Dragon Age: The Veilguard launched on Xbox late last year after a decade-long series hiatus, but it didn't have to be that long of a wait, according to former BioWare veteran Mark Darrah. In a new interview with MrMattyPlays, the former BioWare dev claimed that ideas of a Dragon Age remaster of some sort were floating around at EA, but ultimately rejected.
In short, Darrah says that the team at one point pitched to "rebrand the first three games as if they were a trilogy", potentially dubbed "the Champions trilogy" containing remasters of Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Here's how they say that went down:
"One of the things that we pitched at one point, pretty softly so pitch is a massive overstatement, was to kind of retroactively rebrand the first three games as if they were a trilogy. We'd call it the Champions trilogy, so you have these big, larger-than-life heroes. You've got the Hero of Ferelden, you've got the Champion of Kirkwall, and then you've got the Inquisitor."
As Darrah hints at in the above quote there, this never made it to an official pitching stage or anything - it sounds like more of a rough idea / suggestion than anything more concrete. However, we clearly saw something similar get greenlit in the form of BioWare's Mass Effect Legendary Edition, so the publisher wasn't entirely against remastering some of BioWare's previous efforts.
However, Darrah also mentioned that "EA has historically been [...] kind of against remasters" and that "Dragon Age is harder than Mass Effect to do; to some degree", so that may be why the idea never made it beyond brainstorming stage. Oh well, at least the first two games are backwards compatible on Xbox - meaning we can play all four games in the series quite easily on modern consoles.