Guiding Shepard in Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 lead writer Mac Walters talks storytelling.
9/16/2009 2:08 PM | 7 Comments | Page 1 of 2

BioWare has long been known for its attention to narrative. It's one of the few game makers that regularly pushes its writers into the spotlight to talk about the art of crafting great role-play. And we love talking to them about it. At PAX this year, Mass Effect 2 lead writer Mac Walters met with Crispy Gamer to discuss about the ups and downs of shaping the narrative for BioWare's science-fiction trilogy.

Crispy Gamer: Tell me about your duties as chief writer on Mass Effect 2.

Mac Walters: My main task as lead writer is to ensure consistency. We work with a team of five. Everyone's got their own way of doing things, which is great -- we love that, but you also have to be sure that everything still maintains Mass Effect tone and flavor. The big thing, of course, is Shepard. Everybody's writing Shepard because he's in every conversation, so we have to make sure that Shepard always sounds like Shepard should.

Crispy Gamer: And the type of Commander Shepard the player is playing.

Walters: Exactly. We want Shepard to have choices, but he has to have believable choices. So we had to define parameters for him. He always does the right thing. Sometimes he does the right thing the wrong way, and that's our Renegade. Sometimes he does the right thing the right way. In the end he's always going to do what we consider the best thing for humanity. But we had to define parameters so he wasn't Gandhi on one side and Hitler on the other, because that's not a believable character. His range of choices is defined and set.

Crispy Gamer: Commander Shepard and the other Spectres in Mass Effect are a lot like the Greywardens in Dragon Age. They're people tasked with a job. They're allowed to be above the law. What's the appeal of that kind of character?

Walters: It sets you aside. You can make the choices you want, and deal with the situation however you want. There aren't restrictions on you. But there are consequences. It puts you in a position of power and lets you make these vast, sweeping decisions; but at the same time we reinforce that there might be consequences. I think that's what everybody wants. They want to be the great warrior. They want to be the Jedi. They want to be the Spectre. They want to be the person who is free to do things their own way and choose how to do it. But I think the thing that people really thrive on, with our games anyway, is that there really are consequences. We don't just let you do anything.

Crispy Gamer: Mass Effect took a really interesting approach to conversations. Players made choices in real time, but they didn't always know exactly what their character was going to say. Sometimes the words that came out of Shepard's mouth were surprising.

Walters: We call it a "paraphrase." But we have to make sure that he says something that might surprise you, but deep down doesn't shock you. "I didn't mean to call him an asshole! That's not what I wanted!"

Crispy Gamer: Even so, it really livens up the storytelling process.

Walters: In our past games, like Jade Empire for example, you see all these responses exactly as they're going to be read. And you have to read them all unless you're being really quick. So you know what it's all going to be. In Mass Effect I took Paragon last time. I don't know what the Renegade response is going to be. It's kind of nice that it does offer a kind of surprise on a second playthrough.

Crispy Gamer: By the time I play Mass Effect 2, I'll probably have three saves. Will I see a profound difference across the different games as I dive into Mass Effect 2?

Walters: You'll probably see things very early on. And they'll be referenced continually throughout. It's something we're very careful of -- to make sure it wasn't all front-loaded. A great example I use is Rex. What happened to Rex? Is he alive? Is he dead? What happened to Ashley and Kaidan? Are they alive? Are they going to come back? Will you see them? They're not going to be there at the beginning of the game, standing there and waving at you.

Crispy Gamer: How much of these plot threads and narrative hooks between games did you have worked out in advance?

Walters: When we were working on Mass Effect we had an arc for the entire trilogy. Casey was very specific where he wanted it to go. We always knew that the decisions you made in Mass Effect would affect Mass Effect 2. We knew that from the get-go. But we also had fans and critics, even, who decide, to some degree, what we come back to. Every once in while there's a character where you say, "Wow, I never would have guessed that that character is going to be so popular. Now what do we do?" In some cases it doesn't matter. We can just bring him back. But in other cases it's "Oh crap, we let you kill him. What do we do now?" And then it's a decision -- do we account for whether they're alive or dead?

Walters: From a technical standpoint is it even possible to keep track if they've lived or died?

Walters: Actually, we have a system called Story Manager that stores every decision and every choice you make in a binary state. We track all of that. If we tracked it all and brought it all back we'd just be making Mass Effect Plus -- there'd be no room for Mass Effect 2 story.

Crispy Gamer: A lot of your more idiosyncratic characters are alien characters. The Hanar (those detached vendors that resembled tall jellyfish) and Elcor (the hunched, stocky creatures that speak in monotone) seem particularly difficult to write.

Walters: One of the things we had to do early on in Mass Effect was planning how do the Hanar speak, how do the Elcor speak. There was definitely a phase where everyone had their own take. And we had to go back to define it. Iteration is one of the big things that we do when we're writing. And we do peer review, so all the writers are looking at each others' work. That is where we get a lot of the bugs out of the system. On Mass Effect 2 it was a little bit easier because all this stuff is established. It's easier for us to actually point to an example -- finished in-game -- and say, that's our typical Hanar. That's what you want to aim for.