A recent history of BioWare:
2014: released Dragon Age Inquisition which IMO was pretty good
2015: work on Dragon Age 4 (code name Joplin) begins as a single player story-focused game
2017: released Mass Effect Andromeda which was released in a sorry state and was mediocre. But supposedly that was because the BioWare “A-Team” were all busy working on Anthem
2017: Joplin gets canceled because they want DA4 to be a live service game instead, based on Anthem’s code
2018: Dragon Age 4 development begins now code name Morrison, set to be a live service game
2019: Anthem releases and it’s such a broken, disappointing, half baked pile of shit that it makes ME: Andromeda look like a masterpiece in comparison
2020: Bioware announces their plan to totally overhaul and reboot Anthem
2021: BioWare cancels their plan to totally overhaul and reboot Anthem
2021: Bioware decides to remove the live service components from Morrison and make DA4 into a single player game
And there was a ton of staff turnover. I’ll just copy the section from Wikipedia because it’s too much to summarize:
The project has been marked by a high
turnover of leading staff. Several veteran
Dragon Age staff, including Laidlaw, left the company in response to Joplin's cancellation in 2017.
[3] After the 2018 restart, Mark Darrah remained as an executive producer, while Matthew Goldman took over the position of creative director for the project from 2017 to 2021.
[10] By December 3, 2020, Darrah had resigned from BioWare, replaced by BioWare Austin studio head Christian Dailey as executive producer.
[11] Goldman left BioWare by November 2021,
[5] and was replaced as Creative Director by John Epler.
[12] Dailey left BioWare in February 2022.
[13] Corinne Busche became game director thereafter, Benoit Houle director of product development, and
Mac Walters production director.
[13] Walters in turn left BioWare in January 2023.
[14] In March 2023, Darrah returned as a consultant for the game and the
Mass Effect team joined the production of
Dreadwolf, according to EA
.[15][16]
In August 2023, BioWare fired 50 people working on
Dreadwolf and the next
Mass Effectgame;
[17] this included Mary Kirby who was one of the series' original writers and credited with "creating Varric and the Qunari".
[18] PC Gamercommented "that's not to say there are no veterans of the good old days left, but you're looking at a very different group of people than the one that made the studio's greatest hits".
[18] In October, seven of them sued BioWare for additional compensation, complaining that BioWare's
NDAs prevented them from adding their work on
Dreadwolf to their portfolio.
[19]
en.m.wikipedia.org