Hands up if you understand the Eclipse engine

Image credit: Chasing Dings / EA

Former Dragon Age series producer Mark Darrah has shared his tuppence worth on the likelihood of BioWare and EA ever commissioning a full-on original Dragon Age trilogy remaster or remake. He thinks such a remastering or remakering would sell pretty well, not least because OG Dragon Age looks like a toilet bowl in a Silent Hill game (I exaggerate the sentiments here slightly). But he also thinks the odds of such a project are low, for the straightforward reason that nobody either inside or outside BioWare really understands the proprietary technology those older RPGs run on. Ah well. We'll always have the mods.

Released in 2011, Dragon Age: Origins used BioWare's proprietary Eclipse Engine, an updated version of the Aurora Engine created for Neverwinter Nights. The subsequent Dragon Age 2, released in 2011, ran on another Aurora variant called the Lycium Engine. 2014's Dragon Age: Inquisition, finally, was built with the Frostbite Engine devised for DICE's Battlefield shooters. Some context: at the time of Inquisition's development, EA were on the warpath about getting all their games to use the same engine. This caused chaos for the Dragon Age team, who found that Frostbite lacked many of the features they needed for role-playing development.

Getting three games that use different, proprietary tech to hum along together in one remaster package is a tall order. Certainly, a taller order than remastering the original Mass Effect trilogy – all those games run on Epic's publicly licensed Unreal Engine, which is pretty well-understood across the industry. Nonetheless, Darrah – who left BioWare in 2020, returning briefly in 2023 to work as a consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard - did envisage a "Champion's Trilogy" at one point in his BioWare tenure. Back in August last year, he discussed the pitch on his Youtube channel. The rough idea was to create some Frostbite tools and then "find a mod house that seems talented, and just uplift them, and pay them to do a remake of Dragon Age: Origins."

"That was always my plan was like, we’re going to do a champion’s trilogy," Darrah reiterated to FRVR, in a podcast interview this week. "We’re going to kind of retroactively kind of like turn this into like, these are three games with three different important figures. And we’re going to group them in, collect them together into, we’re going to retroactively turn it into a trilogy."

He still thinks a trilogy of Dragon Age remasters would "sell super well", noting that "even at the time, Dragon Age: Origins wasn’t the most attractive game". Ooof, what a slap in the face for enthusiasts of dark fantasy muck and grime. But Darrah thinks that at this stage, you'd need to create a brand new team within BioWare to build up expertise with the old engines.

Image credit: Johnsen1972 / EA

“There is basically no one at BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora Engine,” Darrah told FRVR. “There’s basically no one outside of BioWare anymore that understands the Aurora engine. So unlike Mass Effect, which is Unreal… there are basically no companies that could help you.”

EA may not be in the mood to approve any Dragon Age games at all. They're in the middle of being acquired by a consortium led by Saudi Arabia's public investment wing. Leaving aside the Saudi Arabian regime's policy of brutalising women, queer people and migrants, which doesn't seem a great fit for the diversity politics of The Sims, this will saddle EA with a $20 billion debt, to be theoretically recouped by way of the magic bean technology that is generative AI. EA are on a cost-cutting drive right now. They've already made layoffs at BioWare following the release of the extremely troubled Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Reportedly, those who remain at BioWare are focussing on the next Mass Effect.

In general, I'm very interested in how companies try to retain expertise about their proprietary tools from generation to generation, in the face of team cuts and departures. Many studios learn the value of good documentation the hard way – just look at The Witcher and Cyberpunk developers CD Projekt.