BioWare Uses “don’t require support from the full studio” as a Cheap Excuse to Dump Staff Before Kicking Off Mass Effect 5

As BioWare has bid farewell to Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it’s time for the development company to put all of its focus on Mass Effect 5. This is the franchise that BioWare hasn’t touched for close to eight years now. However, the termination of Dragon Age doesn’t ensure the swift development process of Mass Effect.

A few days ago, one studio veteran of BioWare stated that the company is in a unique situation where it isn’t ready to accommodate a lot of people in the development team. Now in a recently released blog post, the developers have turned 180 degrees as the EA is restructuring BioWare.

BioWare doesn’t need its whole development team for Mass Effect 5

Following the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare recently posted a studio update on its official website confirming that EA is reorganizing the studio. According to a blog post by general manager Gary McKay, the studio is “reimagining how we work at BioWare” in the interim between projects.

This indicates that while a “core team” devotes all of its attention to the upcoming Mass Effect game, EA is moving several of the studio’s developers to other projects within the organization. According to the blog post, veterans of the original trilogy like Mike Gamble and Derek Watts are leading the development of the upcoming Mass Effect game. This is what McKay stated in the blog post:

Given this stage of development, we don’t require support from the full studio. We have incredible talent here at BioWare, and so 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.

As reported by IGN, unknown numbers of BioWare developers have already been transferred to similar positions within EA, and some Veilguard team members are being let go completely. Those whose positions have been terminated will have time to apply for other positions at EA.

However, for the time being, it appears that a very small team is working exclusively on Mass Effect, which is so early in development that it won’t require assistance from the rest of BioWare. It sounds like the developers have a long road ahead of them, particularly after EA called The Veilguard a letdown.

BioWare veteran claims the upcoming game isn’t ready to take on a big staff all at once

According to one BioWare veteran, Mark Darrah, the developing company has been in an odd situation since the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, with Mass Effect 5 being its only known ongoing project. They will be looking for other jobs within EA for the time being, though, as he believes the planned sci-fi role-playing game “isn’t ready” to handle a large staff all at once.

Before 2021, Darrah spent almost 24 years at BioWare as an executive producer and consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In light of the release of The Veilguard, he has now made public one of his members-only videos from the previous year regarding BioWare’s future plans, as mentioned on ResetEra. The developer’s history of focusing on multiple projects at once is mentioned in the video, but it seems to have changed entirely since then.

“Mass Effect isn’t ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it,” asserts Darrah. He notes that when the developer moved expertise from one of its projects to another, it was “up and running at full speed” and “had enough existing infrastructure that it was able to absorb everything” so that it could focus on that project.

Although the game was announced years ago, Darrah’s comment that things aren’t exactly moving at full speed just yet is partly due to the fact that there are still very few details available about the upcoming Mass Effect (though it’s important to remember that this video was first released in November for his channel members). It’s still unclear when Mass Effect 5 will be released.