At BioWare, the Mass Effect team didn't get along with the Dragon Age team
, by Thibaut
This year, Electronic Arts decided to start taking down BioWare bit by bit. It was a restructuring plan that saw employees scattered across other projects in development at the American publisher. The end of an era for a studio with a string of failures.
On the Bluesky social network, David Gaider, creator of Dragon Age and former head writer, made a confession about the atmosphere at the studio before his departure in 2016. The main man involved made no secret of the fact that the atmosphere was far from ideal for working serenely.
"You see, the thing you need to know about BioWare is that for a long time it was basically two teams under one roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team. Run differently, very different cultures, may as well have been two separate studios. And they didn't get along."
"The company was aware of the friction and attempts to fix it had been ongoing for years, mainly by shuffling staff between the teams more often. Yet this didn't really solve things, and I had no idea until I got to the Dylan team. The team didn't want me there. At all."
"I kept getting feedback about how it was "too Dragon Age" and how everything I wrote or planned was "too Dragon Age"... the implication being that anything like Dragon Age was bad. And yet this was a team where I was required to accept and act on all feedback, so I ended up iterating CONSTANTLY."
"I won't go into detail about the problems except to say it became clear this was a team that didn't want to make an RPG. Were very anti-RPG, in fact. Yet they wanted me to wave my magic writing wand and create a BioWare quality story without giving me any of the tools I'd need to actually do that."
This seems to explain at least part of BioWare's troubles at the time. And it was inevitably reflected in the quality of the studio's games.
Source: bsky.app