven by story, much less driven by open worlds. And we’re going to start from the very ground, being very clear that this is not a sequel, this is not another Elder Scrolls, this is in the Elder Scrolls universe, but it’s something different.
Because I think the worst outcome would be this weird Frankenstein mix-up of BioWare sensibilities and Bethesda sensibilities in this kind of like messy thing. That could be amazing, but I think if you design that game 10 times, nine of those games are going to be bad. One of them is going to be awesome, but nine of them are going to be terrible.
Q: Essentially creating a BioWare-style narrative game inside The Elder Scrolls universe?
MD: I think that would actually be my temptation. Make something that looks more like a BioWare game than a Bethesda game, but it’s set in the Elder Scrolls universe.
Q: What are your expectations for former BioWare writer Casey Hudson’s new project, Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic?
MD: Casey’s got a lot of really good legacy to draw upon. He was the person that was in charge of KOTOR, which is still considered the best Star Wars game that’s ever been made. Although, he’s the person who was in charge of Mass Effect. So it’s hard to know. What do you do? Do you do essentially KOTOR 3? But obviously not called that.
But there’s a lot of things about KOTOR that were great in the early 2000s that would probably not be super great now. I mean, Baldur’s Gate 3 is turn-based, basically, so maybe you could do that. But I think you would be tempted to make something that looks a little bit more like Mass Effect with the Star Wars IP. But I don’t know.
One thing I can be confident of is that it’s gonna be really good at cinematic storytelling, because that’s something that Casey cares very deeply about. It’s something that I am very confident that they will be spending a lot of effort on. So it will be a storytelling game, and it will do its storytelling effectively. In terms of what the structure of the game is around the storytelling, that’s actually where I have almost no confidence. I have no idea. But it’s like, will it tell a good story? Yeah, I’m really confident that it’ll do that.
Q: Are there narrative lessons from Mass Effect or other BioWare projects that Casey Hudson should incorporate into his new Star Wars title?
MD: Casey and I have talked, and I think that he definitely is going to be looking at simplifying some of the way that storytelling is done. I think to some degree, you could argue that maybe BioWare has gotten a little self-indulgent in its storytelling. And I think that Casey maybe sees that a little bit as well. So there might be a stripping it back a little bit more towards a more simple hero’s journey. I don’t know. Maybe I’m putting words in his mouth.
Q: How do developers strike a balance between avoiding self-indulgent storytelling without oversimplifying the game narrative?
MD: I don’t think there’s a contradiction there, but I’m having some difficulty explaining why these two things are not in conflict with each other. Because you’re right. You can simplify. If you take a game and simplify everything away, you lose the game. This is the argument about yellow paint and HUDs and all of that is an argument about simplifying the experience to make it more accessible, but at what point do you simplify away the entire game?
I don’t feel that is exactly what I’m talking about when I’m talking about it from a narrative perspective, but I can’t quite articulate the difference right now.
Q: Complex mechanical systems like Baldur’s Gate 3 resonated with players, whereas other titles feel overly complex. Why do you think that is?
MD: Actually, that’s an interesting point. So if you compare something like Pillars of Eternity, which I found mechanically, not narratively, complicated in a way I found quite off-putting… Whereas with Baldur’s Gate 3, partially because I’m much more familiar with the D&D rule set as opposed to whatever Pillars of Eternity was using, I found it a lot easier to engage with the complexity there.
Q: Were player expectations and reactions too demanding when Anthem launched?
MD: We can argue about the reaction to Dragon Age 2, or the reaction to Veilgard, or the reaction to Mass Effect Andromeda, and say, with all of that, it’s fair. But I don’t think you can actually argue that with Anthem. This was people reacting to the game as it was, in the way they reacted to similar games. You can’t look at the reaction to Anthem and say the reaction was wrong because it’s the reality of, yeah, you’re demanding, and you should be.
For a looter shooter or any live service game, the game is demanding a significant percentage of your time for a significant length of time. So with a single-player game, what you’re asking is, come to my amusement park, it’s different. It may not be better, but it’s different. So that’s getting you a long way. But with a live service game, you’re saying, switch gyms. You already have a gym. Quit your existing gym where you know everybody and come to a new gym. Well, that gym doesn’t have to be as good as your existing gym. It certainly can’t be slightly worse than your existing gym. It has to be better in almost every single way than your existing gym. That’s it fundamentally. So is Anthem better than Destiny in every single way? Absolutely not. Is it worse in several ways? Yes. Is it the same in several ways? That too. Is it better in any ways? Yes, it’s better in a few ways. And so it attracted some people that were like, yeah, great. I love moving around the world. I love a bunch of things that I like better than Destiny.
But for a live service, yeah, I have to quit my existing gym. So that’s a big bar to cross.
Q: Even established live-service titles like Destiny have struggled with player retention over time.
MD: Absolutely. It’s hard to talk about Anthem without talking about Destiny, but ultimately, the same thing happened to Destiny. It just took a lot longer.
Q: Games like Warframe are still alive, operating almost like a familiar local spot.
MD: Weirdly, Warframe is just a wildly different thing.
I do actually wonder if – I’ve never really talked through this metaphor before – and I do actually wonder if you’re hitting the nail on the head, which is fundamentally that live services are not about being the best experience. They’re about being an experience you’re willing to come back to from time to time.
Q: Players sometimes seem to go where their friends are playing instead of chasing new mechanics.
MD: Maybe that’s the secret to the current friendslop games, which is: these are like live services except they are consumable like single-player games. So you come in, it’s different, and neat, and weird, and not that great, but you play it, and you’re like, yeah, we had a bunch of fun, and then we’re done. Maybe friendslop is the next evolution of live service. Maybe that’s us rejecting, to some degree, live service, which is asking you to do this thing over and over again, and it’s saying, like, ‘No, just go to a dive bar.’ And yeah, the floor is sticky for some reason, but you’re not coming back, so who cares?
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