BioWare departures hand over responsibility for ‘Anthem’ reboot to ‘Dragon Age 4’

Something pretty wild seems to have happened at BioWare, as two massive characters, Casey Hudson and Mark Darrah, suddenly left the studio. Hudson from Mass Effect had already left once and returned, while Darrah had ruled Dragon Age for ages now, including the upcoming Dragon Age 4.

The departure of the two at the same time left the status of virtually all of BioWare’s projects uncertain and created some really massive changes that I’m still trying to figure out.

Biggest headline is that Christian Dailey is now in the process of being in charge of the new Dragon Age game, someone you may not know, but the person I recognize as being in charge of the ongoing effort to restart Anthem, releasing updates on his blog every few months. Dailey saw a meteoric and unlikely rise in responsibility for Anthem’s live updates post-launch, in the game’s 2.0 reboot, to now seemingly lead… the studio’s hottest project.

It’s hard to understand what exactly is going on at BioWare at the moment. Dragon Age 4 has already been rebooted internally at least once according to reports, and still looks a long way from launching, with BioWare still showing very little concept art or a few different landscape scenes to this day. Now he has suffered the loss of Mark Darrah with the replacement for Dailey and it seems … extremely serious for his prospects, combined with everything that is going on.

The rest of BioWare’s announcement reiterates that Andromeda / Anthem’s Mike Gamble is still working on the next Mass Effect game, whatever it is, and we have virtually no information on that. Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the remastered trilogy, is still coming out as planned.

Anthem 2.0 must be dead. I still found it hard to believe that BioWare was putting resources into it in the first place, but removing Dailey for Dragon Age likely sealed its fate, although nothing about Anthem was announced at all through it all.

BioWare just won two high-profile failures, Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, and needed the next Dragon Age to impress, and the next Mass Effect to make players believe again in the franchise. And hey, maybe Anthem could have been a No Man’s Sky type flip-flop story, because it looked like some big changes were happening.

Now? Who knows. Obviously, none of this inspires confidence in what can happen at the studio, with all of its projects without release dates or frankly, even previews or proper teases. We have no idea how many years it will take before we see any of these games or at this rate, if we will see them at all. Mass Effect Legendary Edition in 2021 seems to be the only sure thing on the bridge at this rate, and hopefully it goes without major hiccups, as we’ve seen in other remasters.

There’s probably a lot more to this story, but we’ll have to wait for internal reports to figure out what’s going on here. Until then, we only have what BioWare tells us, which is that the Dragon Age and Mass Effect projects still exist. After that, everyone guesses.

Update: Christian Dailey has tweeted and seems to indicate that the anthem reboot is still underway with the existing team. No idea who’s running it now:

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