Dragon Age series producer Mark Darrah has touched on the possibility of remasters of the original trilogy of games, and it’s not the news fans were looking for. While Dragon Age: Origins and its sequels may seem like they’re ripe for remasters, there are some unfortunate problems in the way.
Dragon Age: Origins released way back in 2009, and immediately became a hit, receiving rave reviews from critics and fans, and ultimately selling over three million copies. For a while, the Dragon Age franchise was quite successful and active, with the original game receiving an expansion and numerous DLC, plus two more sequels, all within five years. After a decade of dormancy, the series got a new entry in the form of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, but it ultimately failed to perform as well as EA expected.
Dragon Age Remasters Unlikely to Happen
In a chat with FRVR, Dragon Age creator and series producer Mark Darrah discussed the possibility of the fantasy RPG getting a Legendary Edition-style remaster trilogy, like fellow Bioware series Mass Effect has received. There were early hopes to create a Champion’s Edition for Dragon Age, which would have been a packaged remaster of the first three games in the series. However, unlike Mass Effect, the first two games in the series didn’t use Unreal Engine, and were instead built upon the Aurora Engine, which was created by BioWare. Darrah pointed out that there’s no one currently working at BioWare that understands the in-house engine anymore, so it’s not as simple as what the Mass Effect team had to work with.
Balance the critic averages
Balance the critic averages
Easy (6)Medium (8)Hard (10)
Darrah noted that he thinks that a Dragon Age remaster would sell quite well, particularly of the first game, as it “wasn’t the most attractive game” even when it launched. However, in order to do so, he thinks that it would mean putting together an entirely new team, as there would be substantial work required to rebuild the early games on a new engine. Darrah doesn’t seem at all convinced that EA will make that effort, though, saying that “EA doesn’t like having employees so, if you’re going to do that, you’re going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else.”
Unfortunately, this is the second instance of bad news that the Dragon Age franchise has recently received by way of Darrah. The dev has also said that he can’t think of anyone who would or could pitch a new Dragon Age game to EA, and that to the best of his knowledge, no one at BioWare wants to work on the franchise. The claims follow similar statements from writer David Gaider, who stated that EA had no faith in Dragon Age, and that while he personally likes the idea of the challenge of working on a new entry, EA’s involvement and history makes him far less likely to actually be willing to do so.
Unless a big shake-up happens in the future, for all intents and purposes, it seems as though the Dragon Age game series is largely dead in the water. Fans of Mass Effect can at least rest easy knowing that a new game in the sci-fi RPG series is still in the works at BioWare, though it remains to be seen if it can satisfy fans and meet EA’s expectations.
- Released
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November 3, 2009
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood, Intense Violence, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content
- Publisher(s)
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Electronic Arts
- Engine
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Eclipse
