“That’s where crunch comes from, and that’s where delayed games come from because you can’t predict with a hockey stick … BioWare Magic is bullshit.” Darrah sees a more reasonable process as a triangle, so a constant gradual incline without that rough, sharp turn up. The Dragon Age II director and producer takes issue with that short piece of the graph, but he attributes that difficult period to “bad process” throughout the entire development cycle. You don’t know if it’s gonna be shallow, super steep, and you don’t know when it’s gonna happen.” “That’s terrible, right? Because you don’t know what the angle of this thing is gonna be. “Things come together really late, things get better really late,” Darrah says. It’s that last bit of the graph Darrah describes as the fabled “BioWare magic,” it’s when the game takes shape through a surge of development, and suddenly there’s tons of content to work with. Then at some point, that is usually impossible to identify before the fact, you hit a pivot point, and things start clicking together.” “You’re going along not making a ton of visible progress, we’re slowly getting things done, but if you draw that line out, your game is shipping in 30 years. “BioWare Magic is this,” Darrah begins in his new YouTube video, gesturing to a hockey-stick graph that gradually climbs higher before suddenly taking a sharp turn up. It's a succinct explanation highlighted by former Dragon Age director and producer Mark Darrah, who explained systemic problems in the video game industry that development teams face while trying to quickly usher new titles out the door. “BioWare magic” is the catchall term for what makes games from the Mass Effect and Dragon Age studio so special, but in reality, it’s all just an ugly way to rebrand lousy development practices that cause crunch.
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