Former BioWare producer Mark Darrah believes a remaster of the original Dragon Age trilogy isn’t likely to happen, as no one left working at the developer knows how the old engine works.
Speaking to FRVR, Darrah says that a proposed “champion edition” for Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age: Inquisition was proposed while he worked at the company. However, there were some key issues with the idea.
Unlike Mass Effect – which received its own remastered trilogy in the Legendary Edition back in 2021 – Darrah claims Dragon Age is harder to work with. That’s because it doesn’t use Unreal Engine like Mass Effect does, instead being built upon an expanded version of the Aurora engine. That engine is what the original Witcher was made with, as well as the brilliant Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic RPGs.
“There is basically no one at BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora Engine,” Darrah told FRVR. “So unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal… there are basically no companies that could help you.”
Dragon Age: Origins used the Eclipse Engine (an upgraded version of Aurora), while Dragon Age 2 uses the Lycium Engine, another proprietary BioWare engine based on Aurora. Inquisition uses Frostbite instead, which would make it significantly easier to modernise compared to its predecessors.
Darrah goes on to say that creating a Dragon Age trilogy remaster would require a “brand new team”, though doubts that would happen. He tells FRVR: “EA doesn’t like having employees so, if you’re going to do that, you’re going to do that within the umbrella of BioWare, which means those people are not working on something else”. Nevertheless, Darrah believes such a project would sell well.
It’s doubtless a sad bit of news. One of the downsides of using proprietary engines is later down the line, when staff leave or are laid off like many were by EA, you risk losing a lot of in-house knowledge about prior projects. From a business perspective, EA would now likely have to invest a staggering amount of time and money to get a Dragon Age trilogy remaster made.
Darrah has been vocal about past BioWare projects since his departure from the company back in 2020. Earlier this year, he spoke about Anthem and its chance to live on in the community’s hands, granted the tech created to do so was “salvaged and recovered”.
