Former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah, who was at the famed studio for more than two decades while running the Dragon Age franchise, has suggested that Mass Effect 5 might actually benefit from being the only game on the developer’s plate even if it means the gap between BioWare releases is longer.
For years, BioWare juggled multiple projects at the same time. The original Mass Effect, Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, and Dragon Age: Origins were all in different stages of production concurrently, for example, and the studio continued with that structure of having developers go back and forth between games up until, well, now.
Executive producer Mike Gamble even recently stated “the team is heads-down and focused exclusively on Mass Effect” since they “have a lot of universe to cover, lots of features to build, and lots of romances to figure out” – and, presumably, not enough bandwidth to cover a second game anyway.
Speaking to Destin Legarie, Mark Darrah says the “Mass Effect 5 team did what we should have done when we moved the Dragon Age people on to Anthem, which is everyone went.” By nature, that means there’s going to be a more significant gap between the studio’s releases – Darrah himself guessed Mass Effect 5 might come out “a long time” after Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
“BioWare has effectively become a one-project studio, which has its own problems, but it’s a different set of problems than what BioWare has been up until arguably 2022,” Darrah continued, before explaining all the upsides that can come with making games under a one-project structure.
The BioWare of old, Darrah said, had “several projects fighting for attention and resources, and like bumping each other and elbowing each other and causing unintended effects on each other. That’s not the studio that it is now. As near as I can tell, 100% of what they’re working on right now is Mass Effect. That’s probably for the best.”
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