Fans of Dragon Age have been hoping for a remaster or remake of the original games for what feels like forever, a hope that was renewed with the success of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Based on a new interview, it’s confirmed that the idea was actually pitched to EA in numerous forms.
Speaking on the MrMattyPlays Youtube channel, former BioWare executive produce Mark Darrah covered a wide range of topics, including remastering or remaking the original Dragon Age and its sequels.
Darrah says BioWare did want to remaster the old games, but it was EA they kept it from happening for several reasons, including being unwilling to fund the project.
“I don’t think they will, but I think they should do a remaster of the first three. I mean,one of the things that we pitched at one point pretty softly, so pitch is a massive overstatement, was to, kind of retroactively, rebrand the first three games as if they were a trilogy. Call it, like, the Champions Trilogy.”
Darrah says the soft pitch was to remaster them rather than remake to help keep costs down.
Darrah goes on to say that there was even a pitch for handing over the Frostbite toolset to a mod company to let them remake Dragon Age: Origins. However, EA never seemed interested in any of the pitches Darrah and his colleagues made. Darrah cites EA’s own publically acknowledged dislike of remasters and remakes as a big reason.
“I don’t really know why. It’s strange for a publicly traded company to basically seem to be against free money. But they seem to be against it,” said Darrah.
“So, I mean, I think to some degree EA’s stance was probably sure, go ahead and do it, but do it with the money you already have. And it’s like, well, we can’t do it with the money that we already have because we’re doing all these other things.”
Darrah also explains some of the potential complexities of remastering the game.
“You either have to spin up a brand-new team that’s going to learn this really, really crotchety old tech base, or you got to do it all in-house, and that’s harder because it gets back to a bit of the resource war that you were talking about, right? Yeah. Like EA doesn’t like spending money, but the thing that EA likes even less than spending money is hiring people permanently.”
The topic of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which remastered the first three games, pops up several times. Darrah addresses the differences, explaining why Mass Effect was a much easier project.
“One, it’s all Unreal instead of two different engines. 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 Legendary Edition.”
The Dragon Age games were built on propriety Bioware tech at the time. Both Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 were created on the Eclipse Engine, before moving to Frostbite for Inquisition. Back in 2024, creative director John Epler also stated that he would love a Dragon Age remaster, but “I think I’m one of about maybe 20 people left at BioWare who’s actually used Eclipse,”.
In other words, not only do you have to spend the time remastering the games, you have to spend time re-learning the old engine to do it.
It seems like Dragon Age might be dead in the water, then. Dragon Age: The Veilguard was a failure, as admitted by EA themselves, which would seemingly make a remaster of the original games even less likely. Perhaps Dragon Age might get rebooted, but if that’s the case, EA won’t have any reason to resurrect the OG.