Dragon Age II Already in Development

With Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 nearing completion, BioWare writer Patrick Weekes has (inadvertently?) confirmed that most of the company’s writers have moved on to Dragon Age II and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

At this stage in the project, writers get to do a lot of things.

1) Bug fixes. It’s a big game, and we’re catching things now that we missed before. It’s tough to make big changes at this point, so in many cases we have to cut or move lines in order to alter the story without adding or changing the VO. This takes a lot of time and is the vast majority of what we’re doing.

2) Systems. Some writers are working on planet descriptions or codex entries. I’m working on a Paragon/Renegade pass (putting in all the “you get a small bonus here” actions on good lines). I’m also working on the sound sets (the ambient barks that bad guys use in combat). What we have now is good, but some lines fire way too often or way too close together, so the combat team and I are working on probability tweaks to get the best possible experience.

3) Downloadable content. And that is all I can say about that.

4) Many writers are on different projects now, like Dragon Age 2 or the MMO.

5) In our spare time, we playtest like mad. We’re the ones who know the story the best, so while we may not be the best at firing combat bugs, we’re great at catching, for example, when lines that should have fired didn’t.

…

First we swear. A lot. Then some of us drink.

Then we figure out what to do. Sometimes that means going into the raw sound files and looking for an alternate take. Other times, it means having the sound guys chop off the front or back of the line in order to remove the offending bit while still keeping the part we need.

A lot of the time we have to cut the line, and then we get to figure out how to make it work without new VO. Can we jump over to another section? Do we just lose an entire part of the conversation? Is there somebody who hasn’t been recorded yet who we can write in as saying a line there so that it makes sense?

It is a fun and exciting opportunity for problem solving. You’ve heard of thinking outside the box? This is thinking inside the box. And the box is shrinking.

…

We did kinda call the first one “Origins”. I hope I’m not giving too much away.

…

Bear in mind that I’m a writer, which means that I’m not actually in the VO department — I just work closely with them.

As I understand it, the basic reason we can’t just call somebody back in casually is that a basic voice-acting contract is a given amount of money for a four-hour session. A normal voice actor gets through somewhere around 150 lines of dialog in that time.

So let’s say we’ve got a character, “Evil Merc Leader,” and he’s a 100-line character — your basic villian, shouting over a loudspeaker as you blast through his compound, with one nice character-building conversation at the end. A month after the actor records the EML, it turns out that due to memory requirements, we can’t have both geth and mercs in the same area. This happens all the time, but the writer, lured in by promises of glory, had the EML specifically say, “My mercenary band and our geth allies will tear you apart!”

Now the geth are cut from the level.

Aside from that one line, the situation is salvageable. You’ve got an Investigate option about “How did you get the geth to work with you?”, and that’s easy enough to cut. You’ve got a few lines like “Send the geth to fill in the back ranks!”, and you can just avoid those lines now. But that big “My mercenary band and our geth allies…” line is just wrong now, and it can’t easily be fixed, because “and our geth allies” is right there in the middle. You can chop something off of one end or the other, but in the middle, you’re toast.

So at this point, your options are:

1) Call the actor back in to fix one line. Unfortunately, due to the way the business works, you’ve got to pay him for four hours. Wow, you just cost the company a bunch of money.

2) If you’ve got a lot of other lines that need recording, you can maybe pull the actor back in and give him a four-hour session, with that one line being one of many lines he records. You could, for example, have him record “Angry diplomat” (a 75-line character) and “Grizzled Soldier” (a 70-line character) and then have him just fix that last line from Evil Merc Leader as well. The only catch here is that according to voice-acting rules, you’re only allowed to ask an actor to do three different character roles while he’s in a given session, so you can only sneak this line in if you’ve got a role to spare.

3) If that actor just plain can’t come in, then, well, it’s only 100 lines to re-record EVERYTHING, so worst-case, you just bring in someone entirely new and have them redo the character. This wastes some money, yeah, but not as much as paying an actor double to try to lure them back in for, essentially, one line. The bad news here is that if Cinematic Design has started working on the dialog, bringing in a new actor can screw them over — the new actor has different timing and different inflection, and that means that the CineDesigners have to go in and look at every line of that guy’s dialog again to make tiny adjustments.

There’s no perfect solution — just a number of different ones, any of which can be the best under the circumstances. Three times out of four, we can get by with clever line cutting. If you played ME1, and you remember the conversation with Fai Dan after clearing the tower of geth — the conversation that tells you to go to ExoGeni? Yeah, we cut that one to ribbons. He gave you very specific directions that ended up being wrong when we had to change the level, and we had to edit for that, and then we had to do more editing to make it clear that the Mako would be waiting for you there. We managed to do it with a few line cuts here and there, and a bit of careful chopping. The conversation won’t win any awards, but in cases like this, the goal isn’t to make it beautiful — it’s to make it understandable. Ideally, very few people even remember that conversation. Our edits covered it up well enough that it did its job quietly and slunk away before you realized that some of the lines fit together oddly.