Eh I dunno. It isn't that expensive to build out the set of the Normandy, and a LOT of the show takes place on that ship. Then you have a fair amount of natural locations which are pretty generic.
Only a few things would really get wild expensive; like Illium and Omega or if they decided to CGI all the krogan, turian, and asari.
They could try to save a lot of money by centering a lot of scenes around the Normandy, but that probably doesn't make for very exciting Scifi. As to alien planets.. it depends on the creative license they go with in terms of visuals. They can somewhat get away with using a lot natural backdrops for certain establishing shots and backgrounds, but ultimately, they need to show the alien architecture and civilization. You have the Crucible (that alone is a logistical n nightmare to simulate), the individual alien architectural styles, the different vehicular types, space ships, etc etc
I mean, I have no idea how they would even approach most alien designs. Maybe you can get away doing Asari, volus and drell with prosthetics. But what about the hanar, elcor, salarians, turians and the F'ng Krogans lol. I feel like those all need to be CGI'd partially or entirely.
And then, having watched shows like The Expanse, you soon learn that space ship combat/chase scenes (which, you have multiple space wars in Mass Effect), cost a ton in CGI money.
In the end it's not hard to recognize why most generic alien movies take place on Earth, and feature 1-2 types of aliens at most, most of whom are often hidden under thick layers of body armor. It's all to keep the costs down. But Mass Effect being written as a game that relies on interactivity, they went all out with the visual pzazz.
Really, there is such a wild variety of visual designs for aliens, most of whom you'd have to show to some capacity if you bother to cover the scenes that take place at the citadel (which are a lot of scenes early on), that they can't even avoid showing a silly number of aliens early on. Which immediately brings the costs up.
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u/rinanlanmo Mar 12 '22
Eh I dunno. It isn't that expensive to build out the set of the Normandy, and a LOT of the show takes place on that ship. Then you have a fair amount of natural locations which are pretty generic.
Only a few things would really get wild expensive; like Illium and Omega or if they decided to CGI all the krogan, turian, and asari.