Former ‘Dragon Age’ Producer Criticizes EA and BioWare for Lack of Support Over ‘Mass Effect: Andromeda’

If you remember Mass Effect: Andromeda, the 2017 game is considered to be a black sheep in many ways, both in-franchise, but also for the companies that developed (BioWare) and published (EA) it.

The game received mixed reviews but was a commercial failure, which led to BioWare Montreal being merged into EA’s Motive Studios and the Mass Effect franchise being temporarily put on hold.

Now, several years later, executive producer Mark Darrah reveals how his team got little to no support from either BioWare or EA, criticizing the two companies for their specific approach.

The revelation came in a video that was released on YouTube, in which Darrahs talks about the year 2017, a year that changed a lot:

When looking back, Darrah revealed that in 2017, he and his “final” team were brought in to give Andromeda a final push ahead of the release, but while this might have helped the game, Darrah recalls that the overall feeling related to the game’s release was not as pleasant.

“My feeling at the time 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 said.

As you can see, his team was moved away from the game that would eventually become Dragon Age: The Veilguard and pushed to work on Andromeda, which Darrah criticizes as a horrible and dangerous decision that could have hurt both games.

And why? Well, this happened, according to Darrah’s words, simply because “they had little to gain from the success of Andromeda and little to lose from its failure,” which explained the lack of interest from both BioWare and EA; they just wanted to get the game out and done, but no one really cared for it.

Both companies focused on Anthem at the time, which, as you know, also turned out to be a commercial flop that got mixed reviews. It seems that it was a chain of bad decision, but had Darrah not been brought in to complete Andromeda, it seems that the game might have been even worse off.

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