BioWare veteran Mark Darrah has revealed that the studio previously worked on a Mass Effect spin-off for the Nintendo DS – Mass Effect: Corsair.
Darrah talked about the cancelled project in a recent interview with MinnMax. According to him, Mass Effect: Corsair was in development at some point, with it being a first-person space-travelling game. Players would have had to fly their ship to the galaxy’s lawless, less-explored regions (likely the Terminus systems) to complete various assignments. Sounds a little bit Mandalorian-y, eh?
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Apparently, you wouldn't have been bounty hunting for pirates and criminals, though combat was on the table. “It was going to kinda be a combination of Privateer and Star Control,” Darrah said.
As envisioned by the team, the protagonist of Mass Effect: Corsair was not a Spectre, but rather a Han Solo independent type. Mark Darrah said there were many different objectives for the game, including cargo deliveries, exploring, gathering and selling intel to Alliance, and so on.
Darrah admitted that BioWare hadn’t spent a long time working on Mass Effect: Corsair and the only thing the studio had at the time was the “beginnings of the flight controls” for the ship.
The main reason for the potential Mass Effect spin-off being abandoned was due to the Nintendo DS and its expensive cartridges. As Darrah said, the economics of the platform were “just terrible.”
Considering the cartridges needed for Mass Effect: Corsair cost $10.50 each, and the sales projections were at around 50,000 copies, it just “didn’t make sense". Darrah says the Corsair team eventually made the third-person mobile game, Mass Effect: Infiltrator.
In more recent Mass Effect news, the BioWare team has announced that it will miss the upcoming EA Play Live showcase later in July, so don’t expect any new Mass Effect details there. The developers said they are hard at work creating the next installment for the iconic franchise, yet the game seems to be a way off with nothing to show for it just yet.
Source: IGN
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