Former BioWare lead writer and Dragon Age creator David Gaider has said that the teams working on the company's biggest franchises were not best of friends. 

In a thread on BlueSky, the development vet said that these problems became readily apparent when staff from both IP were merged to work on the troubled Anthem. 

"The thing you need to know about BioWare is that for a long time it was basically two teams under one roof: the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team," Gaider said. 

"Run differently, very different cultures, may as well have been two separate studios. And they didn't get along.

"The company was aware of the friction and attempts to fix it had been ongoing for years, mainly by shuffling staff between the teams more often. Yet this didn't really solve things, and I had no idea until I got to the Dylan [codename for Anthem] team. The team didn't want me there. At all."

Gaider adds that there was miscommunication between these two groups, including about the tone of game. 

"Dylan had been concepted as kind of a 'beer & cigarettes' hard sci-fi setting (a la Aliens), and I'd been given instructions to turn it into something more science fantasy (a la Star Wars)," he continued. "Yet I don't think anyone told the team this. So they thought this change was MY doing.

"I kept getting feedback about how it was "too Dragon Age" and how everything I wrote or planned was 'too Dragon Age'... the implication being that *anything* like Dragon Age was bad. And yet this was a team where I was required to accept and act on all feedback, so I ended up iterating CONSTANTLY." 

Anthem launched in 2019 after what appeared to be a messy development cycle. The game was axed in 2021.