Dragon Age creator Mark Darrah reveals that EA never really understood the value of the Dragon Age franchise compared to Mass Effect, despite the series’ high sales figures.
Alongside revealing why Dragon Age is likely dead in the water and why a remaster trilogy likely isn’t happening anytime soon, Darrah explained in an interview on our FRVR Podcast that the fantasy series has always suffered from EA’s oversight.
In the interview, I asked Darrah if it ever felt like Dragon Age was “half-foot in the past, half-foot in the future” compared to Mass Effect. While Mass Effect was fully real-time, Dragon Age Origins made space for both real-time gameplay and classic tactical-pause CRPG gameplay in a way that some, such as investors, could construe as old-fashioned.
“I think you see it in the way that EA interacted with the two franchises,” Darrah said. “I think that if you are not a person who plays CRPGs, it’s very hard to look at a game like Dragon Age or a game like Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 and understand why anyone would want to play this nerdy piece of garbage. Whereas they look at something like Mass Effect and go, ‘okay, it’s a Star Wars game’. Like, I get it, even that might be too nerdy for me, but I get it.”
During the development of Dragon Age Origins, this meant very little. The series’ debut was already in deep development prior to EA’s acquisition of BioWare in early 2008, but afterwards it became harder to entice the fantasy series to EA executives.
“They have always seen Dragon Age as too niche, too backwards, too old-school,” Darrah said. “You can blame some of the things where Dragon Age has always seemed to be in this perpetual state of flux, a lot of that coming from pressure from EA because people don’t understand why people would want to buy this hardcore, tactical thing.”
Darrah explained that there were “internal pressures as well” regarding the creation of Dragon Age as a mix of real-time and classic CRPG gameplay. For example, to facilitate tactical pause, every environment has to serve a third-person camera angle and a top-down camera angle which is a much bigger task than a sole consumer might expect.
“It’s expensive,” he said. “A huge pain. The level artists hated doing it so they didn’t really want, they kinda wanted to move away from that, so there were maybe receptive ears to some of that pressure, certainly.”
Of course, with Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s proof that the classic, top-down CRPG formula can work in the modern era, especially with the romance-heavy gameplay that BioWare essentially created. “It’s hard to look at a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 and go, ‘right, we couldn’t kept doing this. We could’ve kept refining this formula.”
For now, Dragon Age is on ice, and it might be forever. Right now, BioWare is working on a brand-new Mass Effect game which currently has no release date.
