Mark Darrah on Veilguard: “Tied Up in the Trunk Shouting Directions”

Mark Darrah joined BioWare in Edmonton in 1997. He ran Dragon Age as executive producer for years, walked out in 2021, and then came back as a part-time consultant to help drag Dragon Age: The Veilguard over the finish line. So when EA shut the studio down, he was one of the few people who could explain how it got there. He did that in an exclusive interview with Eldorado.gg, and he doesn’t hold much back.

Most of the Mark Darrah interview took place just before the closure, which makes a few of his answers feel eerily well-timed. Asked about the end of BioWare, he mostly sounds tired:

“The sword of Damocles has been hanging over the studio since Mass Effect Andromeda.”

What EA actually announced

EA announced on October 21 that BioWare is closing and that early work on the next Mass Effect is over. It’s part of roughly 400 layoffs across EA, with about 50 of them at BioWare. By EA’s own count, Veilguard pulled in around 1.5 million players in its launch quarter. That’s close to half of what the company wanted.

Here’s the strange part. Darrah says EA historically almost never shut studios down on paper. It would move people to other teams, let the studio shrink to five or six developers, and wait for them to quit. No press release, no farewell post. With BioWare, EA skipped the slow fade and just said it.

A consultant nobody wanted to listen to

As executive producer, Darrah worked 60-hour weeks that stretched to 80 in crunch. On Veilguard he got about 20. That alone limited what he could do, but the real issue was political. Whoever was in charge didn’t want him stepping on the leaders who had replaced him, so he spent the project on the outside looking in.

“I’m used to being in the driver’s seat, and now I’m tied up in the trunk shouting directions through the walls of the car.”

It gets worse. Darrah says he’d sometimes flag a problem, get ignored, and then watch another outside group raise the exact same point and get listened to.

Never time to fix, always time to fix it twice

This is where the interview really bites. According to Darrah, the team knew about problems and skipped proper fixes because certification was supposedly six months out. It ended up being 12 to 18 months. So instead of one real fix, issues got a Band-Aid, then a second Band-Aid when the first didn’t hold. Add those up and you’ve spent about the same time a proper fix would’ve taken.

His clearest example is the writing. Players called Veilguard’s jokey tone “Marvel-esque,” and Darrah says the team already knew it was a problem going into alpha in late 2022. It got three or four polish passes. Nobody ripped the plots apart and started over.

“It wasn’t deemed that there was time, but ultimately, yeah, there totally was time.”

Worth noting: he doesn’t pin this one on EA. In his telling, the game’s own leadership made the call, then spent the time anyway on weaker solutions.

Veilguard was built on live-service bones

A lot of what players hated about Veilguard goes back to 2017 and 2018, when Dragon Age 4 was being rebuilt as a live-service game. Darrah walks through it. Companions who never really push back on you? That makes sense if everyone in co-op needs the same party. Faster action combat? You can’t pause a multiplayer session every ten seconds. Bite-sized missions? Built for people dropping in and out.

Then the live-service plan died, and nobody went back to tear those systems out.

He actually thinks both sides of the review war have a point. On its own, he puts Veilguard at “high 70s, low 80s.” If you’re a long-time fan who wants your old choices to matter, though, the game throws away too much, and the angry user scores make sense too.

EA never hated Dragon Age, it just never got it

If you’ve been waiting for Darrah to blame EA executives for sabotaging the series, he won’t. His read is more boring and probably more accurate. A lot of people at EA come from sports or from outside games entirely, and they look at everything through that lens. It works for Battlefield. It sort of works for Mass Effect.

“When you use that lens and look at Dragon Age, it doesn’t work at all.”

EA didn’t understand The Sims either, he points out, right up until it started printing money. Dragon Age never got there. Darrah can picture a version of the series that grew from Origins into something like Baldur’s Gate 3. What it got instead was a push toward simpler, broader games, which is how you end up with Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition.

Why Mass Effect is worth more than Dragon Age

Could Larian just buy Dragon Age? Darrah answers like the producer he is. Without people like former lead writer David Gaider attached, the name doesn’t bring the old fans back on its own. Larian might as well make “Wyvern Era,” his joke name for a Dragon Age game with the serial number filed off. Thedas sits close enough to Lord of the Rings, Baldur’s Gate and The Witcher that a fresh fantasy IP covers most of the same ground.

Mass Effect is another story. That universe is distinct enough to be worth something even without its creators. Which makes EA killing the next one before it got going a bit hard to explain.

AI won’t make games cheaper

Darrah expects AI to show up in code first, because players care a lot less about who wrote the code than who drew the art. He doesn’t buy the savings pitch, though. Every time the industry got faster at making games, it just made bigger ones.

“Games would just get three times as complicated, and you would be no further ahead.”

Anthem, gyms and dive bars

His best line is about Anthem. A single-player game asks you to try a new amusement park for a weekend. A live-service game asks you to quit the gym where you already know everyone. The new gym can’t be about as good, it has to be better at nearly everything. Anthem beat Destiny in a few areas and lost in several, and that was never going to cut it.

He also has a theory about the wave of cheap co-op “friendslop” games. Maybe they’re what happens when players get tired of gyms. You go once with friends, have a laugh and leave. More dive bar than gym. The floor’s sticky, as he puts it, but you’re not coming back, so who cares?

There’s plenty more in there, from how he’d handle an Elder Scrolls spin-off to what he expects from Casey Hudson’s Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic.