After EA released the Mass Effect Legacy Collection, featuring remasters of its beloved sci-fi series, fans of developer BioWare had one obvious question. When will the Dragon Age series get a remaster of its own? As it turns out, BioWare once considered that very thing only to be denied by EA, but as with so many games, a remaster may not be the solution at all when the original release is still there.
Recently, Dragon Age: Origins director Mark Darrah told YouTuber MrMattyPlays that BioWare once “softly” pitched a remaster of the three original Dragon Age games to EA. According to Darrah, EA was averse to remasters at all, and that at least when it comes to the first game in the series, there are bigger problems than the studio’s reticence.
“The other problem is, Dragon Age is harder than Mass Effect to do,” Darrah said.
That’s because unlike Mass Effect, which was developed with Unreal Engine, the Dragon Age series was made with in-house engines. And while Dragon Age: Inquisition was made with a version of EA’s Frostbite Engine, which is still in use today, the first two parts of the series used an engine that’s no longer in use. Despite that, Darrah says that early on in the development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, some thought was put into making a set of tools for the Frostbite Engine that would allow EA to hire a mod team to create a remaster of Dragon Age: Origins rather than having BioWare itself work on it.
There are plenty of reasons why you’d want to remaster Dragon Age: Origins, especially for players on Xbox. The console version of the game has some significant differences in its tactical combat, and technical limitations of earlier consoles mean the complexity of battles is dialed down. Even the PC version has had issues, with modern hardware having trouble running the game as-is, and some modding is also required to get it working properly.
That being said, Dragon Age: Origins is still entirely worth playing on PC, remaster or no. The most dated element of the game is its combat, and while that may be given something of an update in any potential remaster, it still wouldn’t bring it anywhere near what players get in a modern Dragon Age game. And if you’re going to be playing a version of the game that’s remastered by modders anyway, that’s entirely possible right now.
The Dragon Age Redesigned mod is a ten-year project that updates the visuals of just about every aspect of Dragon Age: Origins, including its DLC expansions. Improved Atmosphere adds more variation in NPC behavior and appearance, and restores content cut from the original release while fixing bugs. Those two mods alone amount to what’s essentially a very lightweight remaster, and other popular mods lets you bring a pet into combat without using a party slot, respec your party members, and offer plenty of other additions and fixes.
More to the point, though, Dragon Age: Origins doesn’t need a remaster because most games don’t need remasters. You can already play the original (albeit with a bit of tweaking), and some of the very things that would be changed in a remaster are what give the game its character. Sure, there’s a lot about the game that doesn’t feel modern, in both its visuals and mechanics, but those aren’t mistakes. Getting used to the ways that old games are different from new ones without thinking of one as superior to the other is always going to be better than simply hoping every older game you want to play gets a new version. There are countless incredible games out there, like Dragon Age: Origins, that will never get remastered and earning to appreciate them for what they are is more than worth the effort.
