Two part question. 1) Where does a decision like taking DA4 from single player to live service back to single player most likely come from? Do studio leads make that kind of call, or project leads? Or is it a publisher-side “mandate” based on market trends? 2) Rebooting like that must come with significant costs given all the “wasted” dev work, so what needs to happen to make them that confident that staying on course will result in smaller returns than starting over?

boynextdoornews

I think you've misunderstood the "single player vs live service" thing. Live services exist for single player game - any game with regular content updates and patching is a live service. Those content updates and patches are the "service" part - we have to build them, they go live and get pushed out to the public. When Andrew Wilson talked about having live service elements for Veilguard, he didn't mean it needed multiplayer or MMO elements. He meant that EA and Bioware probably should have authorized, prepared, and built paid and free DLC to support the game post-launch. The "live service" part means that the game is "live" (it is out in public) and that we "service it" by building additional stuff for it over time. Now let's get to your questions.

Where does a decision like taking DA4 from single player to live service back to single player most likely come from? Do studio leads make that kind of call, or project leads? Or is it a publisher-side "mandate" based on market trends?

A big decision like this tends to come from agreement between the dev team's executive producer, the studio head, and the publishing executives. This decision would require a major shift in direction, which requires a significant allocation of people to the project in varying disciplines and fields of expertise. The studio, the team, and the publishers need consensus as to what is feasible with the headcount available and what the important core elements of the game are. These decisions determine whether they have to hire more for specific roles and have to cut developers who have no work to do on the new project plan.

Rebooting like that must come with significant costs given all the "wasted" dev work, so what needs to happen to make them that confident that staying on course will result in smaller returns than starting over?

As game development progresses from initial concept to prototyping to preproduction to production, there are certain major evaluations that the project must pass in order to get the green light to continue. These evaluations are primarily gates to increased amounts of funding, because the next step after passing the evaluation is usually to add more staff (and thus the project costs significantly increase). Each evaluation has its own general set of criteria that are agreed upon and updated over time by the publishing executives, the studio leadership, and the team leadership. If a project fails to pass one of these evaluations, consequences happen. If the project fails too hard, the project can get cancelled altogether. If the evaluation doesn't go well but the leadership thinks the idea still has merit, the project might get its progress reset to the previous gate (or even to an even earlier gate) to try again. Usually when this happens, there's also some reassignment of the dev team, either layoffs or transfers to other projects. This is likely what happened with the various versions of DA4 that they attempted to build.

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