Dragon Age Remasters Now Looking Very Unlikely

If you’re waiting on remasters of the Dragon Age franchise, you probably shouldn’t hold your breath. Remasters and remakes are somewhat of the backbone of our industry these days. They can sometimes be used to gauge interest in a dormant franchise, they are a good way for developers to test certain ideas without having to worry too much about other things that are already locked in place from the original game, and they also just make a ton of money since fans want to revisit old games. The remake of Mafia highlighted a demand for story-driven, linear crime games and led 2K to make Mafia: The Old Country instead of a big, bloated open world version of Mafia 4.

However, these remasters and remakes can be costly depending on how much effort the studios want to really put in. For a really big game, the expectations are really high and fans want something that modernizes their favorite titles. If you miss the mark at all, you end up with something like the GTA trilogy, which was lambasted upon release for not only being extremely buggy, but also having a worse art style than the original games which really angered fans.

With that said, there are a lot of great games that fans want to see remastered in some capacity still. RPG fans have longed to see some of the Dragon Age games remade or remastered for some time, especially as the franchise is now 15 years old. Unfortunately, fans probably shouldn’t anticipate such a thing. In an interview with MrMattyPlays, ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah said that he thinks EA should remaster the first three Dragon Age games, but doesn’t think it’ll happen. He noted that they pitched the idea of a retroactive trilogy that would package them all together and release them, but it obviously didn’t move forward. He noted it would be wise to remaster instead of remake them as a way to sort of relaunch the franchise and then take it from there.

Darrah noted that EA is apparently against remasters and aren’t interested in going backwards. However, he also believes that Dragon Age is harder to pull off than Mass Effect as Mass Effect uses Unreal Engine amongst other things. The idea of bringing back Dragon Age: Origins was floated around in various ways too, but it didn’t come to fruition. Of course, the Mass Effect trilogy got a big remaster, but it’s unclear if that was used to lay any kind of groundwork for Mass Effect 4 beyond making the first three games playable on modern hardware. Mass Effect is also much bigger and more commercially viable, likely making it easier sell for EA.

Whether or not the Dragon Age franchise carries on remains to be seen, but if it does, it will likely be a long time from now. EA’s best course of action may be a straight up reboot if that happens, but we’ll have to wait and see. Key members of the Dragon Age team are gone and it seems like EA isn’t very interested in the brand following The Veilguard, but maybe things will change when the dusts settles.