Mass Effect 5 devs should “scapegoat” Veilguard and a Dragon Age trilogy remaster was pitched to EA, says ex-BioWare producer
Former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has discussed pitching remasters of the first three games in the series to EA, and made clear in the same interview that he’s encourage the developers of the next Mass Effect game to “scapegoat” Dragon Age: The Veilguard “as much as they need to”.
Darrah’s offered a lot of insight into life at BioWare since departing the studio back in 2022, with the veteran dev having done plenty of that via his own YouTube channel. This time, though, he was interviewed by YouTuber MrMattyPlays.
Just past the ten minute mark of the chat, Darrah was asked whether he thinks the next Mass Effect game will likely face a “less messy” development cycle than the likes of Veilguard have suffered. “To be frank,” he responded, “the Mass Effect team is going to be able to point to The Veilguard and say ‘We should steer away from some of these things because look what happened.’ I would honestly encourage that team to scapegoat Veilguard as much as they need to, to get what they need from the organisation, whether it’s true or not.”
So, not giving Veilguard’s developers – whom Darrah worked with as a consultant and stood up for following the game’s release. Instead, just pointing to it in an effort to get dumb execs to stop pushing yet another project in the same problematic directions and learn from some past mistakes.
Meanwhile, slightly further on, Darrah added that he thinks the next step for the Dragon Age series should be remastering the first three games: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Inquisition. He also revealed that remastering these games as a “Champions Trilogy” was discussed and soft pitched to EA while he was there, but didn’t end up happening for a few reasons.
“EA’s historically been and I don’t know why, but they’ve even said this publicly — they’re kind of against remasters,” Darrah explained, “I don’t really know why, and it’s strange for a publicly-traded company to seemingly be against free money but they seem to be against it. So that’s part of it.
“The other problem is, Dragon Age is harder than Mass Effect to do. To some degree unknowably harder, maybe only a little bit harder, maybe a lot harder. One of the very earliest things for Joplin [the codename for BioWare’s earliest version of Dragon Age 4] was let’s do Frostbite tools, and then let’s find a mod house that seems talented, and just uplift them, and pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age: Origins.”
However, as Darrah went on to outline, that wouldn’t fly, because of the “advantages” the series about banging ok has over Dragon Age in terms of being easy to remaster:
One, it’s all Unreal instead of two different engines. But actually, just the fact that it’s Unreal [engine] means that you can remaster Mass Effect essentially for money. If you’re willing to spend money on it, you can go to an external house and they can do most of the work, which is sort of what happened with Legendary Edition. There were a bunch of people at BioWare working on it…I don’t know remember how many, but it was not a ton. Whereas, if you’re going to do [Dragon Age], you either have to spin up a brand new team that’s going to learn this really, really crotchety old tech base, or you’ve got to do it all in-house.
Sounds like a tough sell to spending-averse execs who Darrah suggests elsewhere in the interview have historically struggled to see the Dragon Age games as potential mainstream hits. Regardless of where it’s that or something else, here’s hoping Veilguard doesn’t end up being the last we ever see of BioWare’s lizard era.
