«To be frank the Mass Effect team is going to be able to point to The Veilguard and say ‘we should steer away from some of these things, because look what happened’.»
The future of BioWare has never looked murkier.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard proved the latest highly divisive release from a studio that hasn’t had a launch unmarred by controversy since Mass Effect 2 in 2010. Over which time a huge number of key developers have left or been unceremoniously laid-off.
Now BioWare, formerly always a multi-project studio, has focused all its efforts on only one: a new Mass Effect sequel, hoping to dispel the lasting shadow of Andromeda and forge a new path forward for the series.
But that new structure will make the project «less messy», according to Mark Darrah—a longstanding BioWare veteran who served as executive producer on Dragon Age until he left in 2020, and consulted on Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
In an interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, he describes how past BioWare projects have struggled against and «cannibalised» each other, hampering key titles and in some cases preventing proper post-launch support as staff have been swiftly moved off projects deemed to be struggling in development or failed at release.
