Dragon Age veteran says his team was "jerked around" because EA didn't care about big RPGs like Mass Effect: Andromeda, just Anthem

(Image credit: BioWare)

A former Dragon Age boss says he felt his team was "jerked around" by EA, but that BioWare's corporate overlords weren't really interested in Mass Effect either.

In a new video, former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah explains how, in 2017, he witnessed a BioWare first: In the "final push" towards the release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, he led a "final team" that came on to help the series' black sheep get out the door. Unfortunately, it seems that wasn't a decision Darrah was particularly happy with.

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"My feeling at the time," he explains, "was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around. We were feeling like we were getting no support from BioWare or EA, which was basically true."

He maintains that moving senior leadership away from a project - in this case the game that would eventually become Dragon Age: The Veilguard many years later - was an "incredibly dangerous" strategy that stemmed from EA being "disinterested" in BioWare.

That disinterest didn't last too much longer, however. Darrah says that EA wasn't "particularly interested" in Mass Effect: Andromeda, "because they had little to gain from the success of Andromeda and little to lose from its failure." In fact, the company "had a lot more incentive for BioWare to move onto the next thing that they could tie themselves to."

That "next thing" was Anthem. While theoretically that loot-shooting service game could have become a major BioWare cash-cow, it failed utterly, grinding to an abrupt halt barely a few weeks after launch.

BioWare initially discussed rebooting the game, but those plans were eventually abandoned in favor of a return to the single-player RPGs that made its name - last year's Veilguard and the upcoming Mass Effect 5.

BioWare remains responsible for many of the best RPG games out there.

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I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for news, shaping the news strategy across the team. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.

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