BioWare recently faced a stream of high profile resignations. This included prominent members of the studio like Senior Editor Cameron Harris along with Senior Development Director Chris Wynn and also David Gaider, long-time BioWare Writer, who all stepped down last year.
As a result, the team behind the upcoming highly-anticipated game, Mass Effect: Andromeda, has been pretty hard hit by such resignations. The Head Narrative Designer, Gary Vakarian resigned this week, resulting in the studio losing all its chief members. At the moment, the senior-most member of the staff is BioWare intern Connie Verner.
He joined the studio back in September 2015. While talking about her work history with the company, Verner said, “Technically I’ve been a BioWare staff member since 2011, back when I won the Admiral for a Day contest when they were promoting Mass Effect 3.”
“But my internship on Andromeda started last September, which means I have two weeks’ seniority over most of the other interns. I mean the Senior Staff.” Verner further said, “We’re also bringing in some of the biggest Mass Effect fans in the world to fill out the team.”
“We’ve done a good job getting them up to speed, too. The new Art Director, Danny — his parents wouldn’t let him play the first Mass Effect game when it came out, but he’s got an old Xbox 360 in his room now, so the whole team will be ready to go by the end of the month.”
Electronic Arts further addressed the issues regarding mass resignation of BioWare employees and declared that the release might be delayed even further than the expected 2017 release. IGN spoke to EA’s Vice President of Community Relations, Arthur Saren. He said, “It’s true that some prominent personnel at BioWare have stepped down since Electronic Arts acquired the company in 2007.
From founders like Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, to this morning’s abrupt resignation of Stavros Pelinkovicci, the long-time janitor at BioWare’s office.” Mr. Saren further said, “However, EA still retains ownership of the many characters and intellectual properties created by that team, and we have a new group of enthusiastic young designers — some of whom have, in fact played, Baldur’s Gate — who will bring the classic BioWare franchises to a new generation of video game consumers.”
In the press conference, Mr. Saren was joined by Mikey Onassi who was BioWare’s Acting Voice Director. He said, “Oh my God! Jennifer Hale just walked by the conference room! She’s so awesome.” This happened before he started chasing after the prolific voice actress, equipped with his autograph book.
A reported marketing survey for Mass Effect: Andromeda has been released into the wild and it revealed some possible details about this upcoming entry of BioWare in the spacefaring RPG franchise. There were survey slides seen on Reddit and NeoGAF recently. They asked people a series of questions regarding the game.
There were questions involving the overview of the game and it further revealed that it will take players to the Andromeda Galaxy. This is probably where the series formula will be flipped on its head.
A line from the reported description reads, “Mass Effect: Andromeda takes players to the Andromeda galaxy, far beyond the Milky Way, where players will lead the fight for a new home in history territory — where WE are the aliens — opposed by a deadly indigenous race bent on stopping us.”