"EA said make this a live service": Dragon Age veteran says the fourth game's multiplayer pivot was a "rationalization" to move devs onto Anthem, and "I wish that pivot had never occurred"

The game that eventually became Dragon Age: The Veilguard was in development for a long, long time at BioWare, and during that period the game went from a single-player RPG to a multiplayer live-service game and back again. According to studio veteran Mark Darrah, that central pivot to live service was partly a move to shift people from Dragon Age onto Anthem.

"Part of the excuse for moving people off of Dragon Age was this pivot from a single-player game into a multiplayer live service," Darrah says in a video about how BioWare changed fundamentally in 2017. "I believe that a large part of that pivot was done entirely as rationalization – as a reason to make it make sense that we were taking everyone away from Dragon Age."

After all, Darrah notes, "there's no reason have all of these people on the project because they are going back to the drawing board, because we are making a live service game now. So we can start over again."

Darrah's timeline matches up with what we know from an extensive report on Dragon Age 4's development from Jason Schreier at Kotaku in 2019. According to that report, DA4 – then codenamed Joplin – was put on hold in late 2016 to help bring Mass Effect Andromeda over the finish line.

In 2017, Joplin was effectively canceled in favor of the new, live-service-flavored Dragon Age 4, codenamed Morrison, with much of the DA team moving to help finish the troubled Anthem, just as it had with Andromeda the previous year.

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"I wish that had never happened," Darrah says in his video. "I wish that pivot had never occurred. But that's what happened. EA said 'make this a live service.' We said 'we don't know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.' And thus Joplin became Morrison, and myself as well as other very senior members of the team moved onto Anthem."

Darrah's video paints an unflattering portrait of latter-day BioWare, and while he acknowledges there's a certain amount of personal grievance at play here, several other BioWare veterans have been sharing the video and indicating that it aligns with their experiences with the studio at the time.

"I talked a fairly long time ago about how EA buys studios and then consumes them," Darrah concludes, "and they start to lose their culture into the overall EA culture. To me, it feels like 2017 is when EA finished digesting BioWare, which they had bought 9 years earlier in 2008."

That might not posit the most rosy idea about what we're going to get from Mass Effect 5, but Darrah has a note of optimism in the video's comments, saying that "BioWare and EA seem to be fully behind the next Mass Effect." Here's hoping that commitment remains for the long haul.

BioWare is responsible for many of the best RPGs ever made.