Interview with Mac Walters – Bioware
Where does BioWare’s love of story-driven games come from?
The source goes back to the founders, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, who love story and wanted to create games in which story was important.
Over the years, BioWare’s games have delivered compelling stories. It’s something the studio is known for. Our games put the player’s emotional involvement with the characters first.
BioWare is one of the rare studios that has put a tremendous emphasis on storytelling, with major investments in people and tech to support this. How big is the writing department on Mass Effect 3?
There are 17 writers on staff and 5 editors. In addition to the writers, there is an entire cinematic design department that was born out of the development of Knights of the Old Republic, their role being to support all the conversations created by the writing department.
In fact, it goes far beyond support—the cinematic designers have their own skills and expertise that has allowed them to take the conversations much further than we as writers ever thought possible.
So, between writers, editors, and cinematic designers, there are nearly 35 people working purely to support storytelling in the game.
Are there specializations within the writing team?
On most of our earlier games, the writing teams were small enough that every writer had to wear multiple hats. The writing team on Mass Effect 3 is big enough that we have been able to let specializations occur naturally.
So, some people will focus on writing content that helps flesh out the world, like planet descriptions for uncharted worlds, and Codex entries, or things like the Cerberus Daily News in Mass Effect 2.
You also find that some writers are really strong at understanding the role-playing aspects of the game, and so they focus on those elements. Still others are really into the characters and understand emotional engagement and writing scenes that really draw the player in.
Where do you typically recruit writers? Is there such a thing as a typical place?
There really isn’t a typical place. Our writers come from diverse backgrounds, which is one of the team’s strengths.
Some writers come fresh out of school, others come from having written screenplays, others are from within the games industry, and still others who are involved as editors or with the theater scene.
These diverse backgrounds mean we come up with more diverse and interesting content.
In addition to writers, there are editors on the writing team. What do editors do, and how do they fit into your workflow?
Editors are responsible for managing a lot of the non-voice-over text that goes into the game—things like Codex entries, weapon and ability descriptions, etc.
Sometimes they are writing this content as well, but generally they are keeping track of it and organizing it.
They make sure all the text gets translated into the various languages and establish standard processes for getting text content into the game—a huge task when you consider how many people are creating content for the game.
And they do all the other things you would expect of an editor: They review the text, make sure it’s grammatically accurate, no spelling mistakes, etc.
And then we also have editors who are involved with the dialogue we create, and they are responsible for trimming and streamlining the dialogue to make sure that our dialogue delivery is punchy and as economical as possible, to avoid things getting too verbose for the player.
How many lines of dialogue do you have in the game?
Mass Effect 3 has about 41,000 lines of voice-over dialogue. Also, with better editing and just being better at using our dialogue, we’re able to make the 41,000 lines go even further than the lines in previous games.
Mass Effect 3 has the most dialogue of the three games in the franchise. We’ve added a lot more banter into the game, and much more ambient dialogue than the previous ME games. All this together makes for a very rich dialogue experience in ME3.
How is the writing team integrated into the rest of the development team?
Over the years, we’ve learned that close collaboration with the other departments is the best way for writers to work.
The writers are encouraged to spend time with all the other teams, share what they are working on, interact with them and solicit feedback, ask questions, etc.
The writers should not be sitting by themselves—they need to get out and talk to the level designers, the animators, cinematic designers, etc.
Writers should not wait for any of those groups to come to them; they need to be proactive in seeking and sharing information.
Has the writing team developed any specific processes along the way?
During Mass Effect 2, we began developing what we today call the Narrative Review process. It’s a process we’ve evolved heavily during Mass Effect 3’s development as well. This process starts before we even begin developing any levels in the game.
The project leads will establish a “hook” for a level. This might be a simple statement, what we call a “razor” for a level.The razor is usually a short evocative statement that captures the theme of a level.
So, for example, the razor for the opening levels in Mass Effect 3, where Earth is attacked and ravaged by the Reapers, was “Rome is burning.” This succinct statement captured the tone and sense of chaos we wanted to explore in that section of the game.
Once we have the razor, we start working with the level designers, gameplay designers, cinematic designers, and then start to flesh out what this razor means. How will it be supported by gameplay and action and story moments, etc.
Coming out of these conversations, we develop a Player Experience document, which is a short document—about one page—that describes the core experience of that level.
Once that Player Experience document is approved, we create an Execution document, which literally walks through each step of the player’s experience.
The Execution document includes feedback from all the content creators who will be working on that piece of the game, so they can collectively determine what work needs to be done to deliver the level.
Once the Execution document is approved, we are basically given the green light to create the content, at which point we collaborate as a big multidisciplinary group to create the level.
By this point, so much iteration has occurred that we might look back and see a lot of the original ideas from writing are gone, have been improved upon, that things have been streamlined, or that new ideas have been added to the mix.
During the development of the content, the writers will work closely with the level designers and cinematic designers, supporting them with content, providing tweaks, updating them on new direction or edits that need to be made, and generally making sure that everyone is aware of any changes to the narrative that inevitably happen over the course of development.
In terms of writing, one of the strongest elements of story in the Mass Effect games is the characters themselves. How were they conceived and developed?
The emphasis on characters in our stories is highly intentional. We feel like the best stories are the ones with the strongest characters, and that’s what we as players relate to, more so than even the epic storylines and themes themselves.
The process of character creation depends on each character, and what role they play in the story. For example, in Mass Effect 2, we knew the Illusive Man was going to be a key character; he’d be the player’s mysterious contact and guide throughout the game.
We spent a lot of time defining his psychology and how he would react to various situations. And then we worked out things like how influential he was, what resources he’d have access to, who did he have working for him, and most importantly, what his motivations were.
Once we have some of this background material fleshed out, we work with the concept art team to figure out what these characters look like. The concept art becomes the razor for that character, quickly informing players as to what that particular character is all about.
Sometimes the character-creation process is much more incidental, such as with Thane in Mass Effect 2. We knew we wanted to create an assassin character but didn’t have many specifics in mind beyond that.
As we developed his character, we ended up creating a whole new species for him, detailing specific characteristics such as how his species recalls events, their relationships with other races, etc.
Thane wasn’t critical to the bigger story, but in exploring him as a character we discovered new opportunities to expand the Mass Effect universe.
How does the writing team track the various story threads in a Mass Effect game? What tools do you use?
We start with a five- to seven-page document that outlines the high-level story of the game. This becomes the source of the emotional backbone of the game and hits on all the key beats in the story.
It’s worth noting, however, that this document doesn’t try to define any of the missions or levels in the game; it is simply an outline of the story we want to tell with the game.
This document goes through a lot of revisions—for example, the last version for Mass Effect 3 was revision eight or nine.
Then, when we go through the process of defining the individual levels—with the gameplay designers, level designers, cinematic designers, etc.—each of those levels gets its own document as well.
A new process we implemented for Mass Effect 3—and one that was very successful for us—was that we created a flowchart outline of the story, showing all the various “modules” of the story and how they related to each other based on the possible player choices.
Each mission would be represented on this flowchart, including the key narrative beats of that mission. It became so big that we had to put it on one of the walls near where the writers work.
The flowchart was so useful that people on the team would wander over to have a look at whatever new thing had been added or updated, and that would encourage informal discussions to occur, which would lead to other new ideas being formed.
This visualization of the story meant that anyone could simply walk up to the wall and immediately get a clear sense of what was going on with the story.
How does the writing team keep track of the possible story outcomes across all three Mass Effect games?
We have a tool called Story Manager that helps us keep track of all these conditions, using flags, that allows us to check on any state. For example, at the end of Mass Effect 1, we track the outcome of the Council: Did they survive, or were they sacrificed?
The tool allows us to track a large number of states across may variables, including dialogue options, whether or not players completed certain missions, which love interest characters they chose to romance, etc.
These various player choices become a state that is tracked by the game so that it “remembers” these choices in future games.
We track thousands of conditional states, and this gives us the ability to know the most important story conditions up to that point. This also gives us a window into what characters and choices resonated most strongly with players.
The challenge in Mass Effect 3 was creating a story that supports all the possibilities from the previous two games while delivering a really compelling experience for players regardless of their previous choices, including major events like the deaths of certain key characters.
The key is that the game offers a great story, but that this is improved again for you as a player when it reflects the choices you’ve made. That’s the heart and the magic of Mass Effect’s story.