Today I’m rounding up April’s updates on Dragon Age 4, we’re going over two brand-new BioWare Developer Stories, we have a story on contracted Dragon Age QA developers who are filing to unionise, and we have a veteran who has left the Dragon Age team. We’ve got a lot of blogs and articles to go through today, so that’s why I’m ditching the camera and delving straight into this one.
Before we get to the news, in my last video, I announced that I’m a BioWare Gear Store Ambassador which means I can give you all a sweet discount to use in the BioWare store. I have a new code for you all today, you can use code: BWJACKDAW1 for 20% off at the BioWare Gear Store right now! This discount code ends May 7th! So, use it while you can. It doesn’t work for preorders or items that are already discounted, but everything else is perfect to use this code with!
With that said, let’s jump into these BioWare Developer Blogs.
BioWare Developer Blogs:
In the middle of April, BioWare posted a Community Update blog covering the next game’s progression, I covered this fully in my last news update if you’d like the full scoop.
Essentially the blog shared insights from a few members of the Dragon Age team, showcased community and fan works, and it unveiled a new blog programme called developer stories which will introduce many members of the team in great detail, allowing us fans to get a better understanding on who’s creating the next Dragon Age game and what their roles entail.
Since the reveal of this Community Update blog, we’ve received two developer stories, one about Creative Director John Epler, and the other about Technical Director Maciej Kurowski which is apparently pronounced like ‘Ma-chay,’ according to many of you. Thanks to those who did provide clarity on this. I really appreciate any help with pronouncation because I often screw it up.
We’ll start with John Epler’s blog and then I’ll cover Maciej Kurowski’s blog. So, reading this from the start:
Friends! Welcome to the first of many BioWare Developer Stories! In this series, we’ll be talking with our colleagues here at the studio about their histories, what they do at BioWare, what makes this such a special place to work, and all sorts of other topics.
Today’s lucky contestant is John Epler, Creative Director for the Dragon Age franchise. John’s been at BioWare since the late ‘00s, but he actually didn’t get his start on the creative side of things at all. In fact, before BioWare he was in a different field entirely: the audiovisual trade.
THE STORY SO FAR
“I was selling TVs,” John says. “I knew I wanted to get into games, though, and at the time BioWare was hiring term testers, which is a contract position in QA.” (That’s Quality Assurance, the folks who track down bugs and other issues.) “I got lucky enough to run into a couple of BioWare people at the store and mentioned that I’d applied. I got an interview, got the job, and I’ve been working at BioWare ever since.”
After a few years in QA, John started working as a cinematic designer on Dragon Age: Origins, which he describes as working with a huge library of animations to put together cinematic scenes. “It’s largely about knowing the animation library well enough to be able to go, ‘Oh, I need someone to walk backwards for three seconds; here’s the animation that does that,’” he says. “So you round up all the appropriate animations and stitch them into a finished scene.”
John remained a cinematic designer through Dragon Age: Inquisition, graduating to lead cinematic designer for Inquisition’s DLC. From there he moved into the narrative director role for the next game, which is more about the story and characters of a game as a whole. “You’re focused on narrative as more of a holistic experience,” as he puts it. And now, as creative director, he takes an even wider view, “keeping an eye on the game, and the franchise, as a whole,” he says, “and making calls about where to focus resources on the project.”
ON DRAGON AGE
With all this Dragon Age experience, you might expect John feels a strong connection to the series—and you would be correct: When we ask about some memorable moments from his time with BioWare, he goes right to the closing days of Inquisition’s development. “We were finishing out the Redcliffe scenes,” he says, “and one of our audio guys called me down to listen to what he’d been working on. I remember standing there, hearing the theme kick in, and thinking, ‘Oh, wow. We might have something special on our hands here.’ We’d put so much of ourselves into this thing, and it was finally coming together.”
It’s a scene where the player has to decide what their character believes in. And that kind of moment is one of the hallmarks of the series, John says. “Faith is a big theme throughout the games,” he explains. “Not faith in a religious sense, necessarily, but belief in something—whether that something is a wholly unknowable figure, or another person, or even just yourself. And the games look at what happens when that belief is challenged, or completely broken.”
John’s connection to the franchise extends even outside of the games themselves: He contributed to the 2020 short story anthology Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights. So naturally, we had to ask how writing a short story compares to writing on games. “Honestly, both have their own challenges,” he says. “Writing games has to consider interactivity, budget, branching, technical needs…so the actual writing is only a small part of the job. Fiction is easier in that I can write whatever I want because there’s never going to be someone building any of it. But I think you lose a lot of shortcuts that you get in games. Like, I hate writing fight scenes—but in a game, I can say ‘and there should be a fight here’ and I never, ever have to write another fight scene.”
ON BIOWARE
There’s a reason Dragon Age makes such an impression even on the people who help make it. “Dragon Age is really about the people,” John says. “The stuff with BioWare games that tends to get referenced the most—the things you hear people bring up time and time again—it’s almost never the big critical-path beats. It’s the character beats, and at their best, those critical-path beats and those character beats become the same thing. It’s about how those characters interact with each other; ‘family is where you find it’ is a pretty core theme for all of our games.”
And John’s introduction to the studio’s own cast of characters was an especially memorable one. “My very first day at BioWare was the day they held the Mass Effect launch party,” he says. “It was at our local science center, and they had the game playable on the planetarium screen! We had the run of the place after hours—it was pretty incredible.” He pauses. “It may have set the bar way too high.”
And what would John be doing if he hadn’t found his way to the studio? “Honestly, I don’t know,” he says. “I nearly ended up working at a paper supply company before I got the job at BioWare, so maybe that? There’s an alternate universe John out there somewhere that’s basically—I want to say Jim from The Office, but I’ll be honest and say Andy—and he’s living that life, and probably making games in his spare time. But it’s hard to imagine, honestly. I’ve been working here for nearly a third of the time I’ve been alive!”
John Epler is the creative director for the Dragon Age franchise. You can find him on Twitter at @eplerjc.
Onwards to Maciej Kurowski’s developer story:
Welcome to another edition of BioWare Developer Stories, where we learn what drives the people who make our games, how they got here, what they do here, what they think about being here, what they do when they’re not here and—well, you get the idea. Let’s move on.
Today we’re talking with Maciej Kurowski, the technical director for the Dragon Age franchise. Maciej will have been with BioWare for six years this May and has been in the games industry as a whole for over 13 years.
THE STORY SO FAR
After earning his master’s in computer science, Maciej joined a small independent studio in Poland, where he started as a programmer and quickly moved up to chief technology officer. It may seem like it’d be quite different from working at a big studio like BioWare, but that experience offered some invaluable insight.
“Starting on a small indie team with very few resources helped me understand something very quickly,” he says. “What ultimately matters is to get a good game out. Any tech, no matter how impressive, is just a means to an end.” And that’s an important lesson when things scale up. “On a big, highly specialized team, it’s sometimes easy to get lost in technical minutiae,” he tells us. “So I’m grateful for the experience of being forced to focus on the end product.”
That focus continues to inform his work as technical director, where he oversees not only the technology that drives our games but also the tools our developers use to make them. So the proper focus can make a huge difference. “Ultimately, my goal is to launch a high-quality game smoothly,” Maciej says, “while staying within the timeframe and scope we’ve set for the game. But making a game takes years, and every day brings different issues that need to be dealt with in order to get to that goal.”
We asked Maciej what an average day looks like on the path to that destination—and it sounds like there may not be such a thing as an “average” day. “Some days are spent in deeply technical discussions about how to solve unexpected challenges,” he says. “Others are dedicated to checking up on the well-being of my team. But probably my favorite days are the ones where I get to help devs in other departments figure out their challenges. I love that we can all work together to make the best experience for players.”
ON DRAGON AGE
It’s hard to express how gratifying it is to have players who experience these games and feel so passionately about them. So we like to ask our interviewees why they think fans respond so strongly. In the case of Dragon Age, “I think it’s that these aren’t your usual fantasy stories,” Maciej says. “Fantasy has historically been aimed at teenage males, and that used to be the demographic games were geared toward, too. But that’s no longer the primary demographic of gamers—and it was never the whole demographic anyway. So I think, especially with DAII and Inquisition, that Dragon Age speaks to a wider variety of people, with stories that aren’t just about being cool, doing fancy things with a sword, killing things, and seeing lots of blood.”
And the “stories” part of that is especially key. “Another thing is that these games are a mix of pure roleplaying—being able to build your own character and have them act in a variety of different ways—and a strong story. There are a bunch of other really successful RPGs that have more of a simulation approach, where it’s all about freedom. But that can come at the cost of a complex story, and the connection a player makes to that story. I think since BioWare games tend to prioritize storytelling more, while still offering genuine roleplaying, players can really get invested. I think there are few games that can balance those two things as well as Dragon Age does.”
That balance grabs even folks like Maciej who develop the tech for games. It’s what keeps him so invested that he won’t even consider playing an evil—or even rude—character. “I appreciate the existence of the ‘jerk’ options,” he says, “but it just feels wrong to not be nice. I’m probably nicer to virtual people than to actual people.” It’s what allows him to name his favorite moment in any Dragon Age with almost no pause for thought (“Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts” in Inquisition, the one in Orlais with all the court intrigue). And it’s what gives him an easy answer for what Dragon Age character he’d most like to work alongside: “Varric, so he can narrate our efforts making the game while flashing his magnificent chest.”
ON BIOWARE
You’ll notice as we do more of these Dev Stories that lots of folks talk about “BioWare games” as almost a genre in themselves. And we’re always curious what it is that our colleagues think makes BioWare special. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Maciej has a technology-focused answer. “One thing that I was pleasantly surprised with when I started here was how closely we’re able to collaborate with other EA studios on our tech,” he says. ”We don’t just share centrally developed tech; there’s also a lot of code-sharing between the studios. It may be surprising to players, but there are lots of common technical challenges that we share with games as different from ours as FIFA, and being able to contribute solutions that end up being used across many different games is a great perk.”
And that’s not even mentioning the collaboration that has to happen between BioWare’s own two studios, situated over 2.000 miles apart (around 3,400 kilometers). Throw a global pandemic into the mix, and you’ve got the potential for a technological nightmare. But the team took things in stride. “Ever since I joined, we were working in a distributed manner between our Edmonton and Austin studios,” Maciej says. “But the pandemic forced us to rapidly deal with all-new challenges that come from an extremely distributed team. It was chaotic at first, for sure, but I think we ended up even stronger than before.”
We’re just glad our newfound ability to work remotely hasn’t driven Maciej back to his more temperate homeland. “I’m told Edmonton is a prime example of North American urban sprawl, and that that’s a bad thing—but I actually enjoy all the space,” he says. “The weather, though… when the air hits your face in the winter? That hurts.”
Maciej Kurowski is the technical director for the Dragon Age franchise. When not at work, he can be found scrutinizing home-improvement videos on YouTube for tips on how to fix his bathroom.
It’s certainly great to understand more about the developers of Dragon Age 4 and gain some personal information on how they feel about Dragon Age, the BioWare team, and so on. I’ll be keeping my eyes out for more of these in the future, I do wonder how often BioWare plan to release these.
DA QA Devs Unionizing:
Moving on to the next story, a group of quality assurance testers working on Dragon Age 4 have filed an application to unionise. I’m quoting IGN’s article for the sake of this video, the article followed:
The employees, who work directly with developer BioWare but as contractors of supporting company Keywords Studios, are attempting to unionize over issues of poor pay, a return to work mandate, and more.
An anonymous source told Kotaku that Keyword employees would have to return to their Alberta-based office on May 9 despite cases of COVID-19 slowly rising since the start of April.
Keyword employees would not be entitled to sick pay if they had to quarantine as a result of COVID-19, the source said, while BioWare employees are allowed to work from home completely.
The return to work ruling was seemingly the final straw for the 15-20 QA testers who allegedly are already subject to poor pay. The source said some employees are being paid $16.50 Canadian dollars per hour - $12.82 U.S. dollars - which is considerably less than identical roles carried out by full BioWare employees.
Other issues were raised including gender-pay discrimination, a lack of useful performance evaluations, and a hostile response to unionising efforts.
The union application was filed on April 20 and is currently being reviewed by the Alberta Labor Relations Board until May 3. A vote to unionise will be held within the next two weeks, and the result will be confirmed by the board within another two weeks.
The source said the group is "very confident" it would win the vote, having taken inspiration from the recent efforts of Raven Software QA employees to unionise, allowing them to have more influence over their workplace.
They became the first union within Activision Blizzard despite alleged attempts from the developer to stop them. The workers were left out of recent pay increases at the company, however, with Activision Blizzard saying it was "due to legal obligations under the National Labor Relations Act."
I’m all for higher pay and better working conditions for games companies, especially with the pandemic and forced mandatory conditions. I think that’s utterly unfair, so, of course, I’m in support of developers fighting for a chance to join a union.
Nick Thornborrow Departure:
And that brings us to our final story of April, Story Artist Nick Thornborrow has left BioWare and the Dragon Age team after 14.9 years. Nick posted on Twitter:
Today is my last day at BioWare. If I'd stayed another two weeks, I'd have been there for 15 years which... How? I'm so grateful for these past 14.96153846 years, and in particular the last few doing story art. And I'm still not sorry for putting that wolf jaw necklace on Solas.
It's been a pretty emotional week saying goodbye, but change is good in this case. I'm excited about what's up next, which I'll talk about in a couple weeks after I've had a chance to decompress a bit.
Nick was one of the artists responsible for crafting the beautiful Dread Wolf Rises mural, a piece of art that has been dissected to almost death by many of us. It’s certainly sad to see him go, but I’m wishing him all the best in his future endeavours. Thank you for the 14.9 years you’ve spent at BioWare Nick, as a fanbase, we greatly appreciate the time and care you’ve put into one of our favourite franchises.
With that unearthed, let me know your thoughts on each of these stories. How do you feel about the blogs coming out from BioWare? Has it hit you that they’ve started their marketing campaigns and soon down the line we’ll be seeing gameplay, trailers and other huge teases? I’m trying not to get too excited, but it’ll be a fantastic time on this channel when that sort of news hits us. How do you feel about Nick’s departure? And what are your thoughts on Dragon Age 4’s development at the moment?
Don’t forget to use BWJACKDAW1 in the BioWare Gear Store checkout for 20% your order!
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