'Dragon Age: The Veilguard' Executive Producer Claims Dragon Age Team "Got No Support From BioWare Or From EA"
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Executive Producer Mark Darrah recently claimed that the Dragon Age team “got no support from BioWare or from EA.”
In a recent upload to his YouTube channel, Darrah noted that BioWare and EA were not supporting its Dragon Age team especially at the end of 2016 and into the beginning of 2017 when the company was attempting to ship Mass Effect: Andromeda.
He said, “In late 2016 we are reaching the point when Mass Effect: Andromeda is trying to ship. It has been grabbing resources from around BioWare for awhile, but in this last push we reach a decision that is different than anything we have done in BioWare’s history, at least in recent memory. And that is I actually led this final team that came on to Mass Effect: Andromeda. … My feeling at the time was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around. They were feeling like we were getting no support from BioWare or from EA, which was basically true.”
However, he did later note, “In the case of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I don’t think the impact to Dragon Age was huge. It wasn’t very long. But it did set this precedent as being a thing that we could do. And it’s not a good thing to do. It is incredibly dangerous to have a project run while its missing some of its core leadership.”
Interestingly, while he claims that BioWare was not providing support for Dragon Age, he would later note how EA changed its business structure in 2016 and had BioWare reporting to an individual who was “hyper interested in us and really wanted to be involved in the day-to-day, in the decision making on the project” instead of the Sports division who has disinterested and allowed BioWare to operate more independently.
He went on to reveal that this new management group was not interested in Andromeda and quickly moved on from it because it was created before it took over and was more interested in working on the next project “and show themselves as having influence on the development of.”
Nevertheless, Darrah would go on to share his opinion that even after Andromeda shipped that Dragon Age was not getting enough support.
He said, “I was feeling like Dragon Age was still not getting adequate support. We hadn’t gotten the people from Montreal that were supposed to come onto Dragon Age. … They were still doing stuff with Andromeda and I went to Patrick Soderland at the time and said, ‘I don’t feel like I’m getting the support from the organization that Dragon Age deserves. I don’t feel like I’m getting the support from the organization that Dragon Age needs.’ And from Patrick as well as [EA CEO] Andrew Wilson, I got lots of assurances that Dragon Was incredibly important. That we were going to get what we needed, what we wanted.”
Next, he revealed that he was given stock in order to convince him to stay. He described this as “financial handcuffs to try to [him] to the organization.”
Darrah then moves on to when Casey Hudson was rehired at BioWare and how his hiring led to BioWare shifting its focus to Anthem with himself as well as the Montreal team that were supposed to work on Dragon Age were moved onto Anthem.
He then claimed that the Montreal team was lied to and that the “Dragon Age team didn’t want them and that they were going onto other parts of the EA organization because BioWare couldn’t keep them anymore.”
From there he concluded by observing how EA wanted the Dragon Age game to be turned into a multiplayer live-service game and it was also focusing on the live-service Anthem and had in effect become a fundamentally different company after 2017.
What do you make of Darrah’s comments?
What kind of support did he want - more money to waste on this awful product? Then again this would've lost EA more money, so maybe it would've been a good thing.
Veilguard was not a game.
It was a liberal social lecture about gender-journey fantasies.