- BioWare pitched EA a remaster of the first three Dragon Age games, but the concept was turned down
- Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah said the remastered games would have been called the Champions Trilogy
- He also said that “EA wants mainstream success” and is “against remasters”
A remaster of the first three Dragon Age games was pitched by BioWare to EA, but turned down because the publisher is “against remasters”.
Speaking in an interview with the YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah discussed the last year’s latest entry in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the mixed reception it received.
Now that BioWare has shifted its entire focus to Mass Effect 5, Darrah said that he doesn’t know how a new Dragon Age game can be made and thinks the studio should remake the first three games, starting with Origins.
The former franchise lead went on to reveal that this concept was pitched to EA as the Champions Trilogy, but was turned down.
“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 (thanks, IGN). “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. 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?”
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Although EA wasn’t inclined to remaster the Dragon Age games, it did release the Mass Effect Legendary Edition in 2021, which combined the first three games in the series.
According to Darrah, EA favors Mass Effect over Dragon Age because it wants “mainstream success”.
“The problem Dragon Age has had, charitably I guess, would be to say that EA wants mainstream success and it’s hard – or at least it has historically been hard – for corporate people, people who come from the sports side of the organization to look at a game like Dragon Age: Origins, which is super nerdy, not very attractive looking, and say ‘this is a mainstream game’,” said Darrah.
“They don’t see it [with Dragon Age]. They look at Mass Effect, they can see it… there’s just been a lot of difficulty with them, there’s always been a push for [Dragon Age] to be more mainstream, more accessible. So it’s always had this either pressure to be something different, or more – in the case of something like Inquisition – a reaction to that.”
Darrah added: “EA’s historically been — and I don’t know why, but they’ve even said this publicly — they’re kind of against remasters. 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.”
Darrah continued, saying that another problem is that a Dragon Age remaster is “to some degree unknowably harder” to make than Mass Effect, since the three games were all made using different engines.
He explained that the plan for the initial version of Dragon Age 4, before its multiplayer reboot and before it became Veilguard, was to use the Frostbite engine again, find a mod house, and then “pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age: Origins.”
“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.”
Unfortunately, working with an older engine would have been a difficult task, with Darrah explaining that BioWare would have had to remaster Dragon Age internally.
“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.”
In January, BioWare announced that it was downsizing the studio and moving an unspecified number of developers to other teams within EA, while others will be focused entirely on the next Mass Effect game.
Currently, a core team at BioWare is developing Mass Effect 5. As a result of the changes, several, long-time BioWare and Dragon Age veterans were also laid off.