We’ve talked plenty over the past year or so about the state of BioWare, and to be frank, its “state” isn’t good in the slightest. The developer used to be one of the top-tier game makers out there, consistently making great products, especially in the RPG space. It’s had Game of the Year winners, nominees, and more. Then, thanks to influences from EA and its changes in its own culture, things started to sour, and then REALLY went off the rails. While they are trying to “course correct” and make things like Mass Effect 5, many aren’t sure that they’re going to pull it off like they did in the past.
Enter Mark Darrah, who was with BioWare up until 2020 and was a key executive producer on many of their games. In an interview on YouTube, he made it clear that if Mass Effect 5 was going to be ANYTHING like the past titles that helped establish the company, the team would need to call out the recent past and avoid making such mistakes again:
“To be frank the Mass Effect team is going to be able to point to The Veilguard and say ‘we should steer away from some of these things, because look what happened. I would honestly encourage that team to scapegoat Veilguard as much as they need to to get what they need from the organization.”
Is that fair to say? It depends on who you talk to. After the release of its last game, BioWare straight-up refused to release sales data, and EA did various questionable things to try and mitigate the damage, including saying that it failed because of a “lack of live-service elements,” which is VERY EA.
This isn’t the first time BioWare has been called out for its culture, either, including by one of their former narrative teammembers who recalled when the company PRAISED their narrative branch and encouraged them to make vast and deep stories, only for those same storytellers to be basically whisked out of the company or have their impact lessened because they “weren’t needed anymore.”
While we don’t have any meaningful information about Mass Effect 5, many WANT IT to be a narrative masterpiece that features choices that’ll affect the overall story and have meaningful characters for us to interact with, as that’s what made the original trilogy so great. If BioWare remembers that and builds the game like that, they have a chance. If not, they’ll fail again and might not survive the fallout.