There was a time when the evocation of the name of BioWare made the eyes of role-playing enthusiasts shine, the studio has made a name for itself with titles like Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and dragon age. Careful productions, with a well-written script and characters, and universes rich in detail. Fans were talking about “BioWare magic”.
But in recent years, it’s not really that. Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Anthem, these games clearly did not appeal to players, the magic is gone, just like big names in BioWare, who have decided to look elsewhere. This is the case of Mark Darrah, executive producer of the license dragon age, who left the studio at the end of 2020. And he’s back this week in a video Youtube, where he is not kind to his former studio, pointing the finger a magic recipe that is based on a much criticized element: the crunch.
That’s what people in the studio mean when they say “the magic of BioWare.” They talk about the fact that things fall into place very late and things improve very late. And it’s awful.
BioWare magic is a crap process. It’s about putting a name to something that says: don’t worry, don’t panic, because we know that at a later date everything will go faster and everything will be fine. But the reality is that “everything will be fine”, that’s where the crunch comes from and that’s where the delayed games come from. If you can find a way to get the urgency of completing your project sooner, you can avoid…a lot of nonsense caused by this.
Finishing a game full of quality quickly is certainly magic, but at the expense of the developers. And sometimes the trick doesn’t work, as we’ve seen with the studio’s latest productions. However, despite the big changes internally, BioWare keeps his head up and recently said he wants to “rebuild his reputation” by offering games Mass Effect and dragon age quality. Hopefully that doesn’t mean resorting to crunch during the last weeks of development. You can find Mass Effect Legendary Edition at €49.52 on Amazon.
| Clint008 Writer – Tester |