Former executive Mike Darrah has revealed that BioWare made remaster pitches for the Dragon Age trilogy, but EA was against it.
This information was disclosed by Darrah during an interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays. If you are interested in BioWare games, you can check out our other articles here.
Mike Darrah: BioWare Made Remaster Pitches for Dragon Age Trilogy, But EA Was Against It
August 12, 2025 – Speaking with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, former executive Mark Darrah revealed that EA wasn’t keen to remaster the first three games in the Dragon Age franchise in the same style as the Mass Effect Legendary Collection.
“EA’s historically been – and I don’t really know why, but they’ve even said this publicly – they’re kind of against remasters,” said Darrah. “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 just part of it.
Darrah continued, “The other problem is that Dragon Age is just harder than Mass Effect to do, and to some degree unknowably harder. Maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder.”
According to Darrah, one of the early suggestions BioWare made was to use Frostbite Engine and “let’s find a mod house that seems talented and just pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age: Origins”.
“There were lots of pitches around, ‘Is there a way we can bring Dragon Age: Origins forward?’ And depending on what you do, like, [with] a remaster you kind of get Dragon Age II for free. [With] a remake you don’t.”
Darrah also noted that one of the potential blockers in this project, if it got greenlit, was the difficulty in remastering the games across several different engines.
“One of the advantages that Mass Effect has for a remaster over Dragon Age… It’s all Unreal instead of two different engines,” explains Darrah. “But actually, just the fact that it’s Unreal means that you can remaster Mass Effect essentially for money.”
Darrah continued, “If you’re willing to spend money on it, you can go to an external house and they can do most of the work, which is sort of what happened with [Mass Effect] Legendary Edition. There were a bunch of people at BioWare working on it, but it was – I don’t remember how many, but it was not a ton.”
