David Gaider, the co-founder of Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical developer Summerfall Studios, has opened up a bit more about his time at BioWare, where he served as the original lead writer on the Dragon Age series. Taking to social media, he chose to explain more about his decision to leave the studio in 2016 and the apparently tense relationship between the Mass Effect and Dragon Age teams within the company.
In a lengthy Bluesky thread, Gaider described BioWare’s years under co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk as “the height” of the studio’s time, though he also says he recognizes that issues like crunch and mismanagement were worse than he realized until after he left the company. He describes frustration with his own lack of upward momentum, as he was passed over for the role of Dragon Age’s creative director in favor of Mike Laidlaw. He says he was eventually won over by Laidlaw’s leadership and that the fantasy series benefited from it, but after he left the series to work on something else, things started to change.
Gaider asked to move on to something else within BioWare after Dragon Age: Inquisition’s launch in 2014, and it was between either Mass Effect: Andromeda or “Dylan,” the game that would become Anthem, the studio’s ill-fated loot shooter. Opting to work on the latter, he says the experience illuminated tensions between the different BioWare teams and that he felt the Anthem team didn’t want him there.
“You see, 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 wrote. “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 team. The team didn’t want me there. At all.”
Gaider says that some of his conflict with the Anthem team came from higher-up instructions to write something more “science fantasy,” similar to Star Wars, whereas the original concept had been more of a “beer & cigarettes” sci-fi world similar to Aliens. According to Gaider, he was frequently given feedback that his ideas were “too Dragon Age.”
“I won’t go into detail about the problems except to say it became clear this was a team that didn’t want to make an RPG,” Gaider wrote. “Were very anti-RPG, in fact. Yet they wanted me to wave my magic writing wand and create a BioWare quality story without giving me any of the tools I’d need to actually do that.”
After it became clear that that the project wasn’t a good fit for him, Gaider told BioWare’s bosses that he’d stick with it if there was some kind of promotion on the other side, and when he was turned down, he quit and went on to co-found Summerfall Studios. The studio’s first game, Stray Gods, is a musical game following a modern version of the Greek god pantheon. It launched in 2023, and a DLC focusing on Orpheus was released the following year.
BioWare has been going through a lot of turmoil in the past few months. After the underperformance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the studio was restructured, resulting in layoffs of veteran talent and a company-wide pivot to focus solely on the fifth Mass Effect game.