It’s no secret that the game that would become Dragon Age: The Veilguard had a troubled development. However, every time a new story comes out about how studio in-fighting and corporate favoritism affected the project, it feels like more of a miracle that the fantasy RPG got out the door looking like a classic BioWare game. Mark Darrah, the former executive producer of the Dragon Age series, has released a new YouTube video in which he discusses how a few events in 2017 fundamentally changed the trajectory of the RPG studio and how, according to him, Dragon Age was thrown under the bus in more ways than one during this time.
Darrah’s 16-minute video runs down how things shifted at BioWare in the months leading up to Mass Effect: Andromeda’s launch in 2017, a period of change that he calls “the most impactful 12 months” in the studio’s history. In late 2016 Darrah, who had been working on Dragon Age, began instead leading the team that would oversee the closing months of the sci-fi RPG’s development cycle. He explains that his transfer felt like a blow to the Dragon Age team, which was then working on one of the early iterations of the fantasy series’ fourth entry, as Darrah had been a key member of its leadership. However, Darrah thought that by helping ship Andromeda, he could then see the resources dedicated to the game reallocated to help the Dragon Age team develop the fantasy RPG. But unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
“My feeling at the time was the Dragon Age team was feeling jerked around,” Darrah says in the video. “They were feeling like we were getting no support from BioWare or from [publisher] EA, which was basically true.”
Darrah says his coming on to help with Andromeda was irregular at the time, as it was the first time the studio had a “leadership discontinuity,” in which a person in charge of one project that was in active development left it to work on another. Darrah says the short time he spent working on Andromeda didn’t ultimately have much of an impact on Dragon Age’s development, but it did set a precedent establishing that leadership could be moved around within the company, even if they were in the middle of directing something else. This move contributed to a perception that Dragon Age wasn’t a priority within the company.
Darrah goes on to explain how the relationship between BioWare and EA changed at this time, as the studio started reporting to a different arm of the publisher. Prior to this, BioWare was “strangely” reporting to higher-ups in the company’s sports section, a group which Darrah described as “benignly disinterested,” allowing the studio to work more autonomously. Then, when things shifted in 2017, BioWare started reporting to a branch of EA that was “hyper interested” in the decision-making process. According to Darrah, this change in leadership was likely part of why the studio moved on from Andromeda so quickly, canceling the game’s planned DLC and putting the sci-fi series on ice.
“The group that we reported into had very little stake in either the success or the failure of [Mass Effect: Andromeda], and they had a lot more incentive for BioWare to move on to the next thing that they could tie themselves to and show themselves as having influence on the development of,” Darrah said.
As BioWare geared up for the next game, the much-maligned looter shooter Anthem, Darrah says he received “assurances” from EA and BioWare leadership that Dragon Age was important to the company, but not the kinds of developers and resources that would back those statements up. And it was all made a lot more complicated by the return of ex-Mass Effect director Casey Hudson, who rejoined the company as its general manager in 2017. Darrah says he learned about Hudson’s return at the same time as the rest of the company, despite being a senior member of BioWare’s leadership team. He says he considered the decision to bring Hudson back without consulting him a sign of “an immense amount of disrespect,” and he sent emails shortly after the announcement that said he expected Hudson would make a call to “starve” Dragon Age of resources as the studio went all-hands-on-deck on Anthem. Darrah was once again reassured by leadership that Dragon Age was important to the company and that they were committed to him leading the project.
“As we all know, that’s not what happened at all,” Darrah says. “In very short order, in basically exactly the way that I predicted, Anthem was seen as needing greater leadership support, and myself and some other very senior people, and a large percentage of the Dragon Age team, was moved onto Anthem.”
This was followed by the scaling down of BioWare’s Montreal studio, which saw many staff members moved to other teams across the EA umbrella. Darrah says that the Montreal team had “basically been lied to” and were told that the Dragon Age team “didn’t want” them. He also claims that he was trying to get the next Dragon Age past a certain development threshold which he hoped might allow him to retain those developers, but EA higher-ups who were local in Montreal wanted those people, and “proximity is a powerful tool.”
“If you are someone who’s been mad at me since 2017 because you feel like I abandoned you in Montreal, know that that’s not what happened,” Darrah says. “Know that I fought with every tool that I knew how to wield to try and keep you, but the organization had no interest in that occurring.”
Whatever the circumstances, Darrah says EA wasn’t interested in helping the Dragon Age team grow; it wanted Anthem to get off the ground and be a huge live-service hit for the company. Darrah hypothesizes that, at this point, management pivoted the Dragon Age project into the now-scrapped live-service game as a “rationalization” for removing many members of the team and putting them to work on Anthem. Now that the next Dragon Age was going back to the drawing board, it could be argued that the project didn’t need that big of a team in its early production stages. The move also resulted in a longer “leadership discontinuity,” as Darrah worked on Anthem until the game shipped in 2019.
“I talked a fairly long time ago about how EA buys studios and then consumes them and they start to lose their culture into the overall EA culture,” Darrah said. “To me, it feels like 2017 is when EA finished digesting BioWare, which they had bought nine years earlier in 2008.”
Darrah acknowledges that much of his story might sound like a series of events that affected him personally rather than the studio at large, but a handful of ex-BioWare employees have shared the video on social media and corroborated the events described. Darrah’s claims also line up with Kotaku’s previous reporting on Anthem’s development, in which sources told us about how the loot shooter took up much of the company’s resources, further complicating the development of what would eventually become Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
Darrah left BioWare in 2020, but returned to consult onThe Veilguard in 2023. After 10 years of tortured development, that game finally launched in 2024 as a single-player, story-driven RPG and was divisive in the ways Dragon Age games often are. In January, BioWare was restructured to be a one-game studio, resulting in layoffs for some of the company’s veteran talent. The team that remains is working on Mass Effect 5.