New Tech Stretches Game Writing Tasks

The Hollywood Reporter has published an article entitled “New Tech Stretches Game Writing Tasks”, in which they provide commentary from various developers about how advancements in technology require better writing in video games. One example given to illustrate this point is BioWare’s Mass Effect:

At Edmonton, Canada-based developer BioWare Corp., it is this kind of technology that is putting pressure on game writers to raise the bar on what they do.

“When we did ‘Neverwinter Nights’ just four years ago, many of the characters were seen from a distance and you really didn’t get to see their faces,” recounts Mac Walters, a writer at BioWare. “When the character got angry, it was important for him to say, ‘I’m angry,’ because you couldn’t see it on his face. Today, with better graphics technology, a character in a game like ‘Mass Effect’ walks right up to you and you can see by his stance, by the way his eyes shift, that he’s feeling complex emotions. There’s no longer a need for exposition like ‘I’m angry.’ Instead, we have opportunities to move the dialogue along — really sort of quickly and succinctly — just as you’d hear in a TV show. It involves new writing skills, which is why we’re continually researching and looking at new ways to work with these digital actors.”

In “Mass Effect,” a next-generation role-playing game for the Xbox 360 scheduled for release in the first half of 2007, Walters and lead writer Mike Laidlaw recall that creating the characters became a team effort. [The first installment of a planned trilogy, the game takes place in the year 2183 and revolves around an ancient prophecy that says that every 50,000 years machines come to this galaxy to harvest all organic life — and the time of their return is approaching.]