Former Mass Effect lead writer Mac Walters says the success of the Legendary Edition helped convince him to leave BioWare: 'I don't want to do any more Mass Effect after this'

pcgamer.com:

Mac Walters amassed an enviable list of credits during his nearly 20-year career at BioWare on games including Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, eventually rising to lead writer of Mass Effect 2 and 3 and creative director on Mass Effect: Andromeda. He then stepped into the role of production director on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, before leaving the studio in January 2023. In a new interview with MinnMax, Walters talked about his reasons for leaving, saying he was prompted to do so in part by the success of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.

The Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remaster of all three Mass Effect games and nearly all the DLC (only Pinnacle Station is missing, because the source code was lost), effectively transforming the sprawling trilogy into a single, massive game. And despite the notorious anger over Mass Effect 3's ending when it was new, the Legendary Edition was, after some teething trouble, a big hit.

It was also a major undertaking. The Legendary Edition was a remaster, not a brand-new game, but the sheer scale of the content involved meant it was «an immense project,» Walters said. But it «wasn't on the roadmap,» so BioWare had to accommodate it without disrupting other ongoing projects: «All of a sudden we've got this project that's unplanned. What do we do with it?»  That forced Walters to become «a little bit entrepreneurial» in his approach to leading it.

«I knew I wasn't going to have a huge internal team… I quickly realized that we're going to need co-dev work, we're not going to be able to handle this just with our internal team,» Walters said. «So [it was] just a whole different mindset of how we want to run things. 

»Long story short, that process reminded me a lot of early-days