Mac Walters, a former veteran a BioWare who worked as a lead writer on the Mass Effect franchise among many other titles, has explained his reasons for leaving the company, which was in part driven by the success of the Legendary Edition of the critically acclaimed space-RPG series.
Speaking in a new interview with MinnMax, Walters reveal that Legendary Edition was “an immense project” that “wasn’t on the roadmap.” As such, BioWare had to accommodate it without it disrupting other titles in development.
I knew I wasn’t going to have a huge internal team … I quickly realized that we’re going to need co-dev work, we’re not going to be able to handle this just with our internal team. So [it was] just a whole different mindset of how we want to run things.
Long story short, that process reminded me a lot of early-days BioWare, because we were a small, scrappy team, a lot of people wearing lots of different hats, a lot of people with opportunity to lead even if it wasn’t in their title, just because that was the nature of what we needed folks to do. There was a lot of camaraderie formed with that team, I think because we stayed small.
After Legendary Edition, because it was so successful to me as a project, in the sense of the team was healthy, we really got along, then of course it was critically and financially successful, it just felt like, this is the bow on all the things I’ve done in Mass Effect, which is like all the things. I don’t want to do any more Mass Effect after this. Why tempt fate?
Walters is now involved in a brand new studio known as Worlds Untold, where he serves as CEO of the company.