PCG Article Former Dragon Age boss Mark Darrah returns to work on Dreadwolf

[Zed Clampet]

Darrah left BioWare suddenly in 2020, but now he's back to help shepard the new Dragon Age RPG

A VentureBeat(opens in new tab) report says former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah, who left BioWare along with general manager Casey Hudson in December 2020, has come back to work as a consultant on the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.

Not sure, but is this the first good news to ever come out about this game?

 

[mainer]

Hopefully. Maybe? It's certainly better than hearing about someone leaving EA/Bioware, which is all we're really heard about these past 2 years. I just wonder how much influence Darrah will have as an "external consultant" over how DA4 is developed. Seems strange that he would actually agree to do it after some of the cutting comments he made after he left in 2020:

"BioWare magic is **** process," Darrah said at the time. "It's putting a name on something that's saying, 'Don't worry, don't freak out, because we know that at a future date it's all going to get faster and it's all going to work out.' But the reality is that 'working out,' that's where crunch comes from, and that's where delayed games come from. Because you can't predict with a hockey stick. You don't know where the pivot point is, you don't know what the angle is. There's no predictability there at all, so you're making it up by delays and crunch time. BioWare magic is bullshit."

One disheartening thing from that article was that they pulled the Mass Effect developer team (out side of a few core members) to work on DA4, also that ME4 is only in pre-production. I thought it was much further along in development than that.

EA also clarified that the Mass Effect team is helping with Dragon Age because the next Mass Effect remains in pre-production, with just a small core team led by Mike Gamble working on it.

As much as I want to see DA4 (and ME4) succeed, it's becoming more difficult for me to get excited about either game until I see some official gameplay footage and actual in-game screenshots.