In a fresh interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, former BioWare veteran Mark Darrah revealed that Electronic Arts refused several pitches from the studio to remake or remaster Dragon Age: Origins and, potentially, the second and third game, too.
I’m not pitching a Dragon Age to EA right now. I don’t know what I’d want to do, to be honest, to go forward with it. I mean, I honestly think they should do – I don’t think they will, but I think they should do a remaster of the first three. One of the things that we pitched at one point, pretty softly so pitch is a massive overstatement, was to kind of retroactively rebrand the first three games as if they were a trilogy. We’d call it the Champions trilogy, so you have these big, larger-than-life heroes. You’ve got the Hero of Ferelden, you’ve got the Champion of Kirkwall, and then you’ve got the Inquisitor. I think as a first step, you take those three games, and maybe Veilguard, you shine them up, re-release them, and see what happens and go from there.
Darrah, an Executive Producer on the first three Dragon Age games and a consultant on the fourth, said that the publisher has been historically reluctant to do remasters. While they did the successful Mass Effect Legendary Edition a while ago, that was made easier by the fact that all those games were powered by Unreal Engine technology, whereas Dragon Age: Origins was powered by the proprietary Eclipse Engine, DAII by the Lycium Engine (an upgraded version of the Eclipse), and Inquisition by Frostbite.
EA has historically been, and I don’t really know why but they’ve even said this publicly, they’re kind of against remasters. I don’t really know why. 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.
One of the very earliest things for Joplin 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. There were lots of pitches around, ‘Is there a way we can bring Dragon: Age Origins forward?’
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