What's Next For BioWare: Former Executive Producer Shares His Thoughts
Dragon Age: The Veilguard has shipped. Mass Effect should be next. Former Executive Producer Mark Darrah breaks down BioWare's history to explain what's next.
Now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has shipped, fans of developer BioWare wonder what’s next. Thankfully, former BioWare Executive Producer Mark Darrah might have some insight. Darrah uploaded a video to his YouTube channel, Mark Darrah on Games, talking about the history of BioWare and what it can tell us about its present and future, including what it means for the next Mass Effect.
“One game to rule them all.” Mark Darrah talks about Bioware shifting to a single-project studio
Bioware was founded in 1995 and has created legendary game series like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur’s Gate, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Last year, BioWare released the latest in the Dragon Age series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Long-time fans of the studio might have recognized a shift in output over the last few years. In his new video, Mark Darrah, who worked at BioWare for nearly 24 years until leaving in 2021, gives names to phases in BioWare’s history: Grow, Consume, Sustain, Contract, and One Project.
In the first decade of its existence, BioWare had many irons in the fire. Many teams within the studio were working on different projects. The team that created Shattered Steel, BioWare’s first game, became the Mass Effect team. The team that created the original Baldur’s Gate eventually became the Dragon Age team. BioWare also had teams working on handheld titles, Jade Empire, Star Wars games, and other titles. In a two-year period between 2011 and 2012, BioWare launched Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.
But this would not last. BioWare began to learn that they needed larger teams to launch these huge games, and the Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams began supporting each other to launch games like Anthem and eventually Dragon Age: The Veilguard. This essentially has led to a BioWare that only works on one game at a time. Now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has launched, Mass Effect 5 appears to be the next project.
Mark Darrah’s video points out how this change is noticeable in where BioWare employees are being used. Over the last few years, when a game like Dragon Age: The Veilguard is ready to ramp up, it would essentially absorb all available BioWare employees to assist with the launch. But now, as Darrah says in his video: “when you look at people’s social media profiles, people who worked on The Veilguard, some of them are moving over to Mass Effect. But some of them are moving into other parts of the EA organization because Mass Effect isn’t ready for them.” This points to the theory that the next Mass Effect is still in early stages of development, and doesn’t have the amount of work needed yet for the whole BioWare team to jump onto it
This is not a bad thing, necessarily, as Darrah points out. “This might be great because what it means is that BioWare, for the first time really ever, is able to singularly focus on a single project… is able to put everything it has towards a single goal which is making the best Mass Effect it possibly can.” The one possible stumbling block could be if BioWare is able to get its developers back after they’ve spent time on other EA projects.
Darrah suspects that we will learn more about the state of this current Mass Effect project sometime in the next two years. For now, fans of BioWare and Mass Effect will have to be patient.
More:Mass Effect 5 director addresses Corinne Busche's departure from Dragon Age team
