As well-received as Mass Effect: Legendary Edition was, Electronic Arts has never felt keen on a similar remastered trilogy for Dragon Age. Former executive producer Mark Darrah told MrMattyPlays in a recent interview that the publisher has always been “kind of against remasters.”
“EA’s historically been, and I don’t really know why, but they’ve even said this publicly, kind of against remasters. 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,” says Darrah.
Of course, bringing all three titles together into one package would have been “harder than Mass Effect to do; to some degree unknowably harder. Maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder.” This is likely because of their vastly different toolsets and engines.
BioWare had some ideas on how to tackle this, though. “Let’s do Frostbite tools, and then let’s find a mod house that seems talented and pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age Origins.” Darrah revealed that, “There were lots of pitches around. A remaster, you kind of get Dragon Age 2 for free, a remake you don’t.”
“EA’s stance was probably, ‘Sure, go ahead and do it, but do it with the money you already have.’ 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 has mentioned lack of support from EA in the past, while former writer David Gaider says it always preferred Mass Effect over Dragon Age, so that may have also played a part.
Dragon Age is even less likely to receive any support following the underwhelming performance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and BioWare’s restructuring, with the studio now focused on the next Mass Effect. While Veilguard has received extensive criticism, it saw no shortage of troubles during its long development period, as reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier.