In a January 29 announcement describing its commitment to Mass Effect 5, EA declares BioWare does not “require support from the full studio” while developing the space RPG, though the publisher fails to reveal if the Dragon Age creator is undergoing layoffs.
“In keeping with our fierce commitment to innovating during the development and delivery of Mass Effect,” BioWare general manager Gary McKay writes in the announcement, “we have challenged ourselves to think deeply about delivering the best experience to our fans. We are taking this opportunity between full development cycles to reimagine how we work at BioWare.”
An EA spokesperson tells IGN, equally cryptically, that “now that The Veilguard has shipped, [BioWare]’s full focus is Mass Effect.”
“While we’re not sharing numbers,” they continue, “the studio has the right number of people in the right roles to work on Mass Effect at this stage of development.” However, IGN notes that a subset of Dragon Age developers have had their roles terminated, with the option to apply to other roles within EA.
BioWare’s studio slimming has also partially come from reallocating The Veilguard developers throughout EA, a strategy former BioWare executive producer and Veilguard consultant Mark Darrah describes in a YouTube video earlier this month.
“Mass Effect isn’t ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it,” Darrah says, so “there is a need to find other work for them within the rest of the EA organization while the Mass Effect team figures out what Mass Effect is going to be.”
To this end, McKay says “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,” and, more ominously, that BioWare plans to become a “more agile, focused studio that produces unforgettable RPGs.” We happened to find The Veilguard to be a profoundly successful, quintessentially-BioWare RPG, though the game’s sales were apparently abysmal, and possibly responsible for EA’s clammy secrecy around BioWare’s future.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard creative director on Mass Effect 2 comparisons and how the RPG draws from BioWare’s past successes: “don’t reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to.”
