As reported by TheGamer, BioWare producer Mark Darrah opened up about the history of attempted Dragon Age remasters and remakes at BioWare in a recent interview with MrMattyPlays on YouTube.
The former BioWare dev thinks a remaster of the first three Dragon Age games is the best shot the series has at a future, but notes that such an endeavor would face massive challenges compared to the well-received Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
“I’m not sure who pitches that game within EA, that’s what it would come down to,” Darrah said when asked about the future of the series. “There would need to be someone at BioWare—or, potentially, someone within EA more broadly—that would be willing to go out on a limb and say: ‘I want to pitch another Dragon Age game, here’s my vision of it.’
“There are more games to be made there, but I’m not sure how it gets started right now.”
When asked what he would do were he still at BioWare, Darrah said he wasn’t sure how to continue the series after Veilguard, but he knows what BioWare and EA should do instead: “I honestly think they should do—I don’t think they will, but they should—a remaster of the first three.”
Darrah explained that BioWare had floated the idea of remastering or remaking Dragon Age in the past, but that it had never risen to the level of a formal “pitch,” rather a range of remaster/remake ideas to the tune of “Is there a way to bring Dragon Age: Origins forward?”
Rather than EA nixing these ideas outright, it sounds like a fear of EA’s response or the work involved kept BioWare from formally spinning them up. One part of this was the eternal struggle for resources between teams at BioWare (mostly Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect), as well as between BioWare and other studios at EA.
Another issue was what Darrah characterized as a general hostility to remastering games at EA—though that seems to have changed given examples like the Mass Effect Legendary Edition and Command and Conquer Remastered.
In addition to external pressure and skepticism from EA, there’s also the issue of Dragon Age’s tech base. DA 1 and 2 were made on a proprietary engine, and in November of last year, Veilguard director John Epler said that “maybe 20 people left at BioWare” still have expertise in the Eclipse Engine—and that was before EA gutted the studio. Darrah characterized Dragon Age 1 and 2 remasters as “unknowably hard”: You’ll only understand the extent of the technical challenge once you dig into it.
At this point, with all the firings and staff departures, I’m not sure any reinterpretation of Dragon Age would result in something I would want. The staff turnover and slow death of BioWare has only exacerbated Dragon Age’s series-long identity crisis, with each game significantly different from the last in tone, mechanics, and visuals.
Despite a lot of great art direction hampered by 360-era muddy brown graphics, Dragon Age: Origins is still an excellent, approachable tactical RPG on PC, one I’m not sure needs remastering, much less remaking. Its console versions were notably compromised with truly borked controls, but the PC release still holds up.
Dragon Age 2 is a very dear game to me that would benefit from a lot of TLC. It has a distinctive, striking look, one of the best story/cast combos BioWare’s ever done, as well as great combat and character building mechanics—everyone always says it was “actionized,” but on PC it’s literally the same real time with pause combat BioWare’s been doing since Knights of the Old Republic. Stop gaslighting me, reviewers and RPG forum guys.
However, its infamous repeating environments and stultifying wave fights make it a caveated classic: I love going to the same spider cave I was in ten hours ago to fight wave after wave of mechanically identical enemies with ridiculously chunky health bars. But the kind of effort it would take to fix those issues is possibly the least likely thing to happen to the series.
Dragon Age is just dead. At least until a future, Microsoft-acquired EA announces their reboot of the series, Dragon Age: Origins – Origins, some time at the tail end of the 2030s.