Former BioWare exec producer says EA was pitched multiple times to remaster the first three Dragon Age games
Fans have long called for a remaster of the first games similar to Mass Effect’s Legendary Collection
BioWare made several pitches to remaster the first three Dragon Age games, according to a former BioWare veteran.
Speaking on the YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Mark Darrah – a former BioWare executive producer who joined the studio in 1997 and worked there for nearly 24 years – said EA wasn’t keen to remaster the first three games in the series in the same style as the Mass Effect Legendary Collection.
Darrah says there was a number of reasons for this, including EA’s apparent dislike of remaster projects.
“EA’s historically been – and I don’t really know why, but they’ve even said this publicly – they’re kind of against remasters,” Darrah said. “It’s strange for a publicly traded company to basically seem to be against free money, but they seem to be against it. But that’s just part of it.
“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.”
Darrah explained that one of the early suggestions his team made was “let’s do Frostbite tools and let’s find a mod house that seems talented and just pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age Origins”.
“There were lots of pitches around ‘is there a way we can bring Dragon Age: Origins forward?’ And depending on what you do, like, [with] a remaster you kind of get Dragon Age 2 for free. [With] a remake you don’t.”
Darrah noted that one of the potential blockers in the project was the difficulty in remastering the games across several different engines.
“One of the advantages that Mass Effect has for a remaster over Dragon Age… it’s all Unreal instead of two different engines,” he explained. “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.”
The latest entry in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, was released last year. The game was met with a lukewarm critical response and disappointment from hardcore fans.
This was reflected in the game’s underwhelming commercial performance. Publisher EA has said that the fantasy RPG “engaged” around 1.5 million players during its first two months of availability, which was nearly half of its expectations.
In January, BioWare general manager Gary McKay confirmed that the studio was downsizing, stating that the next Mass Effect game didn’t require “support from the full studio” at this stage of its development.
VGC’s 3/5 star Dragon Age: The Veilguard review said the title “has great characters, but gameplay stuck in the past”.
