Mac Walters, who spent nineteen years at BioWare, was also a key figure in the Mass Effect series.

Mac Walters, lead writer on Mass Effect 2 and 3 and creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda, has left BioWare after nineteen years. Walters previously served as production director on the upcoming Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. But it looks like the project will have to continue without him. The developer announced his departure last weekend in a post on LinkedIn.

“At the end of last year I decided to leave BioWare,” wrote Walters, even though “These past 19 years have been a life-changing experience […] and it made the choice to go very difficult.”

It isn’t easy to know exactly what this means for the development of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. In an interview with BioWare last year, Walters described the role of production director as “you have the vision for a product you’re helping to uphold […] but on the producer side, you are also responsible for figuring out how you’re going to support the team in creating that vision.” That doesn’t exactly sound like a job you can finish at the end of development and go home. It sounds more like a role that is needed until the game hits the shelves. If that’s the case, then the current situation could put a bit of a damper on Dragon Age development.

As with the whole Mass Effect series (and its remaster: Mac Walters was also project director for the 2021 Mass Effect: Legendary Edition) and his many years at BioWare, Walters is another in a long line of studio veterans who have left the company in recent years. Mass Effect and Dragon Age heads Casey Hudson, and Mark Darrah departed in 2020, while Darrah’s successor Christian Dailey resigned last February. Whatever BioWare may say, it’s hard to believe that Dragon Age development is going according to plan.

Source: Eurogamer