Back before the mighty Baldur’s Gate 3 took over the world, it was Dragon Age: Origins that really opened my heart to the old-school fantasy RPG. Set against the much more modern-feeling Mass Effect, Bioware very deliberately built something that appealed to the classic CRPG crowd. While every entry in the series has its fans, DAO is still my personal favorite, and I’d love to see it make a comeback. Unfortunately, Bioware legend Mark Darrah (who worked as executive producer on the first three Dragon Age games) claims that, while such an idea was pitched by the studio, publisher EA wasn’t willing to provide the funding needed to make it happen.
Speaking to Youtuber ‘MrMattyPlays,’ Darrah talks about why we haven’t seen Dragon Age: Origins and its sequels get a similar treatment to the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Matty says that the remastered trilogy was “the first time in a while there was positivity and optimism around Bioware and their games,” reminding players that the developer has brought us some of the best RPGs of all time over the years. “I wondered if Dragon Age Legendary Edition would be the next obvious step,” he continues, “Was there a reason why that wasn’t pressed any harder internally?”
“EA’s historically been, and I don’t really know why but they’ve even said this publicly, kind of against remasters,” Darrah responds. “It’s strange for a publicly traded company to basically be against free money, but they seem to be against it. That’s part of it. The other problem is that Dragon Age is harder than Mass Effect to do; to some degree unknowably harder. Maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder.”
Mass Effect being built entirely in Unreal Engine, as opposed to the two separate engines used by Origins and Dragon Age 2 before the switch to Frostbite in Inquisition, made the former easier to remaster. “The fact it’s Unreal means that you can remaster Mass Effect essentially for money,” Darrah explains. “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. There were a bunch of people at Bioware working on it, I don’t remember how many, but it was not a ton.”
Darrah says that Bioware was initially eager to recruit a team to remaster the old games. “Let’s do Frostbite tools, and then let’s find a mod house that seems talented and 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?'” He notes that a remaster was also considered; “A remaster you kind of get Dragon Age 2 for free, a remake you don’t.”
Darrah explains that “to some degree, the studios run their own finances within themselves,” suggesting that “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.'”
Speaking to the middling launch reception of Dragon Age 2, a game that history has grown to appreciate more, Darrah says a big reason for this was that “we didn’t adequately prepare people for the change.” Over the years, it’s been able to “repair its reputation” as it’s looked at more on its own merits. He adds that Veilguard faced a similar issue; “I think Veilguard is not a perfect game, it’s got lots of problems, but I think some of its reception could have been mitigated by a more open conversation with the potential player base.”
Darrah muses, “I’ve thought about this a lot and I think within EA you’re better off being [on] one game at a time.” He explains that during the rocky launches of Battlefield 4 and Sims 4, DICE and Maxis were given time to fix them because “they had nothing else” to act as a fallback. “With Bioware, if Andromeda isn’t working, there are two other projects desperate for those people. EA does not like failure and is eager to move on from failure.”
So where does that leave both Dragon Age and the next Mass Effect game? Darrah still believes that a remaster of the first three Dragon Age games is the correct first move, “and then maybe go from there. I’m very curious to see – in a weird, twisted way, the Mass Effect franchise and the Dragon Age franchise are in similar states where 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, like how does Andromeda fit in there? I don’t know.” He emphasizes that this doesn’t come from any insider information; “I’ve seen the same stuff you’ve seen, so I don’t know what they’re doing.”
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