BioWare's Mark Darrah Issues Stark Warning Against Always Listening To Players

Mark Darrah, best known for his more than two decades of work at BioWare, drops regular YouTube videos about the gaming industry. His commentary centres around game development, but in a way that’s accessible for players, pulling back the curtain and helping us understand what goes into making the games we play.

His latest video is no different, but it’s bound to be one that players could interpret the wrong way if they’re not careful. It focuses on player feedback, diving into how useful it actually is for devs. Darrah’s conclusion is that listening to the fans is both “great” and “terrible” for devs, and urges them to see the bigger picture when engaging with their player base.

BioWare's Mark Darrah Warns Game Devs Against Doing Whatever Players Say

The full video is well worth watching, but Darrah makes his point very clear early on, before jumping into specific examples.

“Players are really, really good at identifying problems,” Darrah says. “What they're a lot less good at is identifying solutions. They're not developers. They're game players.”

He jumps into his first example, which is feedback on a class in an RPG. “If they're telling you a class is boring, the actual problem might be that the choices in progression aren't very interesting,” he argues. “It might be that it's too powerful or too weak. It might be that it interacts with the game in a non-standard way. It might just be confusing, and players aren't figuring out how to use it to their greatest advantage.”

Another issue is that fans are not a monolith. He highlights how devs will often only hear from the vocal minority online, and that most will simply play the game and put it down again without comment. “You have multiple different groups of people playing your game,” he says. “You have hardcore players, you have casual players, you have people that play for the math, people that play for the story, you have people that are going to consume every single piece of content and some that are going to blow through the game as fast as they can and then move on to the next thing.

“Each of these groups wants different things. And the problem is you don't have an equal conversation with all of these different groups.”

He goes on to reiterate the players won’t know what they want when they are not devs - they can’t see what you’re cooking up and envision the final product. He argues that devs need to trust their own expertise as well.

“Listening doesn't mean doing whatever the community says,” he argues. “It doesn't mean holding votes and letting the majority win. It doesn't mean putting the loudest voices first. It means understanding what your community is experiencing, using their frustration, using their excitement, using their emotions to figure out underlying strengths and weaknesses in what you're making, and then using that to make your own decisions informed by the design that you have, the vision that you have, the game that you're making.”

All in all, it’s a very nuanced take - listen to fans, but don’t expect them to know how to alleviate whatever problems they’re having with a game. Use their feedback to guide how you work on fixes, but don’t lose sight of the wider picture.

Arguably, this is what happened with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which Darrah consulted on. He has previously suggested that EA’s interference is to blame for much of the game’s problems, particularly its lengthy development, as the publisher kept interfering to try and chase trends.