Mark Darrah, former BioWare executive producer, revealed that Electronic Arts was pitched multiple times to remaster the first three Dragon Age games but declined each offer. Fans have wanted a remaster similar to the Mass Effect Legendary Collection for years, yet EA’s stance on remasters and technical challenges appears to have blocked those efforts.
Darrah, who worked at BioWare for nearly 24 years starting in 1997, spoke on the YouTube channel MrMattyPlays about the difficulties faced in getting EA to greenlight a remaster project for the favorite RPG trilogy. “EA’s historically been – and I don’t really know why, but they’ve even said this publicly – they’re kind of against remasters,” he said. “It’s strange for a publicly traded company to seem to be against free money basically, but they seem to be against it. But that’s just part of it.”
He also pointed out that Dragon Age is more complicated to remaster than Mass Effect. “The other problem is that Dragon Age is just harder than Mass Effect to do, and to some degree unknowably harder. Maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder.” That makes you wonder what exactly about Dragon Age trips them up so badly, right?
Darrah explained that one early pitch involved using Frostbite tools and hiring a talented modding team to remake Dragon Age: Origins. He noted that with a remaster, you could essentially get Dragon Age 2 included for free, but a remake wouldn’t offer that advantage.
Technical hurdles also came into play, as the first three games were built on different engines, complicating any remastering attempt. “One of the advantages that Mass Effect has for a remaster over Dragon Age… It’s all Unreal instead of two different engines,” Darrah said. “But actually, just the fact that it’s Unreal means that you can remaster Mass Effect essentially for money. If you’re willing to spend money on it, you can go to an external house and they can do most of the work, which is sort of what happened with Mass Effect Legendary Edition. There were a bunch of people at BioWare working on it, but it was – I don’t remember how many, but it was not a ton.”
Meanwhile, the latest entry in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released last year, received a lukewarm response and disappointed many hardcore fans. EA reported that it engaged around 1.5 million players in its first two months, nearly half of what was expected, reflecting its underwhelming commercial performance.
In January, BioWare general manager Gary McKay confirmed the studio was downsizing, noting that the next Mass Effect game didn’t require “support from the full studio” at that stage. VGC’s 3/5 star review of The Veilguard described it as having “great characters, but gameplay stuck in the past.”
It’s kind of wild to think that despite all the fan love for the original trilogy, EA won’t bite on a remaster. Maybe they’re worried about the cost or complexity, or perhaps they just don’t see the value. Either way, the door isn’t exactly wide open for a Dragon Age remaster anytime soon.
