I encourage people to try them both and see what they like. Some of the romance lines are only available if you play as fem Shepard or male Shepard. MW: I think the key with all of what we do is that there’s preference. HG: Gus Mastrapa said that if you’re not playing the female commander in ME2, you’re not getting the full experience. We can actually react to what fans like and do something else with them. That’s one of the beauties of doing a trilogy. A lot of times it’s the hard to find characters who have something fun or unique for you. They loved the fact that he would follow you around in a kind of humorous way. HG: And that good writing trickles down to even the more minor characters. We’re willing to let our babies go if we need to. I often tell my writers, the thing that makes our writing as good as it is is not that any of you are Hemingways, it’s that we iterate, iterate, iterate. So it can be two to eight weeks before you actually start writing. Once that’s all done, then they actually start writing the dialog. That’s when it becomes a really collaborative process when we say, step by step in a very detailed way, this is what happens in this mission. After that’s approved, we meet with cinematic designers to see what they could help us with. But it says, this is what happens in my mission. Then it goes on to a player experience document, which is only about half a page. MW: We have a sort of narrative review process where most levels will start out just as a pitch, like a one-line raiser, maybe a short summary of who’s involved and what’s going on. HG: Can you take me through the whole writing process? So I’ll say, here’s the story and please fill in the blanks. But they’re very free within that realm of that sort of box we want to put in there.

We ask, are they 20 minute missions, 40 minute missions? Then, my writing guys provide the right content. You try to figure out what scope a mission should have and sit down with the lead designer and producer to find out how many missions we want in a game. Or you’re just going to anger a lot of people. And if you write too much, it’s going to get cut. So that’s the kind of accountability that we as writers have. They have to give it voice, stage actors and build the models for it. But there’s a whole bunch of characters downstream from me who have to do something with those lines. Because it’s interactive media, I like to say, I can write a couple of lines of dialog fairly quickly. HG: You’re writing up to 30,000 lines of script per game. Today, Mass Effect’s Mac Walters continues to speak about the craft of writing, giving you a look at the complete writing process for the series which takes place at BioWare’s lair in Vancouver

Mac walters interview