Dragon Age could've gotten a trilogy remaster similar to Mass Effect Legendary Edition

At one point, BioWare floated the idea of remastering the original Dragon Age games into a trilogy collection, not unlike the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

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According to previous BioWare executive producer Mark Darrah, BioWare had lots of interesting ideas and pitches for Dragon Age projects, including a remastered trilogy of the first three games. Ultimately, though, the project wasn't greenlit by EA, and BioWare didn't have the extra budget to allocate for this kind of remaster trilogy.

In a recent interview with YouTuber MrMattyPlays, Darrah revealed some of BioWare's ideas that never took off. Darrah says that one of the things that the team thought about doing was a "Champion's Trilogy" of the first three Dragon Age games, referring to each of the title's respective mythical heroes.

• Read more: BioWare pre-production team starts cooking up Mass Effect 5: 'Our full focus is on Mass Effect'

Another idea was to create an internal Frostbite toolset, hand that off to an external dev team, and have them remake Dragon Age Origins within the DICE games engine.

"Honestly, what think they should do, and I don't think they will, but I think they should do a remaster of the of the first three.

"One of the things that we pitched at one point--pretty softly, so pitch is a massive overstatement--was to kind of retroactively rebrand the first three games as if they were a trilogy, maybe call it 'The Champions Trilogy.' So you have these sort of big larger than life heroes; you've got the Hero of Ferelden (Dragon Age Origins), the Champion of Kirkwall (Dragon Age 2), and then you've got the Inquisitor (Dragon Age Inquisition).

"So I think maybe you do that as a first step, you take those three games, you shine them up, you re-release them. Probably as remaster, probably not as a remake. See what happens and then maybe go from there.

"In a weird, twisted way, the Mass Effect franchise and the Dragon Age franchise kind of are in similar states, where they have three a trilogy of games that are pretty well received, and then a fourth game that's that's less well received."

So why didn't the project get greenlit? EA is very careful with investments, and so is BioWare; the devs had their funds allocated with other things, including games like Anthem. Plus, EA doesn't seem to like remasters...but maybe that stance has changed because EA greenlit the Mass Effect Legendary Edition.

EA's historically been against remasters--I don't really know why, it's strange for a publicly traded company to seem to be against free money. They seem to be against it.

EA doesn't like spending money, but the thing that EA likes even less than spending money is hiring people.

The other problem is that Dragon Age is harder to make than Mass Effect. To some degree, unknowably harder, maybe a lot harder. You can't really remaster Dragon Age externally, you have to probably do it internally.

Meanwhile, other video games publishers around the world are mining their respective intellectual property libraries with a plethora of re-releases, remasters, and remakes across all platforms.