Now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard is out, one BioWare veteran suggests that the developer has found itself in a unique situation with Mass Effect 5 being its only known ongoing project. Despite this, he believes that the upcoming sci-fi RPG "isn't ready" to suddenly take on a large team of people, leaving them looking for other work within EA for the time being.
Mark Darrah was an executive producer at BioWare for almost 24 years up until 2021, and also served as a consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. As highlighted on ResetEra, he's now publicly released one of his members-only videos (below) from last year on what's next for BioWare now that The Veilguard has been released, touching on the developer's history of focusing on multiple projects at once, which now seems to have been totally flipped.
He points to 2023, when the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic was moved out of EA and into Broadsword Online Games' care. At this point, Darrah says, "for the first time since arguably 1995, maybe not even then, BioWare is only working on a single project, which is Dragon Age: The Veilguard." He believes that once the developers wrap up any final patches they're working on for The Veilguard, with there being no plans for DLC, "there's only Mass Effect, so everyone at BioWare will be working on Mass Effect."
Things aren't quite as straightforward as that, though. Darrah says that "Mass Effect isn't ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it." He notes that, in the past, when the developer absorbed talent from one of its projects into another in order to focus on it, it was already "up and running at full speed" and "had enough existing infrastructure that it was able to absorb everything."
This isn't where Mass Effect 5 is at, Darrah says, which means "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, figures out the structure, and then gets ready to ramp up to a much bigger team size."
This situation could end up being a positive one overall, Darrah argues: "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 all of its tension 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."
However, there's the potential problem of BioWare finding itself unable to reclaim the staff who've moved onto other EA projects when the time to ramp things up comes – be that because timings don't line up, or staff simply want to stay where they are – but obviously that remains to be seen.
Though the game was announced years ago, details about the next Mass Effect remain incredibly light on the ground, which adds up with Darrah's suggestion that things aren't exactly running at full speed yet (although it's worth keeping in mind that this video was originally published in November for his channel members). There's still no telling when Mass Effect 5 may actually be released.
