In a blog post today, Electronic Arts announced that the scope of BioWare’s game development will be changing. Once a studio capable of working on several projects at once, like concurrent Dragon Age and Mass Effect titles, the Edmonton-based developer known for its highly-praised narratives will be focusing on just one game at a time from now on.
This comes just days after parent-publisher Electronic Arts reported lower than expected sales of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and roughly four years after a new unnumbered Mass Effect sequel was announced.
The blog post highlights that this Mass Effect game is still not in full production despite its 2020 announcement and, as such, much of the studio is just working on other EA games elsewhere in the company.
“Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so we have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit,” writes Gary McKay, the General Manager of BioWare.
In a YouTube video last week, former BioWare producer Mark Darrah predicted this turn of events based on how few people were currently working on Mass Effect. When EA first acquired the studio, Darrah says, they were able to work on 6-7 projects at a time. But with the inflating scope of games these days, it is difficult for studios to manage that kind of multitasking.
After Anthem disappointed both EA and players alike in 2019, EA quickly tried to move BioWare’s resources to Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Unfortunately, The Veilguard also sold under expectations, combined with EA’s soccer titles, resulting in cutbacks for the publisher.
It is unclear when or if we will see hide nor hair of the new Mass Effect title, much less another Dragon Age.