BioWare Pitched Dragon Age Remasters Multiple Times, EA Declined

BioWare made numerous proposals to remaster the first three Dragon Age games, according to a former BioWare veteran.

In an interview with the YouTube channel MrMattyPlays (via VGC), Mark Darrah – former executive producer at BioWare who joined the studio in 1997 and worked there for nearly 24 years – stated that EA was not interested in remastering the first three Dragon Age games in the style of Mass Effect Legendary Collection.

Darrah stated there were several reasons for this, including EA’s apparent aversion to remaster projects. “Historically, EA has been – and I don’t quite know why, but they’ve even said this publicly – against remasters,” Darrah said. “It’s odd for a publicly traded company to seem basically against free money, but they seem to be against it. But that’s only part of the issue.”

“The other problem is that Dragon Age is simply harder to do than Mass Effect and, to some extent, unconsciously harder. Maybe just a little harder, maybe much harder,” he commented. Darrah explained that one of his team’s first suggestions was: “let’s use the Frostbite tools and find a talented-looking mod team and just pay to remake Dragon Age Origins.”

“There have been many proposals like ‘is there a way to 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 remaster, no.”

Darrah noted that one of the potential obstacles for the project was the difficulty of remastering games across multiple different engines. “One of the advantages Mass Effect has for a remaster compared to Dragon Age… is it’s all Unreal instead of two different engines,” he explained. “But really, just the fact that it’s Unreal means you can remaster Mass Effect essentially for money.”

“If you’re willing to spend money, you can go to an outsourcing company and they can do most of the work, which is roughly 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 wasn’t a huge amount,” he concluded.