BioWare magic is shit process. It’s putting a name on saying: Don’t worry. Don’t freak out because we know that at a future date, it’s all gonna get faster. It’s all gonna work out. But the reality is that the ‘working out’ is where the crunch comes from. It’s where delayed games come from.

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The hockey stick approach might explain why we haven’t seen any gameplay video from Dragon Age 4 or any specifics on the next Mass Effect game. Darrah specifically called out current BioWare developers to stop invoking BioWare magic. He emphasized that bad development processes weren’t inevitable or necessary.

“If anyone listening to this works for BioWare, don’t use BioWare magic to refer to this,” Darrah said. “Because this isn’t BioWare magic. This is bad process.”

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The former Dragon Age lead writer also weighed in on “BioWare magic” on Twitter. According to David Gaider, developers would sound the alarm early about their progress, only to be forced to crunch later. While developers decried the brutal process of heavy crunch at the end of projects, they were forced to adapt “BioWare magic” on future projects because their games were ultimately commercial successes.

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Darrah didn’t think that mismanagement was exclusive to BioWare either. He specifically named the Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher studio, CD Projekt Red, for abiding by similar practices. Kotaku was not able to obtain a comment from Darrah at the time of publication.

“It might sound like I’m picking on BioWare right now...because that’s the studio that I have experience with...but the reality is that this is how it works at a lot of studios. This is what CD Projeckt looks like. This is what a ton of games look like. Because they are having difficulty generating completion urgency early on in the process.”

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Correction: 1/19/2022, 1:11 p.m. E.T.: This headline was updated to accurately reflect Mark Durrah’s quotes.