Former Mass Effect lead writer says the success of the Legendary Edition convinced him to move on: "This is the bow on all the things I've done"
Dec. 20, 2023Mac Walters decided: “I don’t want to do any more Mass Effect after this”
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Former Mass Effect lead writer has revealed that the Legendary Edition’s success helped to convince him: “I don’t want to do any more Mass Effect after this.”
“One of the great opportunities I had, which kind of came out of the blue, was working on Legendary Edition,” Walters explains. “That was a project I think we wanted to have greenlit for years. We’ve been asking to do it, and when the opportunity came up, EA came to us and said, ‘Hey, can you do this?’ and we were like, ‘Yeah, we can do it’ - but it wasn’t on a roadmap.”
Walters explains that it was around this time the studio was also working on other upcoming games, includingDragon Age: Dreadwolf, which made things complicated for the team at BioWare.
“If you think about a lot of the planning that goes into these games, like with their cycles, that can be four years long,” Walters explains. “You plan all that stuff out, and all of a sudden, we’ve got this project that’s unplanned.” The developer says he had to be “a little bit rogue” and “entrepreneurial” to keep Legendary Edition on track without disrupting the other teams.
“That process reminded me a lot of early days BioWare because we were a small scrappy team,” Walters recalls, “there was a lot of camaraderie that was formed with that team, I think, because we stayed small.” The Mass Effect writer then reflects on this experience, adding: “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the future; I think this is how triple-A gaming needs to go.'”
Due to the success of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, both financially and critically, but also in terms of how the team performed and got along during development, Walters says: “It just felt like this is the bow on my all the things I’ve done in Mass Effect […] I don’t want to do any more Mass Effect after this. Why tempt fate?”
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Walters says he then wanted to get stuck into a new IP again - especially after having the opportunity to work on BioWare’s other IPs from the ground up, including Jade Empire and Anthem. The developer says they asked around to see if this would be possible at BioWare or EA, but “it became pretty clear [that] there probably wouldn’t be, at least not for the foreseeable future. That’s when I started thinking like, ‘No, okay, I think I think I’m done.”
Walters may have moved onto new things, but BioWare’s sci-fi series is still ongoing - find out everything you need to know aboutMass Effect 5with our guide.
After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training. My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I’m also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.
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