Report: BioWare Montreal restructuring, Mass Effect’s future on hold

At least some of the team at BioWare Montreal, the studio behind Mass Effect: Andromeda, is being retasked to other projects. Kotaku reports, citing anonymous sources, that the studio is being “scaled down” and that the Mass Effect franchise is going on “hiatus.” Reached for comment, studio director Yanick Roy spun things somewhat differently.

“Our teams at BioWare and across EA put in tremendous effort bringing Mass Effect: Andromeda to players around the world,” Roy said in a statement provided to Polygon. “Even as BioWare continues to focus on the Mass Effect: Andromeda community and live service, we are constantly looking at how we're prepared for the next experiences we will create.”

Just today, that team issued a massive update intended to deal with issues such as multiplayer balance and in-game cinematics. One thing that was clear from the messaging of the patch notes was that tweaks and updates would continue to roll out for the foreseeable future.

But clearly something is up at the Canadian studio.

“With our BioWare and Motive teams sharing studio space in Montreal,” Roy said in the statement, “we have BioWare team members joining Motive projects that are underway.”

Motive Studios is working with DICE to create the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront 2. It’s easy to see how the team behind one spacefaring third-person shooter would be well-suited to helping build another.

But what about the future of the Mass Effect franchise? There wasn’t anything on the drawing board, necessarily ... at least not anything that had been formally shared with the public.

Roy, for his part, took an optimistic stance.

“We're also ramping up teams on other BioWare projects in development,” he told Polygon. “There will be much more to come from BioWare in the years ahead.”