Former Dragon Age franchise boss Mark Darrah has discussed BioWare’s difficulty getting a remaster of the series’ first game off the ground, and why it would be a much tougher project than Mass Effect’s trilogy re-release.
Firstly, speaking about the future of the Dragon Age series after the mixed response to last year’s Veilguard, Darrah told YouTube channel MrMattyPlays that he was “not sure” how a new entry in the series would get started. Darrah has spoken in the past of how BioWare is now a single-project studio, and with the company now slimmed-down in size and solely focused on Mass Effect 5, that leaves Dragon Age on pause for the forseeable future.
Instead, Darrah said, he believed BioWare should next focus on remakes of the series’ first three games, starting with Dragon Age: Origins — something that had previously been discussed, but has not happened for various reasons.
“I honestly think they should do — I don’t think they will, but they should do — a remaster of the first three [Dragon Age games],” Darrah said. “One of the things we pitched at one point — pretty softly, so pitched is a massive overstatement — was to retroactively rebrand the first games as if they were a trilogy, call it the Champions Trilogy, so you have these larger-than-life heroes… maybe you do that as a first step.
“You shine them up, you re-release them — probably remaster, probably not a remake — see what happens and maybe go from there,” Darrah continued. “I’m very curious to see… in a weird, twisted way, the Mass Effect franchise and the Dragon Age franchise are in similar states. They have a trilogy of games that are pretty well received, and then a fourth game that’s less well received. I’ll be curious to see what Mass Effect does with Mass [Effect] 5 — how does Andromeda fit in there?”
Early trailers for Mass Effect 5 acknowledge the Andromeda galaxy, and there is an expectation among fans that the events of the sci-fi series’ fourth entry will be a part of the game’s narrative — even if the main thrust of the game’s story will be back in the series’ original Milky Way setting, following more familiar characters, alien races and themes.
So why hasn’t a Dragon Age remaster happened? Well, according to Darrah, a lack of enthusiasm within publisher EA is at least partly to blame.
“EA’s historically been — and I don’t know why, but they’ve even said this publicly — they’re kind of against remasters,” he continued. “I don’t really know why, and it’s strange for a publicly-traded company to seemingly be against free money but they seem to be against it. So that’s part of it.
“The other problem is, Dragon Age is harder than Mass Effect to do. To some degree unknowably harder, maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder?” Darrah pondered. “One of the very earliest things for Joplin [BioWare’s initial version of Dragon Age 4, before its multiplayer reboot, and before the subsequent single-player version that became Veilguard] was, ‘let’s do Frostbite tools, and then let’s find a mod house that seems talented, and just uplift them, and pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age: Origins.'”
In other words, Darrah is saying that during the early days of development on Dragon Age 4, a remake of the franchise’s first chapter was discussed — even if it never moved forward.
“There were lots of pitches around, is there a way to bring Dragon Age: Origins forward? And depending what you do, a remaster you kind of get Dragon Age 2 for free, a remake you don’t.”
Alas, the difficulties in working with Dragon Age: Origins already-archaic engine made it a harder task than remastering Mass Effect (whose entire trilogy was made in the more commonly-used Unreal Engine), and hiring people to either work on a remaster within BioWare or work with an external team was a tough sell.
“You can’t really remaster Dragon Age externally, you probably have to do it internally,” Darrah said. “The studios run their own financials within themselves, and to some degree EA’s stance was probably ‘sure, go ahead and do it, but do it with the money you already have’,” Darrah said. “And it was like, we can’t do it with the money we already have because we’re doing all these other things.”
As for BioWare’s future, Mass Effect 5 is now in early production, but still seems to be years from release. A few months ago, we did at least get confirmation of one particular returning feature.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
