Speaking on the YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, former BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah — who worked at the studio for nearly 24 years — revealed why EA never remastered the first three Dragon Age games in the style of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.
According to Darrah, one major reason was EA’s long-standing reluctance toward remaster projects.
“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 seem against free money, but they are,” he said.
Technical challenges also played a role. Darrah explained that Dragon Age is inherently harder to remaster than Mass Effect, partly because the series was developed on two different game engines, unlike Mass Effect, which ran entirely on Unreal Engine. This made outsourcing work more complex and costly.
One early idea was to hire an experienced modding studio to remake Dragon Age: Origins using Frostbite tools. While a remaster could potentially bundle Dragon Age II “for free,” a full remake would require much more effort.
In contrast, Mass Effect was easier to update because an external studio could handle most of the work with Unreal, which is essentially what happened with the Legendary Edition. BioWare still contributed to the project, but with a relatively small internal team.
The most recent entry, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, launched last year to mixed reviews and a lukewarm reception from fans. EA reported the game “engaged” around 1.5 million players in its first two months — nearly half of its sales expectations.
More Stories
Wizards of the Coast unveils a first look at Exodus combat and exploration gameplay
A Cyberpunk 2077-based card game raised nearly $8 million on Kickstarter within just a few hours
Resident Evil Requiem sets record-breaking sales pace for Capcom