Speaking during a video posted on YouTube, Mark Darrah, who previously served at BioWare as the executive producer on the Dragon Age series, has discussed how the developer underwent a series of changes in 2017 that he refers to as “the most impactful 12 months” in BioWare’s history. Unfortunately, these changes resulted in the team behind the Dragon Age series effectively thrown under the bus.
Darrah started heading up a team in late 2016 that would oversee the closing months of the development of Mass Effect Andromeda, something that he says came as a blow to the Dragon Age team, who at which point were working on one of the early versions of Dragon Age’s fourth main entry. Darrah was confident however that by helping get Andromeda out the door, he would be able to shift the resources for that project over to Dragon Age — something which didn’t happen.
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My feeling at the time was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around. They were feeling like we were getting no support from BioWare or from [publisher] EA, which was basically true.
He added that the relationship between EA and BioWare changed around this time, with the Dragon Age developer starting to report to a different arm of the publisher. Previously, the studio was “strangely” reporting to bigwigs in EA’s sports section, who according to Darrah were “benignly disinterested,” allowing the studio to work autonomously.
However, 2017 saw a shift where BioWare began reporting to a branch of the publishing giant that was “hyper interested” in decision-making, which Darrah says is in part why the studio shifted away from Andromeda so fast, thus scrapping its DLC and putting the franchise on hold.
The group that we reported into had very little stake in either the success or the failure of [Mass Effect: Andromeda], and they had a lot more incentive for BioWare to move on to the next thing that they could tie themselves to and show themselves as having influence on the development of.
BioWare’s next project was of course Anthem, the ill-fated looter shooter that launched in February 2019. Darrah received “assurances” from EA and BioWare leadership that it considered Dragon Age an important franchise for the company, but couldn’t back up those statements with the required developers and resources. The return of Casey Hudson further complicated matters, with Darrah only finding out about Hudson’s return at the same time as everyone else, despite his senior position at BioWare.
There’s more details from Darrah available in the video link below, so be sure to check it out.
[Source – Mark Darrah on YouTube via Kotaku]