Summary
It’s always interesting when you get a glimpse behind the curtain at the internal culture of a beloved studio. Traditionally, these sneak-peeks have betrayed cultures of crunch and sexual misconduct, but occasionally you see a feel-good story or two.
We already knew about the unbelievable crunch atBioWare, and now David Gaider has given us additional insight into the legendary studio’s troubled internal culture. According to Gaider, lead writer on Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age Inquisition, theMass EffectandDragon Ageteams at BioWare harboured a lot of animosity towards one another. Apparently, EA alsofavoured the Mass Effect team.
Two Teams, Two Cultures
Gaider opened up about the conflict in aBluesky postabout his career thus far, saying, “You see, the thing you need to know about BioWare is that for a long time it was basically two teams under one roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team. Run differently, very different cultures, may as well have been two separate studios. And they didn’t get along.”
“The company was aware of the friction and attempts to fix it had been ongoing for years,” he wrote. “[This was done] mainly by shuffling staff between the teams more often. Yet this didn’t really solve things.”
Gaider wanted a fresh challenge after shipping Inquisition, but wasn’t willing to move to Montreal to work on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Instead, he opted to join the team creating Anthem which was composed mostly of developers who worked on the Mass Effect trilogy.
Gaider was tasked with turning Anthem from a “beer and cigarettes” sci-fi into a fantasy sci-fi a lá Star Wars, but the team wasn’t happy with the directive and constantly told Gaider his narrative work was “too much like Dragon Age.” Gaider suspected Anthem was doomed to fail, and resolved to depart BioWare after being told he wasn’t going to be promoted to the role of creative director on a future project.
“I won’t go into detail about the problems except to say it became clear this was a team that didn’t want to make an RPG. Were very anti-RPG, in fact. Yet they wanted me to wave my magic writing wand and create a BioWare quality story without giving me any of the tools I’d need to actually do that,” Gaider explained.
Anthem was ultimately a critically-panned failure, and Gaider went on to co-found Summerfall Studios which released their debut title Stray Gods in 2023.
