Dragon Age Trilogy Remaster skulle sälja, men ingen känner till motorerna

Mark Darrah thinks a Dragon Age trilogy remaster would sell well and that almost nobody left in the industry knows how to build one. The former series producer laid out both halves of that in a podcast interview with FRVR this week, and the second half is the reason he puts the odds low.

His sales case rests on how the first game looks now. Darrah said a remastered trilogy would sell super well, and added that even at the time, Dragon Age: Origins was not the most attractive game. Origins came out in 2009 and has aged into the kind of RPG people recommend with a caveat about the visuals.

Darrah pointed at the engines instead of the budget.

"There is basically no one at BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora Engine."

— Mark Darrah

Darrah said the same is true outside the studio, which is what separates this from the Mass Effect situation. The original Mass Effect trilogy ran on Unreal, a licensed engine that thousands of developers know, so BioWare could hand that remaster to people who already understood the tools. There is no equivalent bench for Aurora.

Each Dragon Age game also sits on different tech. Origins ran on Eclipse, BioWare's own update of the Aurora engine it built for Neverwinter Nights. Dragon Age 2 used another Aurora variant called Lycium. Inquisition moved to Frostbite in 2014, during the period when EA pushed its studios toward a single shared engine, and the RPG team found Frostbite missing features it needed for the genre. Bundling three games on three toolchains into one package is a different job from remastering three games that already share one.

Darrah has pitched a version of this before. He called it the Champion's Trilogy, and he described the plan on his YouTube channel last August: build Frostbite tools, find a talented mod house, train it, and pay it to remake Origins. The framing was retroactive, grouping the three games around three central figures so the series reads as a trilogy after the fact rather than by design.

That pitch never reached production, and the obstacles were commercial before they were technical. EA's resistance to remasters is on the record, because the publisher has said publicly that it is not keen on them, which Darrah called strange for a company passing on free money. Internal budgeting made it worse. A remaster of Origins would have to be funded out of BioWare's own allocation, and Darrah has said it probably has to be done internally rather than handed to an outside studio. He also noted that a remaster of Origins might carry Dragon Age 2 along with it at little extra cost, while a full remake would not.

His current read is that BioWare would have to staff up specifically for the job, building a new internal team whose expertise is the old engines. Darrah left the studio in 2020 and came back briefly in 2023 as a consultant on The Veilguard, so he is describing a company he no longer works for.

EA is not in a position to fund speculative projects right now. The publisher is being acquired by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, a deal that loads roughly $20 billion of debt onto the company, and it has been cutting costs since. Layoffs hit BioWare after The Veilguard shipped, and the staff who remain are reported to be working on the next Mass Effect. Dragon Age is effectively parked.

I would start a remastered Origins for the choice and consequence layer, which is most of why I open an RPG at all, and I expect its combat to lose me faster than its textures would.

Modders are not waiting for approval. Dragon Age: Thedas at War, a total conversion for Crusader Kings 3, came out late last week as part of a fan-run Paradox modathon. It replaces the historical map with Thedas and sets the clock ten years after the Second Blight, with players fighting for the throne of Orlais, uniting Ferelden under Teyrn Caedmon, or steering Hassandriel of the Dales through the threat of annihilation by Orlais.

The scope is larger than a reskin. The mod ships 40 playable cultures, several Dragon Age religions, and the option to play as a mage, currently limited to characters outside a Circle, who can throw destructive spells or heal allies. Its Mega Wars system pulls minor characters into realm-wide conflicts, letting lesser vassals pick a side and take the consequences. The base version of Crusader Kings 3 is enough to run it, with Roads to Power and Royal Court needed only for landless adventurer play, and the team says it cannot guarantee stable multiplayer. More content is coming in chunks.

A map of Thedas gives me nothing to move through, so I expect the mod to land closer to my Don't Starve Together bounce than to anything I finished this year, even though a systemic sandbox is usually where I lose whole evenings. I still find it the more interesting of the two stories, because a fan team is shipping new Thedas content in the same month a former producer explains why the official version cannot happen.

Dragon Age 2 turned 15 this year, and the anniversary coverage was mostly an accounting of what got cut. BioWare had 14 to 16 months to ship a full sequel because EA needed something to fill the fiscal hole left by delays to Star Wars: The Old Republic. Dragon Age 2's crunch produced a game written from first drafts, missing half its planned quests, reusing dungeons, and dropping an entire Varric storyline. Around 80 percent of the environmental changes meant to show Kirkwall aging across seven years never made it in.

"Once it's cut, it's done, and we'll have to just accept the result."

— David Gaider

That is the part a remaster does not reach. New lighting and higher resolution textures would not restore the quests that came off the wall in the writing room, or rebuild the version of Kirkwall that was supposed to change between acts. Series creator David Gaider has also described the reactivity problem the trilogy left behind, where carried-over choices are either irrelevant or not enough, a ceiling the next Mass Effect will hit as well with three incompatible endings behind it.

Darrah is describing a project that needs a new team, an engine nobody has documented well enough to hire for, and a publisher that has said it dislikes remasters while carrying new debt. Thedas at War needs a copy of Crusader Kings 3.