Dragon Age Remaster Trilogy Unlikely as No One at BioWare Understands the Engine
A Mass Effect Legendary Edition-style remaster of the original Dragon Age trilogy is unlikely to happen because nobody left at BioWare, or anywhere else, understands the engine the games were built on. Former BioWare producer Mark Darrah, who worked on the series, told FRVR that a “Champion’s Edition” collecting Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition was his plan while at the studio, but the technical reality makes it far harder than Mass Effect was.
The obstacle is not budget or appetite. It is institutional memory.
The Engine Problem
Mass Effect’s trilogy all ran on versions of Unreal Engine, an industry standard with a deep pool of people who know it. Dragon Age did not. Origins runs on the Eclipse Engine, an upgraded form of the Aurora Engine, which was replaced by the Lycium Engine for Dragon Age 2, while Inquisition runs on a form of Frostbite. Aurora, originally used for the first Witcher and the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games, has never been used by any studio outside BioWare.
“There is basically no one at BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora Engine,” Darrah told FRVR. “There’s basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you.” Because the expertise does not exist to hire in, the usual fix of outsourcing a remaster to a specialist studio is closed off.
The Champion’s Edition That Never Was
Darrah’s original plan was to retrofit a trilogy that was never designed as one. “I think what you want is a Champion’s Edition. That was always my plan,” he said. “We’re going to kind of retroactively kind of like turn this into like, these are three games with three different important figures. And we’re going to group them in, collect them together into, we’re going to retroactively turn it into a trilogy.” Beyond the engines, the three games are simply very different from each other, which complicates presenting them as a set.
Staffing is the other barrier. Darrah says a remaster would require building “a brand new team”, and noted 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.” Any remaster effort would therefore come directly at the cost of whatever BioWare is currently making.
It Would Probably Sell Well Anyway
None of this is a comment on demand. Darrah reckons a remaster, particularly of Origins, would do strong numbers, especially in the wake of Baldur’s Gate 3’s success. “Could a Dragon Age remaster sell really well? Yeah. I think it sells super well because even at the time, Dragon Age Origins wasn’t the most attractive game,” he said. “There’s a lot you could do there to make it a lot better looking.”
EA’s longer-standing difficulty is with the brand rather than the games. Inquisition remains BioWare’s best-selling game of all time, yet pushing Dragon Age as a franchise has proven harder for the publisher than Mass Effect, which carries clearly identifiable, casual-friendly branding. Darrah’s comments on the remaster followed his explanation of why he does not expect the series to return as a franchise under current EA management at all.
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