Mass Effect 5 is “still in pre-production” says director as BioWare shifts full focus to the sci-fi RPG amid dev reshuffles and reported layoffs GamesRadar+ / by [email protected] (Catherine Lewis) / Feb 3, 2025 at 6:42 AM
Amid changes at BioWare as the studio shifts its focus to Mass Effect 5, while shuffling some devs to other EA studios and reportedly laying some off, the project director of the upcoming sci-fi RPG has clarified that the game is “still in pre-production.”
Last week, BioWare general manager Gary McKay said that considering Mass Effect 5’s current “stage of development,” the team doesn’t “require support from the full studio,” noting that “many colleagues” had been matched up with other EA teams with open roles. In a statement sent to IGN, a BioWare spokesperson confirmed that with Dragon Age: The Veilguard now shipped, “the studio’s full focus is Mass Effect.” The spokesperson didn’t provide comment about the reported layoffs, however – Bloomberg has since claimed that less than 100 employees are left at BioWare.
In a Twitter thread responding to this news, the project director of the upcoming Mass Effect game, Michael Gamble, has clarified what stage of development the RPG is currently at and it sounds like it’s still quite a ways off being completed. “As the notes have said, we are still in pre-production,” Gamble writes.
Considering how little we know about the game, it makes sense. Hell, we still don’t know if it’ll pull a Witcher 4 or Switch 2 and be given the “unofficial” name that everyone’s been using for it – Mass Effect 5 – or be called something else entirely.
As for the current team size, this lines up with comments made by former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah, who claimed in a video after The Veilguard’s release that Mass Effect 5 “isn’t ready to suddenly have a team of 250, 300 people working on it.” In the same video, he said that he believed that since the project wasn’t “up and running at full speed” yet, “there is a need to find other work for them within the rest of the EA organization while the Mass Effect team figures out what Mass Effect is going to be, figures out the structure, and then gets ready to ramp up to a much bigger team size.”
If it’s still in pre-producrion, something must have been cut or restarted.
Pre-production is ordinarily supposed to occur while an earlier game is in full development, in this case Dragon Age Veilguard.
The game should have already hit full production as the development of Veilguard was wrapping up under a normal development cycle.
To say that they don’t need a full team at this stage means that either large chunks of the team were working on something else that was scrapped as development of Veilguard was winding down, that they had to readjust the scope of the next Mass Effect game and chose to start over from square one, or they were already planning to let go large chunks of their development team who would have otherwise been pivoting to start work Mass Effect when their part of Veilguard finished.
It’s clear that this has become a make-or-break game for BioWare based on Veilguard’s reception and sales performance.
I’m inclined to think they decided to re-tool for that reason.