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What happens if you don't do that? Does the beginning, does it change at all? Obviously can import your saved game from the first game. If they're dead in your game, then they're dead. So there's no experience like Alien 5, like someone just gets magically resurrected or cloned or something like that? Why don't we bring them back?" So let's bring some of those guys back and then the only tricky ones were if it was a character that people loved and they could be dead. I think actually one of the things that we said was - for some of the big ones, you know the people are going to expect to see them back - but who are some of the smaller characters? We had people that were just in small quests and we realized, "Wow, the fans just latched onto that character. Were you tempted to, or did you have to, retcon some of the characters into the second game? But we still wrote it within that framework. We still don't know where going to go, and maybe it's shifting and changing a little bit based on where you want to be flexible too. You know, we said, "Here's where we want it to go." If you ask Casey Hudson, the producer, he knew where he wanted Mass Effect 3 to eventually end up. We said, "We know basically where we want to go with it." But we wrote Mass Effect 1 with that in mind. Like, I mean we had, essentially, with the first one we said, "Here's the art for the three games." Now obviously what's in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 wasn't really fleshed out. That's not really true with the way we handle that sort of thing.
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Well speaking of that, you know the second game and third game are being written together, whereas the first game was sort of written off by itself. We had people that were just in small quests and we realized, "Wow, the fans just latched onto that character. Three is even going to be more, you know, like we're looking back at two games at that point and saying, "Wow. Yeah, it's going to be more work and it's a trilogy. I think what you're saying is you're looking at Mass Effect 2 as part of a greater experience sort of thing. And to then just say, "Well we're going to ignore all that for Mass Effect 2," we wouldn't do that. Oh it's definitely not, I mean that's what, you know playing a game, you want to - even if it was just the first game - you want to feel like your choices matter within that game. And that second character is, for the cinematic designers who have to create the conversation you need, who are saying, "You mean I've got to have a scene with two possible different characters in it?" And then the VO people have to come in and they've got, "You mean I've got to VO this scene twice, in different ways?" So yeah.ĭid it ever feel like it was wasted effort having to write dialogue and scenarios for characters that some players may never see? That's where the hair-pulling-out comes out, because now I've got to, I've basically got to account for two characters in one situation. It's a new character who has his own back story, who has his own role in the game and whatnot. But they don't just come in and go, you know, "I'm Wrex alternate," or something like that. How do we account for that?" And the big thing was - let's take Wrex for example - we had to limit to some degree the roles that those characters are going to play because we have to say, "OK well they're coming back or they're not." And then we had to say, "Well what are their alternates?" So a lot of times there's characters that will fill their spot. You mean other than pulling out my hair and weeping at night, sort of, "Oh my god, how am I going to do this?" It takes a lot of planning, obviously, but essentially what we did is we looked at it and said, "Yeah we know that some of these guys are going to be dead. The big question we had is, "How do you write a story where all the characters from the first game, or a lot of them, could be dead when you start out the second game?" We sent around email to everyone saying, "What should we ask BioWare?" We discussed everything from the difficulties of penning a story for a game tons of choices to where BioWare currently stands on the portrayal of sweet, alien love-making.
#MAC WALTERS INTERVIEW MAC#
At PAX, we had a chance to catch up with Mac Walters, the lead writer for Mass Effect 2 at BioWare.