A trilogy remaster of the first three Dragon Age games was pitched by BioWare to EA, but the publisher is “against remasters” and “basically seem to be against free money”.
That’s according to Dragon Age series veteran Mark Darrah, who was interviewed by YouTuber MrMattyPlays. Darrah was executive producer on the first three games, but has since left BioWare.
The studio’s Mass Effect games received a trilogy remaster in the Legendary Edition, released in 2021. So why hasn’t Dragon Age received the same treatment?
Darrah discussed why the sci-fi series was favoured by EA. “The problem Dragon Age has had, charitably I guess, would be to say that EA wants mainstream success and it’s hard – or at least it has historically been hard – for corporate people, people who come from the sports side of the organisation to look at a game like Dragon Age: Origins, which is super nerdy, not very attractive looking, and say ‘this is a mainstream game’,” said Darrah.
“They don’t see it [with Dragon Age]. They look at Mass Effect, they can see it…there’s just been a lot of difficulty with them, there’s always been a push for [Dragon Age] to be more mainstream, more accessible. So it’s always had this either pressure to be something different, or more – in the case of something like Inquisition – a reaction to that.”
A remaster of the first three Dragon Age games was soft pitched by BioWare and was to be released as The Champions Trilogy.
However, Darrah said EA is “against remasters”, though doesn’t know why. “It’s strange for a publicly traded company,” he said, “they basically seem to be against free money.”
The other issue is that a Dragon Age remaster would be harder to achieve than Mass Effect, in part because the three games were made in different engines. As such, a Dragon Age remaster would either need to be done by a different team (the studio even considered hiring a mod house), or it would need to be done in-house.
That then brings issues of resources, which were already split at BioWare between the Mass Effect team and the Dragon Age team working on Veilguard. No further resources were available for an additional remastered trilogy.
Darrah believes BioWare will work better as a studio with one project at a time, to avoid “open warfare over resources”.
This matches comments made by Dragon Age creator David Gaider, who’s also since left the company, that staff working on the two franchises “didn’t get along”.
It does, however, bring into question the future of the Dragon Age series, after the poor reception to Veilguard. “I think there are more games to be made there,” said Darrah, “but I’m not sure how it gets started right now.”
In an interview with Eurogamer after the release of Veilguard, series creative director John Epler admitted it was “never going to match the Dragon Age 4 in people’s minds and people’s imaginations”.