BioWare proposed a remastered Dragon Age trilogy, but EA refused
Mark Darrah confirms that the company was uninterested in a collection of the first three games.
At some point, it was proposed that Dragon Age would have a remaster of the first titles in the series; however, Electronic Arts decided to deny BioWare’s pitch.
This information was revealed by former Dragon Age franchise boss Mark Darrah, who was in charge of the production of the first titles, in a recent interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays. During the interview, it was said that there was a plan to create a remastered compilation of the first three titles in the franchise, but Electronic Arts refused, even though BioWare had already been given the green light for Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.
“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.”
“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.”
Other reasons behind this refusal
However, another detail to note is that possibly the refusal of this trilogy is due to the complicated development that the Dragon Age franchise has had. It is worth remembering that each of the first three games was made with different graphics engines, so a remaster would have required a designated team for its realization. Considering the recent release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, as well as the upcoming release of Mass Effect 5, it’s not as if there would have been enough internal resources to pull it off, something Darrah ended up commenting that this would have led to an “open warfare over resources”.
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