The Mass Effect Legendary Legendary Edition is right up there with Valve’s The Orange Box as one of the best deals in gaming, and if BioWare were to ever give its Dragon Age RPG series the same treatment, it would join them. There have been some calls for such a remastered collection of Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, and Dragon Age Inquisition to become a reality as The Veilguard comes to market, but it’s never materialised.
That’s not because BioWare doesn’t want to do it, but because the different engines the three games were created using present a significant issue when trying to bundle them under one roof. As revealed in a new Rolling Stone interview, The Veilguard’s creative director John Epler “would love” to see a remastered Dragon Age collection for the modern era, but giving the three entries that treatment “would be challenging as they were originally designed using EA’s proprietary game engines”.
Dragon Age: Origins and its Awakening expansion were made using the Eclipse Engine, and then Dragon Age 2 used an updated version of it called Lycium Engine. For Dragon Age Inquisition, BioWare switched to Frostbite. Compared to the original Mass Effect trilogy, which were all developed using the Unreal Engine, bringing the first three Dragon Age RPGs together into a single application and having them work together represents a far tougher task.
Of course, Dragon Age: Inquisition is easily accessible thanks to its PS4 version, but Origins and the second game are stuck on PS3 for PlayStation players. Neither of them is on PS Plus Premium for streaming purposes as well, to make accessing them that bit more difficult.