BioWare suffered from friction between its Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams, a former developer has claimed.
Writing on social media, Dragon Age creator and former lead writer David Gaider has discussed his experiences at the studio prior to his departure in 2016, and said that staff working on the studio’s two biggest franchises “didn’t get along”.
This was something Gaider said he experienced personally when he moved across to join the main Mass Effect team as they worked on the ill-fated Anthem, after completing work on the original Mass Effect trilogy.
“For a long time it was basically two teams under one roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team,” Gaider wrote. “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 [Anthem] team. The team didn’t want me there. At all.”
Gaider says he had been specifically asked by BioWare management to write a science fantasy story for Anthem, after the project had initially been concepted as a “hard sci-fi setting” akin to Aliens. And while Gaider says he was just following orders, his new colleagues were seemingly unaware of why he was writing something they thought was “too Dragon Age”.
“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,” Gaider continued. “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.”
Ultimately, Gaider departed BioWare after 17 years following a failed attempt to bargain for a creative director position on another project after Anthem, and some “blunter words” on
the likelihood of him having success outside the company if he did quit.
“I had no idea where I was going to go or what I was going to do, but I wanted OUT,” Gaider concluded.
Since departing BioWare, Gaider has gone on to developer Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical at new outfit Summerfall Studios, which launched to a generally positive response in 2023. The studio’s next project will be a demonic deckbuilder called Malys.
BioWare continued work on Anthem for several years, though the project ultimately launched as a critical and commercial failure. The studio subsequently released the well-received Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in 2021, followed by Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which garnered positive reviews but lacklustre sales.
A newly-slimmed down BioWare is now working solely on the next Mass Effect, first announced back in December 2020.