Mark Darrah, a reputed former member of BioWare for over twenty years, has revealed in an interview with MinnMax that the team got to work on a video game in the Mass Effect series for Nintendo DS, Mass Effect: Corsair. This project, which never came to fruition, was seen as an adventure to explore the galaxy as a space pirate.
“You were going to have a ship, you would be independent, more like a Han Solo-style character, not a Specter,” says Darrah in his meeting with journalist Ben Hanson. “You’d be flying around, picking up cargo, exploring. Could you explore and sell that information to the Human Alliance”, He expands. His creative approach more closely resembled the Outer Rim in the Star Wars universe, with plenty of room for discovery, with less advanced territories.
“Almost all we had done was the beginning of the flight controls, we didn’t really have the rest of the game ready,” he continues. “We were still figuring out how it worked from a saga perspective. It didn’t exactly match the IP, because the way that FTL works in Mass Effect is a little different, “he argues, and thinks about how they could have materialized. “I think we could have made it work, and the reality is that you can usually mold an IP; if everyone is on board and excited, you can make sense of it. “
Not in vain, the reason that led to the cancellation of Mass Effect: Corsair for Nintendo DS obeys Economic issues. As he explains, the game would have required a more expensive cartridge than normal (with more memory); And to this we must add that the title should have a retail price of around $ 30, the standard price of Nintendo portable console titles at the time. Profit margins would have been very low.
Electronic Arts held a sales projection of around 50,000 copies. The project, with this premise, ended up in the trunk of memories.
Casey Hudson and Mark Darrah left BioWare in December 2020
Darrah embarked on a new career endeavor last December. It was Electronic Arts itself that confirmed in a statement that Casey Hudson and Mark Darrah, head of BioWare and executive producer of the Dragon Age series, respectively, were leaving the studio after more than 20 years of history in the company. Hudson, for his part, confirmed on June 29 that he was opening his new video game studio, Humanoid Studios. It is unknown what is the next episode in the professional career of the current protagonist.
Sources | MinnMax; via Gamespot
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