Mark Darrah has shared a surprising bombshell about EA and the Dragon Age franchise. And really, this is a bombshell about EA and all their old games in general.
Who Is Mark Darrah?
As Darrah reveals in his YouTube channel, Darrah was a developer who worked at Bioware from 1997 to 2021. Darrah worked on all four Dragon Age games and all four Mass Effect games. His gameography also includes Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, Neverwinter Nights, and Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.
Suffice to say, he’s as much of an expert on Bioware as anyone. Darrah also has a lot to say about Bioware’s parent company, EA.
Bioware Pitched A Dragon Age Legendary Edition
MrMattyPlays interviewed Darrah about his career. Along the way, Darrah revealed that Bioware pitched remastering the Dragon Age games.
Darrah said this (edited for clarity):
I mean, I honestly think they should do a remaster of the first three Dragon Age games.
One of the things that we pitched at one point – pretty softly, so pitch is a massive overstatement – was to retroactively rebrand the first three games as if they were a trilogy. Call it like, the Champions Trilogy. You have these larger than life heroes. You’ve got the Hero of Ferelden, the Champion of Kirkwall, and then the Inquisitor.
So I think as a first step, you take those three games – and maybe Dragon Age: The Veilguard – you shine them up, you re-release them, probably remaster, probably not a remake. You see what happens and then go from there.
It’s interesting to find out that Bioware was also thinking of bringing the old games back. There was also a ten year gap and a two console generation gap between Dragon Age Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. EA could have kept Dragon Age fans happy if they did some form of rerelease.
Darrah Reveals EA’s Surprising – And Strange – Stance Against Remasters
Matty probed Darrah on why EA didn’t accept any of Bioware’s pitches. Darrah said this:
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.
But that’s part of it. The other problem is that Dragon Age is just harder than Mass Effect to do. To some degree unknowably harder – maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder.
And that’s it. This may seem to be bad news for Dragon Age fans, but it’s actually worse than that. EA took the same position as Hasbro – buying as many studios and IPs as they could, and deliberately not touching them. EA can say that they don’t have good ideas to bring those games back. But there’s another potential reason – they bought out potential competition.
Dragon Age Legendary Edition Could Have Come With Dragon Age 4
Darrah does add one more interesting bombshell in this interview. As it turns out, they tried to pitch these Dragon Age remasters as part of Joplin. Joplin was the original codename of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. However, it was different from the final product.
Darrah told the story:
We had various pitches. One of the very earliest things for Joplin, we said let’s do a version of these games, let’s do it with Frostbite tools. And then, let’s find a mod house that seems talented, and just uplift them and pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age Origins.
There were lots of pitches around where we asked, is there a way we can bring Dragon Age Origins forward? And depending on what you do, if you do a remaster you get Dragon Age 2 for free. If you do a Dragon Age Origins remake you don’t.
It’s also interesting that Darrah preferred a remaster over a complete remake. This could just be a matter of budget; if they were taking that effort to remake all of Dragon Age Origins, that’s nearly as much effort as making a game from scratch. A remaster could get better graphics and QOL improvements. But you would not be trying to reinvent the wheel in that case.
Is EA Really Just Going To Sit On Their Classic Games Library?
Unfortunately, this leaves a sour note for fans of Dragon Age and other EA games in general. We will probably never see many of EA’s classic franchises again, from the Desert Strike series, Knockout Kings, Wing Commander, and even Boom Blox.
And ultimately, it’s all very strange too. Because as Darrah says, it’s almost like EA hates making money.
