BioWare and Mass Effect veteran Mac Walters discussed his reasons for leaving the studio after 19 years to start working with a new team on a new sci-fi series.
In an interview with MinmaxWalters detailed the various factors that led to his departure, ranging from wanting to work on something completely new and not feeling able to within BioWare or EA, to the positive experience of working on the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition trilogy with a small size and “pessimistic team.” Serves as a reminder of his early days in the studio and serves as a positive moment to come out.
Discussing the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition project, Walters described EA’s approval of it as something relatively “unplanned,” compared to the careful allocation of teams beforehand to work on the studio’s typical fare: massive, big-budget RPGs. He said that this led to a different way of working that brought back fond memories.
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“The way to achieve this success was for me to be a little bit rogue,” Walters said. “Kind of entrepreneurial in how we build this with the people we have and the people we can get without disrupting other teams in the meantime.
“This process reminded me a lot of early BioWare, where we were a small, scrappy team and people wearing a lot of different hats,” Walters continued. He continued by saying that this small team had generated camaraderie, and the opportunity to work with different people outside of BioWare bringing in a co-development partner was also attractive.
“This is the future – this is the way AAA games should go when you look at how complex and challenging they are,” he said. “And a lot of it was reminding me of…you know, call it the good old days, or whatever.”
Walters discussed his desire to work on a new IP again, working with a small, “scrappy” team to put something together. But the feeling I’m getting from within the company and within EA is that this won’t be possible anytime soon.
“To be fair, I asked around: Can we do something like this with BioWare, is there an opportunity at EA?” Walters said. “And it became very clear that there probably wouldn’t be any, at least for the foreseeable future. And that’s when I started to think: No, I think I’m done.”
The “arc” to it all was Walters’ positive experience working on the legendary release, which was well received critically as well as commercially. It was an upbeat song about leaving the series behind.
“I don’t want to do any more Mass Effect after this,” Walters said. “Why tempt fate?”
Walters has discussed his tenure on Mass Effect at length with Eurogamer on several occasions – in an in-depth interview with Bertie about dreaming up plans for a full trilogy of games, and with me about how the team wrestled that trilogy’s worth of storylines and characters to the end.
Last month, Walters told Eurogamer that the new narrative-focused studio — Vancouver-based Worlds Untold, powered by NetEase — would “avoid painting ourselves into a corner.” Its first project will be a near-future action-adventure game set “in a stunning world full of mystery and exploration.”
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