Mass Effect Interview

IGN Australia had the chance to sit down with BioWare’s Drew Karpyshyn and quiz the lead writer about the work he’s put into Mass Effect.

In terms of novel-lengths, how many pages or books worth of writing would you estimate you’ve done for Mass Effect?

Drew Karpyshyn: Mass Effect has a word count of around 400,000 words – somewhere in the area of 4-5 full novels. But, unlike a novel, we also have visual images and other ways to tell a story. Our word count would be even higher if we had to describe settings or characters, but we actually have art and graphics to do that for us. I think a better comparison to give the full scope of our game is to use movie scripts. In Mass Effect, every line of dialog has full voice over, and we have 20,000+ lines of dialog – roughly the equivalent of 20 movies. That seems like a lot – and it is – but it’s necessary to keep a player engaged in our game and story for the 20+ hour critical path.