Mass Effect: Drew Karpyshyn

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Historically, gamers aren’t used to having much control over an in-game plot. For most, the back-story in a video game represent passive entertainment at best; something to be observed, enjoyed, but never influenced. But as the quality of writing behind the latest console blockbusters grow ever-closer to those of a best-selling novel, it was only a matter of time before a developer tried something a little more ambitious than the now-traditional ‘fight your way to the next cut-scene’ formula. With their epic space-faring RPG MASS EFFECT on release from this month, it would appear that that developer is Bioware — however, whilst it’s undeniable that the Canadian developers have been the driving force behind the evolution of consequential gaming in recent years — evidenced by titles like KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC and JADE EMPIRE — they can hardly lay claim to inventing it themselves.

Ask any gamer of a certain age, and they’ll almost certainly remember the name CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE. Although not the first solo adventure games on the market — that milestone fell to TUNNELS AND TROLLS, a popular DUNGEONS & DRAGONS competitor first published in 1975 — these books, originally released in 1979, were perhaps the first solid step into popularising single-player roleplay. The game system was simple; each page carried a different section of the story, but they were not necessarily printed in sequence. In order to progress through the story the reader would be prompted to make decisions, each of which would send him to a different page and, ultimately, set him on the path to one of several different endings. The series was certainly a massive hit with children, prompting Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson — founders of roleplay giants Games Workshop — to see the potential in the format and launch their rival series, FIGHTING FANTASY, in 1980. Expanding upon the original premise, the duo split their stories into hundreds of numbered paragraphs, allowing for a much more varied story and therefore dozens more paths through the game; each book offered different climaxes depending on how well you did, with paragraph 400 traditionally housing the coveted “optimal ending”. FIGHTING FANTASY also used a pared-down die system to resolve combat situations, later growing this out with the addition of simplified player stats and rolls for different skills, thus bringing the games far closer to traditional roleplaying than its predecessor had managed.

Of course, with the growing popularity of home computers throughout the early eighties, it wasn’t long before solo roleplaying made the leap to the small screen. 1975 had already seen the birth of ‘interactive fiction’ with ADVENTURE, a simple but atmospheric text-based adventure game written by American university student Will Crowther using a computer lab mainframe. Proving highly popular, the game was later expanded (with Crowther’s permission) by fellow student Don Woods into a fantasy game called COLOSSAL CAVES, and from there, the format spread; after the commercial success of ZORK in 1979, the following years would see all manner of text adventures unleashed on the public, with pen-and-paper franchises like FIGHTING FANTASY, TUNNEL AND TROLLS and even DUNGEONS & DRAGONS all eventually chancing their +10 STR-armoured arm at the medium. Many of these titles sported features that gamers now take for granted – an inventory, a battle system, the ability to save your progress and so on – but very few ever asked the player to take responsibility for their actions, beyond the occasional instant death for making the wrong choice*. Arguably it would be 1983 before players were asked to emotionally connect with the proceedings, with the release of Infocom’s PLANETFALL. Not only did the title offer several different endings based on decisions and accomplishments made throughout the game, but it also forced the player to eat and sleep at regular intervals (failure to do so would result in swift death as the protagonist succumbed to a deadly virus) and provided them with an NPC companion, whose interaction was required in order to complete the game. Taking the form of a cute, child-like robot named Floyd, the character was essential for significant progression, and even gave his life to help the player towards the game’s climax. Pre-dating Aerith’s sacrifice in FINAL FANTASY VII by fourteen years, and despite lacking the inspired musical score which made that game such an emotional touchstone, many gamers nonetheless admit to shedding a few tears over Floyd’s touching death scene – unthinkable for a video game at that point in time.

Following PLANETFALL, many games developers sought to increase their audience’s immersion by directly engaging their emotion; THE LEGEND OF ZELDA and Squaresoft’s FINAL FANTASY series notably used a combination of music and imaginative characters to pluck at the heartstrings. The mid-nineties, however, saw a resurgence of titles using rudimentary consequential gameplay — though poorly-received, “interactive movies” like NIGHT TRAP and RIPPER used branching video footage to play different outcomes depending on choices made, whilst Westwood’s sadly-overlooked BLADE RUNNER (in many ways a direct ancestor of KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC) prioritised writing over flashy gameplay to provoke an emotional response with each and every character. How the player reacted to those characters dictated their actions throughout the game, and those actions led to one of several vastly different conclusions to the story. As the decade progressed, several RPGs picked up the immersion baton and attempted to evolve it further; both Black Isle’s FALLOUT and Bioware’s BALDUR’S GATE franchises presented decisions at critical points and provided party characters who would only join characters of a certain alignment and history, thus training gamers to make their choices carefully, whilst Ion Storm’s much-lauded FPS/RPG hybrid DEUS EX sported NPCs who reacted to you very differently depending on your actions. Sadly, however, whilst these features meant that each player had a subtly different gaming experience in both cases the story was always steered towards pre-determined plot-points, locations and end-game, robbing any tough decisions of their impact and effectively erasing the player’s responsibility for their choices.

The next milestone came in 2003, with the release of Bioware’s seminal STAR WARS RPG KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC. Despite being heavily based on the STAR WARS pen-and-paper roleplay from Wizards of the Coast, KNIGHTS was able to draw in players outside of the usual RPG crowd by burying the die-rolling and stat-pumping under a thoughtful, involving script, a superlative vocal cast and dialogue choices which influenced not only the outcome of the conversation, but also that of the game itself. Again, however, despite this illusion of choice, the story’s climax only had one of three possible outcomes; a “light side” ending in which the Republic wins, but at the cost of one character’s life, an optimal “light side” ending in which that character survives, and a “dark side” ending, in which the Sith (led by the player character) win. Nevertheless, the game’s unprecedented levels of player involvement led it to be hailed as nothing short of a masterpiece, making it a firm fixture in readers polls and favourites lists even now, four years after its release. It is upon this success — both commercially, and as an interactive gaming experience — that Bioware wishes to build with MASS EFFECT, using a detailed character creation system, an impressive branching dialogue structure and a detailed selection of actions and consequences to create possibly the most unique and personal gaming experience yet published. With this mind, we caught up with its lead writer, Drew Karpyshyn (“It rhymes with ‘suspicion’!”) for a little chat.

SFL: Whilst project directors, character designers and composers are often in the spotlight, we very rarely hear from the writers. Tell us a little about yourself, and how you came to be scripting video games for a living.

DK: Sure. I started at Bioware back in 2000; I was actually working on my English degree at the University of Alberta here in Edmonton, where Bioware is located. I saw a tiny little ad in the English department newsletter, saying ‘writers wanted for fantasy video game’, so I looked into it. Bioware had already published BALDUR’S GATE, which is set in a (DUNGEONS & DRAGONS) Forgotten Realms setting, and I had already written a Forgotten Realms novel, so it seemed a natural fit. That was kind of my ‘foot in the door’.

SFL: You seem to have a distinct talent for writing science fiction and fantasy. Give us your SF credentials — what did you grow up with? What are your favourites as an adult?

DK: Growing up, of course, I was largely influenced by STAR WARS. I think most people of my generation were — I’m thirty-six, so STAR WARS came out in my school years, and that was naturally a huge influence on me. I was also into THE LORD OF THE RINGS, the book — like a lot of people I read that quite young — and then, through the 80’s, there were a lot of movies, like ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER, THE TERMINATOR. These were good, intelligent science fiction movies and they kind of laid the foundation for the genre beyond, uh… you know, I read a lot of science fiction novels, all of the classics — Asimov and what have you — and it was nice to see that intelligent science fiction could be brought out of books and into other mediums, which is obviously what we’re tried to do at Bioware with MASS EFFECT.

SFL: MASS EFFECT is the latest in a long line of Bioware RPGs that you’ve scripted, and certainly the most revolutionary to date. How did the production experience differ from your previous work?

DK: It’s almost as if we’ve seen this steady evolution. With BALDUR’S GATE we had some voice-over, but it was mainly text; with KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC, the first game I was lead writer on, we did full voice-overs for everyone but the main player character. With MASS EFFECT we took the next big step, which was full voice-over for everyone including the main character, which really changed the way the story is presented.

In all of the previous games the characters tended to be talking AT you, as the player; it was a very one-sided conversation. You would choose your responses but there wasn’t any voice-over, [so] it didn’t really feel like a dialogue that you were involved with. With MASS EFFECT we’ve managed to take our delivery of the story and change it into a true conversation; you now talk *with* characters and it’s much more interactive, something you *engage* in, and I think that’s what makes MASS EFFECT what it is.

Of course, this exponential increase of work that’s being done on our [the writers’] side means that we have to come up with voice recording, voice acting for an entire script, and you have to layer on top of that the digital acting… it’s more cinematic, and more immersive for the player. You can’t just have two-dimensional frames standing on a scene, that wouldn’t really draw you in. With MASS EFFECT we’ve kind of taken it to the next level, where the actors feel real, they can convey emotion, and you can get of sense of what they’re saying beyond their words and bring subtext into the equation; so it’s a revolutionary step forward from a writing perspective, something I’ve very excited about and something I’m looking forward to continuing.

SFL: Is it harder to tell a story through the medium of a video game than it is using more traditional formats?

DK: I think it’s a very different process, because the player is the one in control. Especially with Bioware games, because you get to play a lot of options, a lot of choice, and we kind of let them guide the experience, direct the experience. You’re giving the player a kind of agency, which is going to make for a lot of branching dialogue, so you’ve going to have a lot more content because you’re not sure what direction they’re going to go, when they’re going to meet somebody, whether they’re, you know, going to befriend them or be hostile to them, whether they’re going to kill them or try to help them.

There’s a huge amount of content that needs to be created, much more so than an equivalent movie or book, but there’s also the idea that we try to give you an experience that you want, so we’re also giving up some of our own personal control, yet you still have to keep enough control that you can provide the player with a meaningful experience; if we just let it degenerate into random choices that’s not going to be very fulfilling for anybody. I think it’s a very unique challenge in this industry, one that you don’t find in other mediums, whether they be movies or books, TV or whatever.

SFL: The game makes use of a radical new branching dialogue system and numerous decision points to make the playing experience as personal for each player as possible. Was it difficult to find all those shades of grey?

DK: Well, it *is* something that we’ve tried to incorporate on some level in past Bioware games; it think it’s more a matter of refining the process, and we did sort of push the limits in this game. What I find is that whilst [in-game] you can make a choice that may not have an effect on the what happens in the end [of the story], we have put a lot of time and effort into colouring the overall experience. Keeping aware of it… it was something that we always had to keep in the back of our minds as writers, and then as we did each draft of the game we would iterate on it, constantly write and rewrite to try and make sure that the creative teams did the best that we could.

SFL: Finding a unique voice for each of those dozens of characters must have been a nightmare! Was it hard keeping everyone unique?

DK: Yeah, that’s actually a huge concern, and one of the things that Bioware is becoming notorious for in the industry is the sheer amount of characters that we have, and the huge amount of different voice actors that we need. We started voice recording sessions well over a year before we were ready to test, and they were pretty much constantly ongoing… we had literally hundreds and hundreds of voice sessions with, you know, over a hundred actors when all is said and done. With these actors you’re saying that you need everyone to sort of be unique, you need the leads to put their own sort of unique voice on those characters, but whoever’s… you know, with MASS EFFECT, where you have full digital actors, you need a voice that’s not only unique but also that fits with that digital character, fits with the action going on, so it put a lot more pressure on our voice directors, on our voice actors, and on us as writers to try and come up with dialogue that allows us to infuse a character with this kind of originality but still get across the important story points that we want to make.

SFL: Do you have any input into the casting at all, or is that handled entirely by a different department?

DK: As lead writer I do have a lot of input into the casting. We do have a audio production department that’s very involved, but for the main character I often sit in on some of the sessions… with the sessions we’ll have Casey Hudson, the producer of the game, with us, he’ll do a lot of the auditions. Obviously you can’t do that for every character — you have hundreds and hundreds — but all of the party members, all the main protagonists, all the main villains, we were closely involved in working with the audio department to find somebody that fit not only the character but, again, the visual appearance and who got across what we wanted, so it does actually involve almost as much of my time as the actual writing.

The writing has to finish much earlier in the project, we have to get the writing finished before we begin the voice recording otherwise the actors wouldn’t have any lines to read… the writing is sort of bogged down in that, so much of my time is focused on helping out the directors and the voice talent to make sure they understand what we’re going for, so they can give us the best performance possible.

SFL: In the main article we’re looking at MASS EFFECT as the first video game to truly capture the mechanics — and the personalised enjoyment — of the classic CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books. Did you read these as a kid?

DK: Oh yeah, I read a ton of those books as a kid, played quite a few of them… uh, well, read, *played*, I guess…!

SFL: It is a difficult thing to pin down! Did your experience of those books help in the development of your story for MASS EFFECT?

DK: I think it did on some level, I mean… you want to make the choices that you think are right for your particular character, so those books kind of give you an idea of how a story can branch… and for the ones that were well written, they do a good job of giving you choices that seemed like they flowed logically from the action. That’s the key element. We don’t want to just give you random choices, we want to give you choices that seem to make sense, that, uh, whether you’re playing a renegade character, a paragon character… you still have choices that mean you get the experience you want to get. So I think there is some benefit to those books, in getting the overall concept of branching dialogue and agency of the player, but of course those books are a much smaller scope than MASS EFFECT. You know, you might have a two hundred, three hundred page book and you might make fifty or sixty personal choices? In MASS EFFECT you’re constantly making small choices and large choices that effect how conversations are going, how the higher game is going to play out, so we’ve sort of broadened that scope, much more than the books offered.

SFL: It might interest you to know that in Britain, about fifteen years ago, there was a children’s TV show called KNIGHTMARE, which sits in between those books and how we’ve progressed with games like MASS EFFECT. It was all done with chroma key in a television studio, but effectively one child would explore a fantasy roleplay scenario whilst being guided by three others. It was all a little camp and tongue-in-cheek, but immersive with it and great fun.

DK: Yeah, and I think a lot of that too is that you see a progressive evolution as the technology starts to evolve as well. Like you say, it may have been a little camp, and all done with blue screen, but it *was* a way of getting immersion across. Now, as games are getting better with things like digital acting, better voice talent and more powerful games systems, we’re able to get more of an immersive feel without having to have a television studio with actors and something… something that you obviously couldn’t do in the comfort of your own home. It’s kind of interesting to see the way technology is helping to drive this quest to become fully immersed in the narrative experience, which, to me, shows that all of this — these books, the TV show you mentioned — all of it has the same goal.

SFL: With this in mind, how do you think video game scripting has changed in the years that you’ve been writing? Is it fair to say that gamers expect more today than they did a decade ago?

DK: I think they do. One of the biggest changes, with Bioware games in particular, is the realism of the graphics, the detail of the graphics, but tied in with that is also a maturing of the audience, You know, I look back at some of the BALDUR’S GATE games, and they were great games, but the dialogue may be a little heavy-handed sometimes, and it’s not as subtle, not as what I would call mature. With the dialogue, we’re staring to see an evolution from what we had, which was text on the screen — written in a ‘book’ style, or a novel-writing style –to more of a cinematic ‘screen’ style — like television or a movie — where the dialogue is a little crisper, much quicker, more back and forth… and, again, more can be conveyed with less words. You don’t need to spell everything out; when someone’s reading, there’s a good chance they’ll miss sarcasm, or some of the undertones of the subtext. With something like MASS EFFCET, the evolutions that we’ve got with digital acting means that voice acting can carry inflections… it means we can get a lot more subtlety, a lot more depth into the the dialogue, and tell more of the story with less actual words.

SFL: When do you think video game plots became as important as the gameplay?

DK: I think its difficult to pin it down *exactly*. I like to see… you know, I kind of look at the BALDUR’S GATE games and some of the earlier roleplaying games that came out before we had [1997 Black Isle Studios/Interplay RPG] FALLOUT… those games really put an emphasis on *story*, but I don’t know that that spread through the whole genre right away. I think it’s been more of a slow evolution. Games are finding that you can… you know, you still need to offer up great gameplay and a fun experience, but if you add the depth of a story on top of that it becomes so much more relevant to players, it resonates a lot more. I think that it’s been sort of a slow progression over, uh, I’ll say over the last ten years, but even now we’re seeing small, subtle advances, With MASS EFFECT we’ve brought something new to the table, BIOSHOCK is very interesting way of conveying a story, but we’ve seen a slow increase in the importance of narrative in games, and I don’t know if there’s any one game in particular that’s launched it forward. It is nice to see that a game like HALO now does focus on the story as much as the gameplay. Bioware’s kind of at the forefront of that movement, hoping to break new ground.

SFL: MASS EFFECT seems to wear its influences on its sleeve — were there any in particular that were at the forefront of your mind whilst writing?

DK: Well, I think that there was a whole range of influences, but there’s kind of two main bodies of work that we draw on. The first are those early science fiction movies that I mentioned from the eighties, ALIEN and TERMINATOR and BLADE RUNNER… they were so atmospheric, and there really got across that sense that we’re trying to capture. And then I think you’re also seeing the influence of intelligent science fiction from TV, those that had the focus on character on writing, so things like BABYLON 5, FIREFLY… so you’re seeing elements of this character-driven plots, so you’re always going to have elements of big science-fictions IPs.

We’re always going to do, you know, a bit from STAR TREK here and there, maybe something from STAR WARS, so those are sort of always going to be influencing science fiction in some way or another, whether you want to directly homage them or whether you’re going in the exactly opposite direction and providing a counterpoint. With MASS EFFECT we kind of looked at all of these influences, like what were things we liked best about them, and how can we get that across in a fresh new way in our own setting. I think a lot of people are looking at it and they see their own influences, and there are so many… I mean, there were five writers involved, a lead designer, several other designers, the project director… so many people brought their own preferences in, and we were able to bring them together in what I think is a very cohesive whole, which brings back all these memories of things you remember from all this science fiction.

SFL: This game is the first part in a trilogy. With so much effort put into providing the player with a unique, personal story, how will these sequels cope with the multitude of different ‘prequels’ on offer?

DK: Well I’ll be honest, it’s going to be a lot more work on our end! But that’s just part of the experience, this unique experience that we’re offering. One of the things that we’re able to do, because MASS EFFECT is planned to run across the life of the 360, is we’re actually able to take your saved games from previous games and look at the choices you’ve made — because obviously those choices are stored in the game data, they’re stored in your save game — and then as you play through the second game we can reference it, and say okay, you killed this particular character, you helped this particular character, and then they can come back… or [if they’re dead] somebody else can come back who knows what you did, and it can make someone who might have been a friend into an enemy, or vice versa. So there’s a lot we can do with that, and it’s actually very exciting, because I don’t think any game’s really ever done that to the level that we’re going to do it, and I think you’re going to be very impressed when you see what we can actually accomplish.

SFL: It sounds like you’re saying that, by the end of the third game, every player will have had a completely unique experience, as choices branch off again and again. Is that what we’re going to see?

DK: Well, there will be a core storyline that you’ll kind of be progressing down no matter what choices you make, but the way you come at those choices and the results of those choices will be quite different, and the ending of the entire trilogy, which I’m not going to spoil for you… we’ve got several endings in mind, and I think people are going to be shocked at just how different they are, how completely divergent these endings are. And then of course the experience that you take to get there will be so different too. Eventually there will be some things that *have* to tie together, that bring you back to the main storyline and progress you along, but I think its important that people feel like they [the plot threads] emerge out of choice that they have made, and that they have had their own experience which is unique to their friends’ or somebody else’s, because of those choices that they have made.

SFL: Besides your work for Bioware, you’ve also written (at last count) five novels, a myriad of short stories and you’re currently working on a top-secret screenplay. Which do you enjoy writing most?

DK: It’s difficult to say. The nice thing about the video games is that they are a very collaborative environment, so you’re not sort of shut in by yourself in a dark room, writing away; you do have a real sense of camaraderie, being part of this great team. The flip-side, of course, is that you do sacrifice a degree of creative control because you have to work with everybody else — you know, there’s so many talented people here at Bioware that there are so many good ideas coming from other people that you want to incorporate, so it does feel like much more of a group effort. With the novels, on the other hand — the things I write on my own — they’re much more personal, you know, my own ‘sink-or-swim’.

It’s all on my shoulders, so, in some ways that’s got some advantages and it’s got some disadvantages. I seem to find that there’s a nice balance between the two. I can do one, get all of the good experience with people to share it with.. then I can go to the other one and say ‘here’s a thing that I’m working on, my own personal project’ and I can do some things that maybe wouldn’t go over in a team environment so well, that would have to be done a little differently. I try to find a balance between the two because I think they both offer a very different experience.

SFL: Finally, what can we expect in the coming months? Can you tell us anything about the MASS EFFECT sequels, or is it all very hush-hush?

DK: Uh, it’s all pretty hush-hush right now! The team’s working very hard already, we’re not resting on our laurels; we’ve got a lot of interesting things planned for the sequels, other kinds of content like that. Of course, Bioware itself is working on multiple projects, some of which have been announced, some of which have not… but specifically for MASS EFFECT, we’ve already begun the process of getting things ready for what’s to come next. We’ve had our little break, to refresh ourselves, so there’s no rest for the weary — we’ve got to jump straight back on that horse and start going to work on what we hope will be as revolutionary and as epic an experience as MASS EFFECT 1 was!

MASS EFFECT is out now for Xbox 360, in both regular and limited edition versions.

Matt Dillon

*Some gamers still shudder at the mention of a Grue, decades later…