Dragon Age: Origins Remaster Faces EA Resistance and Technical Hurdles

A remaster of Dragon Age: Origins has been discussed within BioWare before, but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Former franchise boss Mark Darrah revealed that EA’s lack of enthusiasm for remasters, the game’s complex engine, and BioWare’s limited team size have all made the project a tough sell. With the studio now focused entirely on Mass Effect 5, the future of Dragon Age remasters remains uncertain.

Speaking to YouTube channel MrMattyPlays, Darrah admitted he’s “not sure” how a new Dragon Age entry would even begin production now. The company is working on only one game at a time, and with its reduced size, Dragon Age is effectively on pause.

Darrah believes BioWare should eventually remake the first three Dragon Age games, starting with Origins. At one point, there was even an idea to rebrand them as the “Champions Trilogy,” uniting the stories of the series’ early heroes. His vision was simple: polish them up, re-release them, and see how players respond.

He noted the similarities between Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Both have trilogies widely liked by fans, followed by a fourth game that received mixed reception. With Mass Effect 5 now on the way, how BioWare handles Andromeda’s place in the story could influence any future Dragon Age relaunch.

So, why hasn’t Dragon Age: Origins been remastered yet? Darrah says one major reason is EA’s corporate stance.

“EA’s historically been — and I don’t know why, but they’ve even said this publicly — they’re kind of against remasters,” he said. “It’s strange for a publicly-traded company to seemingly be against free money, but they seem to be against it.”

Even if EA approved, the project wouldn’t be straightforward. Dragon Age: Origins runs on an older, more complex engine than Mass Effect, which was built with Unreal Engine. That difference makes Origins “unknowably harder” to update — maybe only slightly harder, maybe much more. In the early stages of Dragon Age 4’s first iteration, codenamed Joplin, one idea was to find a skilled modding studio, train them on Frostbite, and have them remake Origins.

But while pitches came and went, none advanced to production. Darrah explained that a remaster might allow Dragon Age 2 to be upgraded “for free,” but a full remake would require far more resources.

A big challenge is that Origins couldn’t easily be remastered by an external team. “You probably have to do it internally,” Darrah said. EA’s internal budgeting meant BioWare would have had to fund the project from its own allocated resources, which were already stretched across other developments.

BioWare’s Dragon Age & Mass Effect devs “didn’t get along,” says former writer, which may have added to the internal complexity of juggling both franchises under one roof.

In the end, without a dedicated budget and with Mass Effect 5 now BioWare’s sole focus, Dragon Age: Origins Remaster never moved forward.

Mass Effect 5 is still in early production, and while it will acknowledge Andromeda’s events, it’s expected to return to the Milky Way, bringing back familiar characters, alien species, and the tone of the original trilogy. For now, Dragon Age fans will have to be content with Veilguard — and wait to see if EA ever changes its mind about revisiting the series’ roots.