Veteran Dragon Age dev says one big delay is better than several small ones: “You are laying band-aid on top of band-aid on top of band-aid”

BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has some advice for developers navigating a potential delay, and he reckons it’s better to rip off the band-aid with one big delay rather than continually move dates around.

Darrah published a nine-minute video to his YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the upsetting topic of game delays, which, these days, come around, more often than not, several times in a major game’s development. Darrah advises studios to make the difficult decision to announce one major delay and completely re-evaluate the game they’re making so that they aren’t under constant pressure to meet deadlines.

“If your game ends up being two years late, but you know it’s going to be two years late, that opens up your probability space massively, because you know, ‘OK, right, we’re not shipping in a month, we’re gonna ship in 25 months. Then let’s take a step back and re-examine what we’ve got and potentially undo some of the decisions that we made earlier when we thought we were making a different game, and take a different path,'” Darrah says. “If, instead, your game ends up moving two years, but it does it three months at a time, when does that re-examination occur?

It sounds like Darrah is saying, if a dev’s game is in a state that it needs to be delayed several times, it might be worth taking a step back and asking themselves if there’s a bigger, more foundational problem that needs to be addressed.

“For two years, you’re always three months from ship. Not only were you not able to take a step back and back up and take a different path, as time goes on, you’re digging that debt deeper and deeper and deeper. You are laying band-aid on top of band-aid on top of band-aid, and not only do you not feel like you have the ability to back up because you don’t have time, you’re actualy making it harder and harder to back up, because with each extra band-aid, with each patch, with each thing you do in order to try to make what you have work, you’re making it harder to take a different path.

“You are adding to that pile of assets that you might have to abandon. You are making it ever more difficult to do what you probably should have done in the first place, which is burn it down and take the other fork in the road.”

Put more succinctly: “Sometimes the right path is to throw the thing in reverse, lose everything you’ve been working on, and find another way forward.”

It’s not exactly a counterpoint, but my only comment here is that there are times where game delays don’t signify an underlying issue with the game that needs to be addressed, such was the case with Stalker 2 and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Otherwise, I’m picking up with Darrah’s putting down, for the most part.

At least, from a consumer perspective, it’s easier in the long-run to accept a big delay than to suffer the relentless disappointment of numerous smaller delays, especially if the final product is better for it.

Anywho, here are some upcoming indie games I hope don’t get delayed.