Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has released a video detailing what happened to Bioware in 2017, the same year it released Mass Effect Andromeda. Darrah says that who Bioware reported to at EA changed, which led to the publisher becoming disinterested in Andromeda and instead more intrigued by what the studio was making next. This just so happened to be Anthem, which, like Andromeda, was met with a tepid reception from most critics and players.
RPG trilogy. Andromeda had plenty of bugs and technical problems at launch, too, and while Bioware spent a lot of time fixing the game up, it never quite had the same resonance as Commander Shepard's adventures.
In a new video on his YouTube channel, Darrah says he and a team of Dragon Age developers were brought in to help with the final push of development on Andromeda, which led him to feel like DA wasn't getting the it needed.
"In this last push, we reach a decision that is different than anything we have done in Bioware's history," Darrah says. "I actually led this final team that came onto Mass Effect Andromeda. If you look in the Andromeda credits, you'll see the Dragon Age Finaling team, and I'm on that team.
"My feeling at the time was, the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around. We were feeling like we were getting no from Bioware or EA, which was basically true," Darrah adds.
"This was the first time where we had this 'leadership discontinuity,' where the person in charge of a project left that project to help someone else while it continued to run […] It's not a good thing to do. It is incredibly dangerous to have a project run while it's missing some of its core leadership."
Darrah then claims that the part of EA that Bioware reported to was changed, which shifted how leadership interacted with the team. "Our EA leadership went from being benignly disinterested in us – not really understanding what we did and being willing to let us do our best on our own – to someone who was hyper interested in us.
"One project they weren't particularly interested in was Mass Effect Andromeda, because they had little to gain from the success of Andromeda and little to lose from its failure. So I do think one of the reasons why Bioware moved on from Andromeda as quickly as it did is because the group that we reported into had very little stake in either the success or the failure of the project. And they had a lot more incentive for Bioware to move onto the next thing that they could tie themselves to and show themselves as having influence on the development of."
Bioware's next game was Anthem, which launched in 2019 to an incredibly mixed reception. It felt unfinished, lacked endgame activities, and was incredibly tedious to play. The year after Anthem's launch, both Darrah and general manager Casey Hudson announced their departure from Bioware.
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