Former Dragon Age Executive Producer Criticizes 'BioWare Magic'
BioWare is well known for its vast, deep, and heavily character-driven RPGs. While the studio’s developed many fantastic games over the years, there’s no denying it has issues. Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem both launched in a badly unfinished states, and Dragon Age 4 development had had its own troubles. Even BioWare’s more successful games weren’t immune to production woes.
One of BioWare’s longer-running issues is the studio’s belief in the so-called “BioWare Magic,” the belief that its games will come together at the last minute. Former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah recently came out against the practice in a YouTube video. He called on people to stop using the term and derided BioWare Magic by calling it a “sh*t process.”
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On Tuesday, Darrah explained BioWare magic in a video published on his Old Game Dev Advice YouTube channel. He demonstrated the concept with a hockey-stick-shaped graph showing how game developers will often spend a significant amount of time making negligible progress. Eventually, however, the development reaches a pivot point where the studio is suddenly getting a lot done in a short time. While this process and its problems are hardly unique to BioWare, it’s what the term BioWare magic came to describe internally.
One problem with relying on BioWare magic is developers have no idea when they’ll hit that critical pivot point. It could happen right away, or near the end of development. The latter is especially bad since it makes it incredibly difficult for developers to understand how well the process is going. This is primarily because it pushes back the first working build to much later in development, making it hard to iterate on
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