Ever since Mass Effect got a remastered trilogy collection in 2021, Dragon Age fans have been hoping and praying BioWare’s fantasy RPGs might get the same treatment. If there were ever a time to put one out, it would have been before Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched in 2024 and seemingly wrapped up most of the universe’s ongoing story threads. According to ex-BioWare boss Mark Darrah, the studio was more than up for remastering Dragon Age: Origins, II, and Inquisition in one collection and told Electronic Arts as much, but the publisher turned down the pitch.
YouTuber MrMattyPlays sat down with Darrah, who worked as executive producer on the Dragon Age series and the troubled loot shooter Anthem. During the conversation, Darrah reveals that BioWare “soft-pitched” a remaster of the original Dragon Age games but EA turned it down, partially due to its noted dislike of remasters.
“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. “I don’t really know why. It’s strange for a publicly traded company to basically be against free money, but they seem to be against it. So that’s part of it.”
However, one of the bigger issues in remastering Dragon Age compared to Mass Effect was that the resources to zhuzh up those games is that they’re on different engines The first two DA games were made on BioWare’s internal Eclipse Engine before the team transitioned to Frostbite for Inquisition, whereas the first three sci-fi games are all on Unreal Engine. This meant that the technical lift would have been significantly higher for a Dragon Age remaster than it was for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. Darrah says the project would have either required hiring a new team to work full-time learning how to use the games’ old tech, or that existing staff at BioWare would have to handle the entire thing on their own. He also says that an internal remaster within BioWare would have been the ideal scenario, but that didn’t pan out.
The soft-pitch Darrah talks about included a sort of “rebrand” of the original games as a trilogy called The Champions Trilogy, referencing the three protagonists of each game. If that had come to pass, I would have written you a novel on my feelings about it, considering I think continuity is one of Dragon Age‘s weakest aspects, and branding those games as a trilogy when it decidedly doesn’t follow through on a lot of its connective tissue would be an odd Hail Mary. But since that isn’t happening, I will bite my tongue.
For now, Darrah doesn’t know what the future holds for Dragon Age. He left the company in 2020, but returned as a consultant to help get The Veilguard past the finish line. Since leaving the company, Darrah has been pretty candid about what he and his colleagues felt was unfair treatment of the Dragon Age team by management.
