David Gaider recently claimed that while he worked at BioWare, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams did not get along, and "may as well have been two separate studios". This decades-long rivalry reportedly continued after he left in 2016, bleeding into the already rocky development of The Veilguard.
BioWare joked that the Dragon Age team was a pirate ship, veering off course but always reaching its destination, while the Mass Effect team was the USS Enterprise: laser-precise.
BioWare was given just over a year to retool The Veilguard from a multiplayer live-service game into a traditional single-player RPG, considerably limiting what the team was able to do. While there would eventually be numerous delays, the studio initially worked under the assumption that the game's release was right around the corner, so a lot of those early decisions were made with that deadline in mind, leaving no room to make drastic alterations even with more time piled on top. Unfortunately, that meant development became a series of desperate attempts to salvage the game in response to lukewarm playtests, as BioWare was unable to uproot the foundations.
As reported by Bloomberg, in 2023, EA tried to course...
