Dragon Age developer explains why AAA games take so long and are announced so early
Why do AAA games often take such a long time to develop? And why are they announced so many years ahead of release? Mark Darrah, an industry veteran, explains it to us.
Mark Darrah , a veteran developer who spent 23 years at Bioware and now works as an external consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, has published a video on YouTube where he explains why triple-A games often require so many years of development and how never are sometimes announced well in advance of the release date , highlighting a practice perhaps not very welcome by players but necessary in this sector.
Starting from the first question, i.e. why pharaonic productions take so many years to complete, Darrah explains that often the timescales are actually much shorter than they seem, as these titles are announced when they have not yet entered full production. development , indeed perhaps they are still in a conceptual phase. Staying on the Bioware theme, an excellent example could be the next Mass Effect, revealed with a teaser trailer in 2020 and currently still in an embryonic state.
“There may be a small nascent group, but it doesn’t really work for quite some time,” Darrah says. ” Development studios can be misleading on this front, because they can say things like ‘we’ve started work on Elder Scrolls 6,’ or they can even present a trailer for the game, even if the current team consists of fewer than 10 people” .
“So they give the impression that it’s a parallel development, that the team is working on this game, when in reality it’s just a few people having some meetings and not much gets done.”
Announcing games far in advance is a necessary evil
This dynamic brings us directly to Darrah’s second point: why are games announced years and years in advance?
According to the ex of Bioware, the reasons can be multiple. In some cases a studio or publisher wants to demonstrate to the public that they have strong pieces in the pipeline , while in others it is the developers themselves who want to present a game immediately in order to limit the chances that their publisher decides to cancel the project. In this sense, presenting a title too early is not a good strategy, but according to Darrah sometimes “it is necessary to do so”.
“There may be reasons why it’s important for the studio or publisher to have that game in the public consciousness,” Darrah continues. “It could be because the publisher is in a bit of a weak period in terms of releases and wants the public to remember that it still has important games up its sleeve. Or because the studio wants the game announced because it fears that otherwise the editor take him out.”
Staying on the subject of lengthy development and Bioware topics, the studio spoke in more detail about character creation in Dragon Age: The Veilguard .