The Mass Effect Legendary Edition in 2021 provided the perfect modern way to enjoy BioWare's beloved sci-fi trilogy. Sadly, it's unlikely we'll ever see the first three Dragon Age games get the same treatment, according to Mark Darrah, who co-directed the first game and directed the second.
That's not for want of trying either, as Darrah tells FRVR there was an internal campaign to re-release the original Dragon Age installments, but logistics just weren't in anyone's favor. "I think what you want is a Champion’s Edition," he says.
"My plan was like, we're going to do a 'Champion’s Trilogy,'" he recalls. "These are three games with three different important figures. And we're going to group them in, collect them together [...], we're going to retroactively turn it into a trilogy."
The term Champion's Edition stems from Street Fighter; the re-release of the second installment, Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition, is the third most successful arcade game ever. On its face, packaging Dragon Age Origins, 2, and Inquisition together seems like a sound idea, but there are a lot of technical hurdles.
The first two use the Eclipse Engine, while the third was developed using Frostbite, and they don't feed into each other as directly as the Mass Effect games. The Mass Effect trilogy was made using the Unreal Engine for all three installments, and each sequel was built to incorporate your character from its predecessor.
Dragon Age 2 allows you to do that directly from Origins, but to do it for Inquisition, you had to upload your save to an outside app. It's cumbersome, and even if BioWare or parent company EA wanted to make this happen, finding support would be hard because the underlying tech is outdated within the industry.
"There is basically no one at BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora Engine [the basis for Eclipse]," Darrah says. "There's basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal, there are basically no companies that could help you."
It doesn't help that the last game in the series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, performed underwhelmingly in terms of sales following a turbulent, decade-long development cycle. There won't be much impetus to invest in the franchise right now, no matter how strong the case might be for nostalgia. A shame, because after Baldur's Gate 3, there are generations of fans who'd probably love these fantasy RPGs.
Darrah thinks so, too. "Could a Dragon Age remaster sell really well? Yeah," he says. "I think it sells super well because even at the time, Dragon Age Origins wasn't the most attractive game. There's a lot you could do there to make it [...] a lot better looking."
