According to David Gaider, the publisher has always been drawn to Mass Effect, and it has ultimately been to the detriment of the Dragon Age franchise…

Coffee was essentially over for Dragon Age, as Electronic Arts declared the game a failure, and a few months after its release, it became part of the PlayStation Plus Essential (!) offer for a month. After several years of development, it fell short of expectations, and the publisher reacted as usual (by sending lead developers away from BioWare). David Gaider, who was the author of the series but left Bioware in 2016 after Dragon Age: Inquisition, revealed two truths in a longer series of posts on Bluesky.

The first isn’t so surprising. Electronic Arts didn’t really know what to do with Dragon Age. The second is more shocking! BioWare was completely split between 2010 and 2016. It was split into two studios, and according to Gaider, they pretty much resented each other. Anthem was supposed to be a darker, Alien-like sci-fi, but he was told to make it a fantasy sci-fi. And that was not very well received…

“I joined the new project that the former Mass Effect team in Edmonton was developing. It became Anthem. BioWare was basically two teams under one roof for a long time: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team. Run differently, very different cultures, might as well have been two separate studios. They didn’t get along. The company was aware of the friction and had been trying to fix it for years, mainly by moving people around more frequently between the teams. But that didn’t really solve things, and I had no idea until I got to the Anthem team. The team didn’t want me there.

I don’t think anyone told the team. So they thought the change was MY doing. I kept getting feedback about how it was “too Dragon Age” and how everything I was writing or planning was “too Dragon Age”… But this was a team where I was expected to take all feedback and act on it, so I ended up iterating CONSTANTLY. It became clear that this was a team that didn’t want to make an RPG, yet they wanted me to wave my magic writing wand and create a BioWare quality story without giving me any of the tools I needed to actually do it. I’d stick it out and do my best, but only if there was SOMETHING on the other side where I could have more of a say as a creative director. I wanted to move up. I was rejected outright, without hesitation. Even more so when I was told that I could leave the company if I wanted to, but that I wouldn’t be successful outside of BioWare. To put it bluntly,” Gaider wrote.

So BioWare was not really ONE team under the flag.

Source: PCGamer, Bsky