LogInThe Dragon Age team was once feeling "jerked around."
Mark Darrah
Mark Darrah, the former executive producer of the fantasy RPG Dragon Age series, recently opened up about the unfair treatment of Dragon Age at EA and BioWare, as well as how The Veilguard did not receive adequate support, if any.
In the video uploaded to his YouTube channel, Darrah said that 2017 was "the most impactful 12 months" for BioWare. Around the end of 2016, Darrah and his team were reassigned to help with the final development stage of Andromeda. Once it was finished, those resources were supposed to be returned to the next Dragon Age, i.e., The Veilguard. However, this didn't happen.
"My feeling at the time was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around. We were feeling like we were getting no support from BioWare or EA, which was basically true."
So what happened was that the leader of a project stepped away to assist with another project while the original project was still ongoing. This "leadership discontinuity" seemed to act as a bad example, as Darrah recalled that "It did set this precedent as this being a thing that we could do, and 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."
Mass Effect: Andromeda was released in March 2017, and as he said, "it doesn't go well." But it didn't seem to hurt that much, as Darrah stated that the EA group that BioWare reported to wasn't that particularly interested in it, because they "had little to gain from the success of Andromeda and little to lose from its failure."
After Andromeda was shipped, Darrah still felt that DA still wasn't getting adequate support, including staff who should have come to help but were still working on other projects. So he contacted EA CEO Andrew Wilson and former EA executive Patrick Söderlund for support from the organization that he believed the franchise deserved.
The answer to him was that the franchise was incredibly important and Dragon Age would be allocated resources that they wanted or needed, which again didn't happen.
BioWare
Instead, the parent company seemed to be more interested in pushing BioWare to "move onto the next thing that they could tie themselves to," which is live-service shooter Anthem. Darrah and many developers who used to help with Andromeda again were shifted to offer help. Eventually, Anthem failed to meet Electronic Arts' sales expectations. In 2020, Mark Darrah left BioWare.
Darrah's story, combined with that of David Gaider, a former lead writer at BioWare who recently shared some behind-the-scenes situations between the studio's two major franchises — Dragon Age and Mass Effect — as well as EA's attitude towards them, paints a picture of the situation faced by the beloved franchise.
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