Former BioWare lead says new Mass Effect could be made for ‘well under 200 million’
The former lead dev says $200 million would be ‘more than enough’ for Mass Effect
A former lead designer at BioWare says that a new Mass Effect game could be made for “well under 200 million”.
This claim comes from Christina Norman, who was with BioWare from 2005 to 2011, working on the first three Mass Effect games. She made this comment in response to the news that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 cost $10 million to develop.
“This is a good example of why I think another Mass Effect game could be made for well under 200 million,” says Norman. “5x the budget of Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 should be more than enough.
“You can always spend more, but clever small teams can get it done.”
If true, this would make the new Mass Effect cheaper to develop than recent titles like Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and The Last of Us Part 2, and even older releases such as Halo 2 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), when adjusted for inflation.
It would, however, be the most expensive Mass Effect game ever made. Mass Effect: Andromeda has the highest budget of them all, costing a reported $100 million to develop. Since then, development costs for most triple-A games have ballooned much higher than this.
Norman’s comments come as fans mobilise to save the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, following EA‘s decision to shutter BioWare. The studio closure resulted in the cancellation of a fifth Mass Effect game, Mass Effect Universe, which had a trailer ready to go.
BioWare co-founder Trent Oster has since expressed his interest in trying to acquire BioWare’s IPs from EA, and has even suggested bringing the team back together to work on them. James Ohlen, who worked on the first two Baldur’s Gate games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age: Origins, has said he’d like to join him.
Assuming the duo could get their hands on the rights to Mass Effect again, getting the funding for a game would be another matter, as many developers are struggling to secure investors. With that said, a petition to save Mass Effect has 325,605 signatures at the time of writing, so the interest is clearly there.
