A Bioware timeline -
1995-2000 : Small studio operating out of smaller office space , made a number of successful PC RPG's as well as MDK2 on the dreamcast.
2000-2005 : Continues making stellar PC RPG's while also working with Microsoft to publish KOTOR and Jade Empire on the xbox
2006-2010: the Acquisitions era, Mass Effect is started with some MS' money for the xbox 360 , a holdings firm buys out both bioware and Pandemic , that holdings firm is then bought buy EA. ME1/2 and Dragon Age release, Pandemic is killed off (likely EA didn't want them to begin with)
2011-2015: The backlash era - Dragon Age 2 comes out with a consoles first focus , ME3 comes out and makes everyone mad because of it's half baked ending , star wars TOR online launches , the original founders leave the company (they likely had to stay for X number of years after the EA buy out and walked away with a healthy cheque). Mass Effect Andromeda is announced. Dragon Age Inquisition launches and is generally well liked (wins GOTY a few times) but also signals the beginning of a switch to EA DICE's battlefield engine Frostbite 2. A game engine designed expressly for making battlefield games, there are conflicting reports on how much autonomy various EA studios had in being forced to use this engine.. but every game EA's launched since around 2013 has used it so....
2016-2020(in progress): The modern era - So Bioware Edmonton from 2006 or so was basically 2 studios in one building , you either worked on Dragon Age or Mass Effect and as a project finished up you could switch back and forth. By the time ME3 was being worked on a Montreal studio had formed that only made that games multiplayer. There was also a Bioware Austin formed that has mostly worked on The Old Republic. After ME3 Shipped the Mass Effect Edmonton team started work on what became Anthem in 2013 or so. The Montreal studio started work on Mass Effect Andromeda as soon as ME3 DLC wrapped. Austin continued working on TOR. The Dragon Age floor in Edmonton was knee deep in Inquisition work. Fast forward to late 2015 , despite 3 years of messing around , both Anthem and Andromeda are kind of a mess , Andromeda has too much work done on a version of the game that doesn't work as a ship-able product and Anthem still isn't enough of anything. So, what ends up happening is that the Mass effect team in edmonton puts the breaks on anthem and steps in to turn Andromeda into a real game. They practically have to start over as many have likely read about because there was no real narrative made , only a planet generator. A year deep in development on this version of the game and EA starts tapping their feet "we've already spent twice as much money on this and have nothing to show for it yet , get this thing done for 4th quarter 2016". All of Bioware Montreal, a sizeable portion of Bioware Edmonton and even a section of Bioware Austin are then brought in fairly early in 2016 to crunch out Andromeda. It's not enough and the game gets a delay for 6 months.. all of it more crunch. So Eventually Andromeda finally ships in May of 2017 having only really been in development for around a year and half. With that finally wrapped up , the task falls on Anthem to be an even bigger hit but it's still barely in a state where it's much of anything. The goal the entire time , as this thread mentions - was simply for Bioware to make a big successful more casual game. Despite their popularity- neither mass effect or dragon age ever set the sales world on fire, they did well enough but Bioware didn't have a Call of Duty level success. That's what Anthem was intended to be. The way to actually have the game do that was always up in the air though. So while there were plenty of new people brought in to staff up to make anthem in 2016+ , it was literally the Edmonton Mass Effect team trying something different in the hopes it would be that 10 million selling break out hit game. Sadly, lack of a clear focus on just what Anthem was going to be lead to it being in development hell pretty much from the time Andromeda started showing problems. Shipping ME:A meant Anthem couldn't hunker down fully until after it launched in 2017... so the version of Anthem that exists right now is largely a game cobbled together from 4 years worth of half baked pre production work. Bioware didn't even give themselves 2 solid years to actually finish the game either because once again , you've got EA tapping their feet saying "okay seriously guys, you gave us a half dozen games in a half dozen years and now we've got only 2 games in 5 years, you have to have something ready by Fiscal year end (march 31st 2019) because we've got nothing else to pad out the quarter but there are too many titles after , just ship it or someones losing their head over this"
And so, for most of 2018 ALL of Bioware Edmonton had to spend a few months stapling together Anthem into something ship-able. It was a tumultuous time because everyone working on it could see it wasn't as good as it could and should be but it had spent too long in the oven and needed to face the world , good or bad. Once out , the Edmonton team would slowly finish up some of the initial pipeline of content before transferring all future development over to Bioware Austin, the studio most familiar with online gaming.
Where does this leave Dragon Age ? well , some work was started on a new entry back in 2015 but obviously finishing up these other 2 games delayed development a fair bit. Now, as of late last year, the team in Edmonton is toiling away on a new game. Hopefully with Andromeda and Anthem shipped , Bioware can move forward and evolve from some of these missteps. Go back to making the types of games the fans want from them instead of trying to shoot for the moon in a field they haven't dabbled in from the get go.