After up to four games in the Mass Effect franchise and the return of it in the form of Mass Effec: Legendary Edition, surely there is more than one fan of the galactic saga who has been wanting more . And the truth is that we were about to receive a version that never came to light.
Mark Darrah , a former BioWare employee, revealed on MinnMax (with a Gamespot transcript) that a spin-off was planned to launch on Nintendo DS . That’s right, the Nintendo laptop would have allowed us to travel the galaxy like space pirates, regardless of law or order, with a game called Mass Effect: Corsair .
“You would have a ship, you would have independence, more like a Han Solo-like character, not a Specter (…) You would be flying, collecting cargo, exploring. You could explore and sell that information to the Human Alliance.”
Of course, for all this to make sense within the context of Mass Effect , we would be moved to a more remote area of the galaxy and that would resemble the Wild West. According to Darrah, the main inspiration for this work was Star Control , a 1990 RPG developed by Toys for Bob. The perspective would have been from the first person and the section of the fighting in spaceships would have a key weight.
“Pretty much all we had was the start of flight controls, we really didn’t have the rest of the game ready. We were still figuring out how it worked from an intellectual property perspective.”
As we well know, none of this ever got our hands on it, but Darrah believes that ” we could have made it work ” and that “if everyone is on board and excited it can make sense.” Unfortunately, the accounts did not add up at any time.
Darrah reveals that the most expensive cartridge would have needed to be produced for the Nintendo DS, which left little room for profit. On the other hand, EA conducted an internal valuation of the project and only predicted 50,000 copies sold , resulting in the cancellation.
