#mark darrah

[dragonageconfessions]

CONFESSION:

My confession. I recently discovered Mark Darrah's youtube channel and Its really made me understand game development better. I especially appreciate his sharing of his Dragon Age Memories. I've come to see things differently and I've come to understand why some things/elements/aspects I would like to see can't be done yet because the technology is not there to include it. Its also made me filter out a lot of people in the fandom who post conspiracy theories and really bad takes on Dreadwolf, etc. Its made me realize how many in the fandom come out of the woodwork thinking they know everything about game development when they really don't

[anneapocalypse]

"So there was a controversy that caught me a bit by surprise. When the leak occurred that we were doing qunari as a playable race, there was an immediate backlash because the assumption was that we would only have male qunari. This was never the intention, but because the news was coming out through a leak, it was missing necessary context about the fact that we were doing male and female qunari. So we actually had to get ahead of this, or try to regain control of this narrative at PAX, because the narrative out there was that we were going to put out a game with male-only qunari, which was never the case. So one thing I would say is if you're getting news through leaks, chances are that you're going to be missing a piece of context. Sometimes that's going to mean that you're misinterpreting the news that you're hearing."

--Mark Darrah, Dragon Age: Inquisition - PAX 2013 (Mark Darrah Reacts)

[mrs-gauche]

An important announcement from Mark Darrah

[justzamb]

I've seen a couple posts cautioning fans of Dragon Age to remember that the developers, voice actors, and other creators working on Veilguard are in fact real people, and to treat them accordingly. So it feels like a good time to post this video from Mark Darrah, former dev and executive producer at Bioware (and now consultant on DATV). Game devs are the intended audience for the video, but lots of good things to keep in mind for fans too. And if anyone has a link to one of the posts that has been circling around about toxicity/parasocial relationships please send it to me because I'd love to reblog it with this for context.

[fenharel-archived]

really insightful and nuanced take on the whole discourse around bg3 in case anyone is interested

[exhausted-archivist]

"No, I'm not gonna do your little FedEx quest." - Mark Darrah

This was mentioned in his new video Non-Standard Game Over when talking about how Hawke can tell Flemeth no in the prologue. Honestly the best summary of the interaction.

[byfeldonscane]

At this point, whatever shackles EA had placed upon the multiple dev teams that have tried to make the fourth Dragon Age title have ostensibly loosened, if not fallen off entirely. No longer will this be a live-service, multiplayer title, à la Anthem, and no longer will it feature in-game purchases. Dreadwolf is shaping up to have its very own vision, long-fought, and with that comes a great deal of positive potential.

[bunabi]

girl what happened to just creating fanwork to satisfy your needs

going directly to the developers for canonical changes to the work has gotta stop like what happened to boundaries

[chaosroid]

This is still the funniest thing to happen to the dragon age fandom

oh my god [source]

[bittershroom]

Mass Effect 2s vision statement was ‘ The Dirty Dozen In Deep Space’ 

[dragonageconfessions]

Just thought I'd post this link in case anybody missed it as its very insightful

[anneapocalypse]

So, Dragon Age: Origins, obviously, on PC, known for its tactical camera. Dragon Age: Origins on consoles didn't actually have tac cam, and Dragon Age 2 didn't have tac cam at all, so tac cam remains this interesting feature in the Dragon Age franchise where some players feel like it is a key part of the DNA, and other people never use it whatsoever.

What we found in Dragon Age: Inquisition was it was a feature that was not used very much, and even those people who did use it often used it simply to survey the battlefield before doing most of the combat in the third-person over-the-shoulder camera. Because it's such a radically different camera angle, tac-cam requires a significant amount of additional level design and especially level art work to allow it to coexist with that over-the-shoulder camera.

- Mark Darrah, former Dragon Age Executive Producer

[seriously-mike]

As for Destiny, you should have realized that Bungle were too greedy and incompetent for Activision when they slapped a $80 price tag on Foreskin only to circumcise it out of the game a year later, along with everything that came out before.

Overwatch just rotted away - on one hand, they were pressured into giving up the entire lootbox bullshit after the European Commission threatened them with a large-gauge colonoscopy into their internal business matters, on the other, people weren't buying the $40 boxed game but kept playing Warzone and buying season passes and skin packs for that one, so under the bullshit pretense of "Overwatch 2" they made the same goddamn game free to play and weaseled out of their "PVE campaigns" promise.

And Bioware can go fuck themselves after Mark Darrah aired their dirty Anthem laundry. He basically revealed that "Bioware magic" was bullshit and they were just throwing shit at a wall and looking what sticks. Meaning that their greatest hits came out pretty much by accident.

Sadly I'm at the point when I'd rather Dread Wolf be cancelled than see the stillborn husk that is gonna get released as in the current state of bioware/gamedev/market as a whole.

Why is every greedy exec on this planet hellbent on ruining every video game franchise that I actually loved. First Overwatch, then Destiny and now this. This sucks.

[mrs-gauche]

I can't stop thinking about this joke my friend made yesterday. We were chatting about Mark Darrah's return to BioWare and how he had made a comment saying that his role as consultant was now primarily focusing on, quote, "lore and landing" and what that even means, when my friend was like

"Picture Darrah's first day back, standing in front of the whole dev team, pointing at the game's title: So first of all, that is not how you spell Dread Wolf -"

[girlbob-boypants]

A game dev advocating for crunch by saying a director at BioWare was right for describing it positively...

[alistairkisser]

listen we all complain about the writers of DA a lot but there are many other people on the development teams who contributed to making the games terrible and i think we should give them their time in the spotlight also