Mass Effect 5 “isn’t ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it” now Dragon Age: The Veilguard is done

The next Mass Effect project is still growing in size and isn’t ready for the bulk of BioWare staff to jump aboard, former studio veteran Mark Darrah has said.

Darrah worked at BioWare for 23 years as a project director and executive producer on the Dragon Age series, and has tracked the studio’s changing project schedule in a newly-public video peering behind the scenes.

Some BioWare staff who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard are now filtering over to Mass Effect 5, but others are being kept busy contributing to projects elsewhere within the wider EA organisation, Darrah said.

First announced in 2020, Mass Effect 5 (or whatever it ends up being called) has been worked on by a small team of original Mass Effect trilogy veterans within BioWare while the majority of the company has worked to get Dragon Age: The Veilguard out the door.

But now The Veilguard has shipped, that doesn’t mean Mass Effect 5 will suddenly have the full operational strength of BioWare behind it, Darrah continued, even though the studio had entered an era where it only dedicated the majority of its resources to one project at a time.

“Mass Effect isn’t ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it,” Darrah noted. “In the past when BioWare was toying with being on just one project, like on Anthem or The Veilguard, that project was up and running at full speed so it was able to suck in every available resource, it had enough existing infrastructure that it was able to absorb everything.

“That’s not exactly what’s happening [with Mass Effect 5]. You see this when you go on to people’s social media profiles. People who worked on The Veilguard, some of them are going onto Mass Effect, but some of them are moving into other parts of the EA organisation because Mass Effect isn’t ready for them.”

BioWare previously worked on multiple projects in parallel, such as various entries in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, plus development on Star Wars: The Old Republic and – going back further – teams dedicated to handheld development, a cancelled Jade Empire sequel, and the Montreal satellite studio which led development on Mass Effect Andromeda, and was subsequently folded into EA’s Motive studio.

Having many teams meant moving people between projects might have been easier, Darrah said, but this came with its own issues. For example, having multiple projects also limited that movement, if several games were due to ship in close proximity.

“This might be great,” Darrah concluded of BioWare’s current single-project focus, “because what it means is BioWare, for really the first time ever, is able to singularly focus on a single project, is able to put all attention on a single project, is able to put everything it has towards a single goal: which is making the best Mass Effect it possibly can.”

Mass Effect 5 still lacks a release date, and last year’s N7 Day was a quiet affair as BioWare still heads down on the launch of The Veilguard. Here’s hoping things ramp up considerably in 2025.

BioWare’s Mass Effect head honcho Michael Gamble recently let fans know the game won’t be changing art styles akin to Dragon Age: The Veilguard and dropped a hint that left fans speculating that the series’ Paragon/Renegade system would be returning.

In addition to the next Mass Effect game, Amazon is working on a TV series set within the Mass Effect universe. Commander Shepard voice actor Jennifer Hale told Eurogamer earlier this month that she’d love to see the trilogy’s original cast make an appearance.