Mass Effect: BioWare’s Drew Karpyshyn Interview

There’s clearly a lot more that goes into the development of a game these days. Not only do you need a stable of programmers and artists—and the latter requiring different specialties, from 3-D models to character design to environment textures—but today’s games require such people as a cast of voice actors, and that then requires sound engineers and studio producers to handle the voice sessions…and then a whole other bunch of artists to lip-synch the dialogue to the character models, and so on. Of course, a writer is needed to create all of that prose, to craft the scenes and break down how the story will come together through the course of the gameplay.

Frankly, it’s not hard to see that many developers skimp on the last role, with dialogue that is not all that realistic or a storyline that just seems tacked on. When it comes to BioWare, though…well, the Canadian developer seems to take a different approach to its titles. This strategy is making each successive game that much deeper, but also offers more latitude to the players in how they move through the story and even enable them to vary the outcome. BioWare’s latest release is the highly anticipated Mass Effect, which the player in many, many different directions, depending on the decisions made at certain points.

To find out how this all came together, TeamXbox talked with Drew Karpyshyn, who discussed various aspects of the game’s story and characters. What he says in this edited transcript not only details what you can expect to get when you load Mass Effect into your Xbox 360, but also provides some insight into how the crafting of such a story-based game is taking developers in new directions.

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What do you do with BioWare and how long have you been there?

Drew Karpyshyn: I’m the lead writer on Mass Effect and I’m a senior editor at BioWare. I’ve been at BioWare since 2000.

I worked a little bit on Baldur’s Gate II, then went on and was one of the primary writers on [Baldur’s Gate II:] Throne of Bhaal. I was also a primary writer on Neverwinter Nights and the Hordes of the Underdark expansion for Neverwinter Nights. Then I was lead writer on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and I was also a contributing writer on Jade Empire.




Mass Effect is a little different than the Baldur’s Gate games, right?

Drew Karpyshyn: A little bit…a little bit. The science-fiction thing is sort of a new angle for us.


What did you want to bring to Mass Effect? What did you try to get across through the characters?

Drew Karpyshyn: There’s two sides to it: One is the thing that people can expect from a BioWare game, which is party members are companions that really have a depth to them. They have their own back story. They have their own motivations…their own feelings. You can develop relationships with them…romances with some of them. You can turn them into life-long friends—orenemies, depending on how you interact with them. So, that’s one of the things we really try to give a player is that emotional interaction with their companions, with the people that they meet.

And I think the other thing we’re trying to do in Mass Effect as a whole is just evoke the spirit of the classic ’80s science-fiction movies. Movies like Alien and Aliens, Terminator, Blade Runner…those are movies that we all loved and we said, what was it about those movies that spoke to us, that really grabbed us? And how can we take those pieces—those common elements—and bring them in to Mass Effect, and put our own fresh, unique take on it, so they will give people that same kind of feeling and appreciation that we felt when we saw those things, but in a brand new story and a brand new intellectual property?