In 2021, Mass Effect fans were rewarded with a modern remaster of the first three games in Mass Effect Legendary Edition. However, fans hoping for a similar remaster of the original Dragon Age trilogy may be disappointed to hear that it was already “softly” pitched to EA and rejected.
Mark Darrah–an executive producer on the first three Dragon Age games before leaving BioWare–shared that revelation during an interview with MrMattyPlays on YouTube (via Eurogamer).
“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 [and] call it the Champions trilogy,” said Darrah. “EA’s historically been–and I don’t really know why–but they’ve even said this publicly. They’re kind of against remasters … It’s strange for a publicly traded company to basically seem to be against free money, but they seem to be against it.”
Darrah went on to explain that part of the difficulty with remastering the first three Dragon Age titles is that they were all built on different game engines. He recalled that BioWare considered hiring “a mod house that seems talented” to do a remaster. Darrah added that there were other pitches about how to bring Dragon Age: Origins “forward” that didn’t go through. He also suggested that EA would only greenlight the remasters if it didn’t cost the company anything extra.
“I think to some degree, EA’s stance was probably, ‘Sure, go ahead and do it, but do it with the money you already have,'” said Darrah. “And it’s like, ‘Well, we can’t do it with the money that we already have because we’re doing all these other things.'”
Darrah also touched upon reports of a rivalry between BioWare’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect teams, and shared his belief that the studio will do better with a single project at a time rather than fighting with itself for resources on multiple projects.
After Dragon Age: The Veilguard failed to meet EA’s sales expectations last year, BioWare laid off staff and reassigned some developers to other teams inside the company. Now, BioWare is working on the next Mass Effect game with a much smaller team.
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