The Idle Thumbs crew brings their PAX coverage to a close with a concise interview with BioWare’s Mac Walters. After being a lowly member of the original Mass Effect writing team, Mac decided to climb the company ladder by murdering Mass Effect’s lead writer Drew Karpyshyn, so he naturally has a unique view from seeing both the formative and evolving stages of the Mass Effect trilogy. Bioware is well known for their proficiency in telling stories and Mass Effect is no exception to the rule. The series’s development of voice-over is truly progressive, including the surprising usage of table reads (which isn’t foreign to video games’ second cousin, cinema).
Mac also talks about how some of the story elements are written, especially with respect to the more mundane sidequests that plague the role-playing game genre. It’s made very clear that the writers are cognizant of the delicate balance on the spectrum between “collect 10 space bear pelts” and “consume a science fiction novel in a peripheral plot nonessential mission.” The surprisingly on-topic discussion ends with the explanation of how the renegade and paragon points exist on different scales and how that influences the arc of certain quests. It’s nice to see that such a degree of care is taken into a system that deviates from the cliche theme of “good versus evil” that far too many games in the same genre assume.
Idle Thumbs brings its PAX 2009 coverage to a close with a quick talk with Mass Effect 2′s lead writer, Mac Walters. In Space.
Runtime – 19:29
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Haha, I appreciate that you painstakingly cited references for “collect my pie ingredients” RPG quests.