One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved.
"I wish that pivot had never occurred," Darrah would later recount on YouTube. "EA said, 'Make this a live service.' We said, 'We don't know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.'"
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So if I have this right, EA forced Bioware to turn Dragon Age, a SP RPG into an online live-service title, it obviously didn't work out because the Dragon Age team has zero experience with that and Dragon Age was not set up to be that, things are a mess and so EA finally relents and allows a change in direction but they only give the Dragon Age team a year and a half to reboot the entire fundamentals.
Meanwhile, at the end, EA drags the Mass Effect team in, who proceed to ice out the Dragon Age team and essentially tell them how shit their work is, which was largely not the fault of the Dragon Age team, the Mass Effect team salvages what they can on short notice and do make some good changes, but the Dragon Age team becomes understandably upset about EA's favouritism because things the Mass Effect team request are given to them in an instant but Dragon Age team was told no.
Just a mess all round, EA's going to cause these two studios to start strangling each other soon.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 11 June 2025
