Former Bioware Dev: EA Refused Funding for Dragon Age Origins Remasters or Remake

They wanted to pay some kids to remake DA:O in the DA:I engine. Because nobody knew how to maintain the DA:O engine any more and they were super proud of their crummy DA:I engine. It would have been awful.
 
Last edited:
Such a shame, the first 2 games have no controller support on PC, barely playable on emulator RPSC3 and can't be played on modern consoles. And the first one is a Baldurs Gate 3 level game.

This was the same problem with the Mass effect series that the remaster fixed.

And It's not like Bioware is giving us much of anything else anymore, let's be real.
But the PC version with the tactical mode is the best one by a landslide.
Fuck the controller for party based CRPGs, honestly.
 
No point. They would have undoubtedly fucked it up.

At this point, EA might as well take Bioware out behind the shed and give them the Old Yeller treatment. They're too fargone.
 
Well.. I'd say for now. They might very well reconsider after the "success" of the latest one... And we are already seeing a nice resurgence of just going back to the plain old roots kinda good games.
Also funny how when we talk about remaster/remakes based on the threads over the years it's either "another cash grab" or "well fuck why don't we get it for this one"
 
I don't think I've ever played one start to finish outside of the very cream of the crop. Does anyone? RE4male, I'll play MGS3 Delta. Racking my brain here. Epic gave me Mafia Remake and it just made me want to throw up. The Crysis 2 and 3 remakes are solid though on PC. Worthwhile, but subtle. Shame they got lumped in with the rancid Crysis 1 remake.
 
The thing that ruined perception of 2 was calling it 2. It began life as a spinoff or side story, probably with a $39 target price. That's why the story is so small. It's not a globetrotting adventure, it's a political web based in one city. Viewed through that lens, people would have cut it a wider path when it comes to expectations. They'd be more willing to give way to the structural changes. I haven't actually played it since launch window, but I remember enjoying it for what it was, and honestly there haven't been many games released since then with a similar scope. But when you tell people the entire direction of Dragon Age as a product is shifting from Origins to this, people are rightly concerned because the ceiling just got a whole lot lower.
DA2 was kind of crap. Story wasn't too bad but combat encounter design was simply horrendous with waves and waves of teleporting enemies.

And the overall game suffered from very short dev cycle. Meh.

They produced a gem like DAO and squandered everything.
 
This is why it's 2025 and you can't play any of the Road Rash games anywhere but on emulated roms. It's also why Ultima, Alice, Mirrors Edge, and Black and white were never remastered/remade or ported.

I guess our chances are about as good as Capcom remastering mega man legends or us getting any of the Nolf games... Dragon age origins isn't coming back, sadly...
 
Last edited:
DA2 was kind of crap. Story wasn't too bad but combat encounter design was simply horrendous with waves and waves of teleporting enemies.

And the overall game suffered from very short dev cycle. Meh.

They produced a gem like DAO and squandered everything.

There's some rose-tinted glasses at play for sure. We all remember wanting the Arishok to slaughter Kirkwall to a man, but this doesn't mean we should forget the fact they only had two dungeons they rotated or closed a room off for every quest, the unending waves of enemies spawning in from literally nowhere, the DLC companion, the button-awesome connection, the fact characters from prior games were wholesale re-written to the point of being unrecognisable, and suddenly I'm feeling like maybe Veilguard was inevitable.
 
Last edited:
DA2 was kind of crap. Story wasn't too bad but combat encounter design was simply horrendous with waves and waves of teleporting enemies.

And the overall game suffered from very short dev cycle. Meh.

They produced a gem like DAO and squandered everything.
The combat pulls it down for sure. I haven't tried to replay it, and I don't plan do. I remember really getting pulled into the narrative in the third act. Maybe as much as any game I've played. Granted, I'm basing this off a play through that began on its launch day, so I could certainly be misremembering. Remember really liking the Qunari character.

Higher impression of it than Inquisition
 
Last edited:
Maybe EA doesn't want remasters because they know modern Bioware can't deliver something remotely as good, and bringing back some older games would just highlight that.

It's a shame though. Origins is a great game, but it's ugly as fuck now and there's no good console version.
 
NOOOOO!!!!

I was counting on this to happen eventually as theres no good way to play Origins on console!

This would sell really well too in todays climate. EA sucks. Just like they had tp gp and cancel Dead Space 2 remake because just selling good numbers isnt enough for those assholes.
 
It would be easy money...vs years spent on a GAAS title, to then drop it and re-launch as a bad purple-tinged CW dialog mess of a game made by a director who worked on The Sims.



This is the crap though that just...makes me hate game devs. Deflecting that they didn't "prepare the audience for change" is such an up your own ass response handwaving away accountability for the real problems of the game (rushed dev cycle, flagrant asset reuse, performance problems/bugs, shallow combat system). DA2 got more appreciated over time because there was some good story stuff, and patches + mods fixed shit that shouldn't have been broken in the first place for selling a full-price game.

Responses like this make me think some people at that studio really believed in the whole "Bioware Magic" bullshit.
Bioware has historically been one of "those" studios so no surprise there
 
Remasters and remakes are basically free money and it upskills your workforce.

-It gives them a low-risk project with a fixed scope
-it gives them something to do before embarking on a high-risk new project
-it teaches them how to deliver a project in time
-it teaches the coders what a successful game looks like

-it teaches managers how to, well, manage their team
-development time is much shorter than any new project

What am I missing?
You're making a lot of assumptions with this stuff, the chief being: "hand it to junior devs, it's easy work".

If memory serves, the core issue preventing a Dragon Age: Origin Remaster is that the source code for engine and tools is basically no longer available and/or hasn't been maintained. I'd wager raw assets weren't archived either. So, there goes fixed scope, timelines, and ability to hand this off to junior devs. You now need to write new tools to pull apart the bespoke asset files from the shipped game (which only gives you assets of the original quality, they still need to be polished up), or painstakingly remake everything from hand. Then, you need to reverse engineer the entire game's code so those assets are usable, and so you can get the game to actually play the same. That means either a massive decomplication effort, or a time consuming trial and error process to get it as close as possible - and, likely, it'll be parts of both. For all of that effort, you'll likely need teams of senior coders and senior artists to produce work at scale and quality, or you risk producing something that doesn't even qualify as a remaster, pissing off your customer base and leaving you with an expensive game that's far too different from the original and no one wants to buy it.

For all that cost, time, and risk, it's better business to just produce a full remake. And for a series whose last entry failed to sell even half of their projections, EA is probably not interested in throwing more money into the furnace.
 
Last edited:
DA games play very different and they run on different engines, not surprised that EA doesn't want to get into this mess. You can't expect easy money like with the ME remastered trilogy where only the first game was different and not by much. Plus the IP took a big hit recently and I reckon some people would automatically skip the trilogy remembering how bad Wokeguard was.

A remake of DA1 sounds like the safest idea, but I suspect it could butcher character's models and change some scenes to avoid 'sensitive topics' (remember how they treated the elves situation in the last game?).
 
Disgruntled Dragon Age fans: This sucks, but it's also a good thing based on the current team.

Me: Everyone should feel fortunate that we even received a Mass Effect remaster trilogy and Dead Space Remake in the first place. EA has been very clear for years that 99% of the time they do not give a single fuck about remakes and remasters.

And to prove it they have a massive back catalogue of superstar games that you either have to find an old copy of or emulate.
 
You're making a lot of assumptions with this stuff, the chief being: "hand it to junior devs, it's easy work".

If memory serves, the core issue preventing a Dragon Age: Origin Remaster is that the source code for engine and tools is basically no longer available and/or hasn't been maintained.
Of course! I don't run EA. If the source code is missing then that could actually explain why they said no.
 
But the PC version with the tactical mode is the best one by a landslide.
Fuck the controller for party based CRPGs, honestly.
Its about choice. You could prefer tactical mode for CRPGs, I like a third person mode with a simpler style for controllers.

BG3 was a lot better for me with controller than clicking to go everywhere. It's one of the reasons it blew up to so many non-CRPG fans and why such an expensive game in the genre managed to be produced.
 
Top Bottom