LogIn"It's strange for a publicly traded company to basically be against free money."
BioWare
BioWare's games are often surrounded by controversy, but Mass Effect got its Legendary Edition despite (or maybe thanks to) players' hate toward Andromeda.
Dragon Age, however, didn't receive such treatment, even though the developers wanted to do it. Alas, EA wasn't interested, according to BioWare's former executive producer Mark Darrah.
"EA's historically been, and I don't really know why but they've even said this publicly, kind of against remasters," he told MrMattyPlays (via GamesRadar). "It's strange for a publicly traded company to basically be against free money, but they seem to be against it. That's part of it."
One of the reasons why we didn't see the first 3 parts of DA remastered was their higher difficulty compared to Mass Effect: they are "unknowably harder" to do, "maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder." No wonder: ME games came out in one generation, while DA titles had long gaps between them.
"Let's do Frostbite tools, and then let's find a mod house that seems talented and pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age: Origins. There were lots of pitches around," Darrah said. "A remaster you kind of get Dragon Age 2 for free, a remake you don't."
He assumed EA suggested BioWare remastered the Dragon Age games with the money it already had, "and it's like, 'Well, we can't do it with the money that we already have because we're doing all these other things.'"
Darrah saw the first games to completion and left in 2020. He was then invited as a consultant to make sure Dragon Age: The Veilguard followed the lore, but this didn't help the game much: it received tons of hate and is likely the most despised part of the franchise. Kind of funny, considering the same happened to Andromeda, which came out after the "golden" Mass Effect trio.
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