How my not-great plot happened: a mini post-mortem
An interesting article at Rock, Paper, Shotgun tackles BioWare's tackling of issues tackling modern society, tackling one of my Mass Effect plots in the process. I responded in the comments, and after looking at how much I yammered on, I figured it was worth posting here as a look inside how these things get into the game, and why some things that seem dumb get done. I do say some unflattering things, but I'm saying them about myself, so I don't imagine that work will have a problem with it:

Howdy. I'm the writer responsible for the widow and her brother-in-law mysteriously having no trouble with you intruding yourself into a deeply personal discussion about gene therapy. This article had me laughing out loud, and it also raised some excellent points that reflect what we're thinking in the office.

That plot coming down the way it did was the result of a lot of factors.

We needed to fill up some space on the Citadel with a ton of little quests. The Citadel is beautiful and marvelous and epic in its proportions, and also really flipping huge and empty. This meant that fairly late in development, the writing team hunkered down to fill up an area the size of one of the major story worlds with a ton of small roleplaying encounters.

Also, the fact that the Citadel is so big means that if you try to have combat, the 360 emits a high-pitched whine and then explodes. Even without combat, the Citadel pushes the 360 to the edge of its memory constraints pretty hard, and at one point in playtesting, we were playing in a special game mode, "Get from one end of the Presidium to the other without crashing," using our FPS indicators as sonar to try to figure out which way to go without our memory going splat. As a result, our plot designs for the roleplaying plots had to include not a whole lot of combat and limits to the number of characters and the size of their dialog files. (Note that combat that does take place on the Citadel as part of the critpath tends to happen in small hallway areas with doors nearby as level-load areas.)

Add to THAT the fact that the tech guys are swamped by putting together a game in a new engine, with the arrival of new combat functionality like cover and tech beacons requiring last-minute changes to every fighting area in the game, and you've got tech guys who don’t have a whole lot of time to do complex scripting on the plots you wrote in about a day apiece. The plot with the grieving widower, for example, is generally considered to be stronger than the not-at-all-about-MMR plot. It's also more complex, with two conversations and multiple options for who says what and goes where and when they do it. (It's not very complex as plots go, but it's more complex than "These guys fire one conversation, then despawn after you're done talking to them.") That complexity extends to QA as well. Given that QA found bugs on these plots that ranged from people not appearing to people appearing too early to people despawning but still firing their ambient "Hey, Spectre, come talk to me!" lines despite, you know, not being there, the simpler we could make those plots, the better. (Note: Not a knock on our tech guys. Our tech guys were awesome. Also, they were learning a new engine and scripting system. The writers made their share of fun mistakes, and our conversation system didn't change as much as their scripting system.)

None of which means that you're wrong and I'm right. What it means is that at the time, we looked at that plot and said, "Okay, we've got some that have several conversations already. Let's try to do this one as a one-and-out." It was my call, I made it, and when I looked at it in the final game, I knew that I'd been wrong, since, as you correctly noted, it feels way too weird to have these people just include you in the conversation. In the more complex widower plot, there's at least a plausible reason that the widower needs you to be involved.

What bums me out about that plot is that it really isn't one the writers just tossed out casually. We argued about what the issue would be. After I wrote it, I passed it to our editor, and she came back with some tough criticism. Where she will often just correct my spelling or grammar, this time she told me that my initial take was turning the widow into the stereotypical weeping woman, with the uncle as the voice of reason. We wanted it to be more complex than that, with both sides bringing their own baggage to one of those "Neither of these choices are exactly right" issues; the wife is grieving and afraid to lose the baby, the brother is grieving and desperate to give the baby the chance his brother didn't have. The editor and I actually stayed late working on revisions to that one, and we were proud of how it turned out.

Then we heard it voiced over and realized that I hadn't been specific enough in my VO comments (which the writers place on every line), and when I'd written "angry and frustrated", I'd been thinking of a West Wing kind of way, and what I got was an actor yelling "My BAAAAAAABEEEEE!!!" because she thought she was supposed to be more overwrought than I'd intended. It came out like bad soap opera, but it wasn't a major enough plot to do a retake on the voicework, so in it went. That's also on me: I'm a newb writer, and I didn't make my VO comments detailed enough. With better delivery, I think the plot would have felt stronger.

Finally, Mass Effect is the first BioWare CRPG to take place in a setting that includes the real world in its history. It's not the real world, because it's the future, but it's a heck of a lot closer to the real world than Jade Empire or KotOR was. The fact that we can actually reference real-world history and events (except for Hitler, because, you know, we want to sell in Germany) gave us an opportunity to hit real-world problems in new ways, and we were excited about that.

That new cool opportunity also screwed some things up. People talk about the Uncanny Valley as it applies to character design, but it's equally true for plot design. Your elven ranger can walk up and interrupt the baker and his wife as they argue about whether to use garden crystals to keep the bugs out of their garden, even though garden crystals attract skeletal rats in the long run, and even if some part of the player's mind realizes that these people are awfully eager to include you in their thinly veiled pesticide metaphor, the player is generally thinking about magic crystals and undead rats and just doesn't care that much about being invited into a deeply personal conversation between a husband and wife, or is congratulating him- or herself for seeing that incredibly complex pesticide metaphor and doesn't care how gamey the plot structure is.

You put that same plot in the real world, or something where people have names like Ashley "Boom-stick" Williams instead of Alustria Swiftarrow, and people aren't thinking about crystals and rats, and that plot design that wouldn't have bothered the player in a fantasy game sticks out like a sore thumb… a sore thumb who is JUST THINKING ABOUT THE BABY!

Overall, I'm really proud of the small part I had on Mass Effect. There are some plots I'd love to take back and get the chance to do again, knowing what I know now about how they'd play once they were actually in the game, and there are some that came together just wonderfully. In the offices, designers on all the projects are playing the game, making a lot of the same observations you just did, and looking for ways to improve what we do. I hope that you'll see us improve in the next game.