Former Dragon Age Producer Explains Why The Veilguard and GTA 6 Took So Many Years to Develop
Former Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah spoke on a podcast explaining why The Veilguard and GTA 6 took so many years to complete.
Creating a new AAA takes a lot of time , years and years, and big publishers are increasingly reducing the density of their publishing lineups because of it. In some cases, however, the time between a project and success is really long, even ten years or more, as happened with GTA and Dragon Age .
Speaking on a podcast about why AAA games take so long, former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah and now consultant on Dragon Age The Veilguard had his say.
Darrah’s words on game development times
“One of the reasons AAA games take so long in some cases is simply because they can afford it ,” Darrah reveals. “They look at the market, they look at what they need to do, and they decide it’s more important to produce a very impactful game than it is to release something more quickly.”
Former Dragon Age Producer Explains Why The Veilguard and GTA 6 Took So Many Years to Develop
“We could argue that’s what Rockstar does with GTA : they’d rather have a game come out once every decade or more and be a cultural phenomenon rather than try to shorten the timeline and potentially reduce its impact.” Darrah states that in many cases of “successful” franchises, “a long waiting period between games” can “actually enhance the impact of the upcoming game”.
Darrah explains that these are some of the ” external reasons ” for spacing out game releases. Furthermore, from his point of view, AA and indie games (which require less time) can arrive on the market and surprise everyone with a particular idea that forces AAA to change some details of the game in order to introduce it and keep up with the latest trends, slowing down development even further.
“There are many reasons why AAA games take a long time,” concludes Darrah, “some of which make sense, some of which make sense if you are part of the management of a company, and some of which honestly don’t make much sense, but are a consequence of the ambitions of the team, but also of the expectations of the players that the teams fear of disappointing.”
We also point out that Darrah had already made some comments on the game, had said what he thought of The Veilguard and did not use half measures .