Summary
- Mark Darrah, who was at BioWare for 23 years, addresses the issue of toxicity directed at game devs.
- Darrah says that those who attack devs often don’t know who is actually responsible for the thing they didn’t like in a game.
- Many of his comments appear to be in reference to Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Longtime BioWare developer Mark Darrah has called out toxicity in the gaming community, specifically those who target writers, actors, and other devs online.
While he does not mention Dragon Age: The Veilguard by name, it appears to be in relation this this latest release, as he calls out those who celebrate layoffs – something BioWare was hit with after The Veilguard launched. He argues that many who are abusing devs online don’t actually know what caused a game to have issues in the first place, as they are not privy to what happened during development.
Mark Darrah Calls Out Those Celebrating BioWare Layoffs
This comes after multiple Dragon Age: The Veilguard devs were either moved to new studios or laid off
Darrah made these comments in a new video shared on his YouTube channel, titled, “Your $70 Doesn’t Buy You Cruelty”. Here, he gives several reasons why gamers should not be cruel to developers. The first of which is that it’s simply not a nice thing to do, but digging a little deeper, he also suggests that they may be getting angry with the wrong people.
“I’m not saying you’re not allowed to be angry about it, I’m not saying you don’t get to express your dissatisfaction with the content of the game that you’re not enjoying” he starts. “But when you climb into someone’s personal social media and start actively attacking that person, when you celebrate layoffs at a studio because the game that you don’t like didn’t do that well, you’re crossing a line into being cruel and fundamentally you should have more grace for other human beings.”
He then continues, saying that fans have no way of knowing what created the issues they have with a game. He gives several examples of what could have gone wrong during development, such as the writing being poor quality because the writer was working to a tight deadline, or the direction of the game was changed last minute. He also points out that issues can come up when the leadership of a project changes several times – something which we know happened to the fourth Dragon Age game since it started early development after Dragon Age: Inquisition.
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“When you decided to personally attack that one specific person on social media, how certain are you that it was their fault, that they are responsible for that thing that you don’t like?” he argues. “You shouldn’t be certain, because you don’t know exactly what was going on within the project.”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard was largely received well at launch, but came under fire by some longtime fans who felt that the writing was weaker compared to previous games. On the other hand, the game also became a culture war target, with bigoted comments made about its inclusion of queer characters.
Again, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is not mentioned in the video, but a lot of what he mentions does seem to apply to the project and its turbulent development – which was restarted twice. Now, every single writer who has ever worked on the series has left BioWare, and it’s unclear what is happening with the series now that the focus is on Mass Effect.
BioWare
- Date Founded
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February 1, 1995
- CEO
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Ray Muzyka
- Headquarters
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Edmonton, Canada