BioWare Interview

CVG has a somewhat slobberingly fanboyish but expansive interview with writers Mike Laidlaw and Drew Karpyshyn about what makes BioWare successful.

Creating entertaining, involving dialogue for characters is a major element of making a role-playing game, with characters such as KOTOR’s killer robot HK-47 and his immortal line, “I am most eager to engage in some unadulterated violence.” However, when asked about writing speech for games, Karpyshyn is brutally honest in his assertion that “dialogue is so often one of the last things we do!

“There’s so much you have to do before starting on the dialogue, especially with a new game like Jade Empire, as you have to establish the world. So for Mass Effect we spent about nine months planning everything out before we started to lock down characters or the story. It’s trying to establish what’s your setting, what’s the tone, your art style, and your narrative style.”

Laidlaw adds that it’s important that writers also ensure they ask themselves what the game is actually about: “You have to think what are we trying to do? What are we trying to say? What is the point of this story? If you think about Mass Effect, a prime theme of the game is ‘Is it us versus them, or is it us with them?’, which could very easily be carried into an allegory for modern times. It helps us set a purpose for the story and the characters.”

BioWare create character bibles for most of the personalities in their games, and settle on three levels of importance – major, medium and minor. “Minor characters are typically the barkeep, where I’m not so worried about his family history, as in any interesting personality quirks he has – he’s short and round, maybe has asthma…” says Laidlaw.