**********Edit - ok the formatting went completely screwy when I posted the below and its too much work to go fix it, but the text is still all there*************
I haven't read the thread since about page 9 so apologies if anything similar has been posted but I assume it's still mostly Mac-hate in here?
I just found a (relatively old) interview with him about his opinion of the comics and TIM etc, just to give a bit of insight into what he might have been thinking. Starts off pretty general but then gets into stuff about the comic specifically.
Part 1
HG: Is the comics series something for people who don’t know Mass Effect?
MW: For the people who haven’t played Mass Effect or read the comics
or novels, I think if you like a good story, you’re gonna like Mass
Effect. It’s a fantastic story. The characters are interesting and fun
and it’s a fantastic shooter/adventure RPG. If you haven’t played the
game, you might think, “It’s an RPG. That scares me a little.” We’ve
gone to a lot of lengths to make the game accessible. You can go deep
into it if you want, but you’re not forced to. You can pick it up, play
as a soldier, run in, fight, kill some guys and along the way you get a
fantastic story and get to explore this amazing universe.
HG: But the game is such a big game. How do you go about organizing
your life and your mind to do these kinds of varied and branching
stories?
MW: And it gets more complicated in the sequel because it gets more
complicated than in the first game. So it really is a lot of planning,
more work and documents than I’d like to admit to. But I work with a
team of from four to six writers. So it means a lot of meetings, not
just hey, write a great story, but write a great story and keep this in
mind. It’s like, here is the main story. But if you want to do your Jack
Acquisition plot, that’s great. But keep it in a certain context. All
the stories can branch, but they need to come to a common end point. And
you always have to look at this: what consequence does this story have
on the main game? You ask, Is it too big of a consequence? Does it
happen too early in the game? Don’t have the consequence happen right
away. Instead, build up to it so you can deal with it fully in separate
cut scenes.
HG: When you start a game, you have tons of ideas for story. Can you
detail some things that were cut, but you wanted to stay in?
MW: There were whole plots of mine that were cut for Mass Effect 1. I
originally came up with the whole Cerberus plot line, which has a
bigger role in Mass Effect 2. You join the Illusive Man and his group.
There was a whole global plot, a plot that spanned many worlds involving
Cerberus in Mass Effect 1 that we ended up cutting. A few hints of that
plot remained, and that’s what we built on for ME2. The plot was
completely gone and the characters were gone. We built so much around
the Illusive Man for ME2.
Part 2
HG: You’re writing up to 30,000 lines of script per game. How do you manage that?
MW: It’s up to me as the lead writer. Because it’s interactive media,
I like to say, I can write a couple of lines of dialog fairly quickly.
But there’s a whole bunch of characters downstream from me who have to
do something with those lines. They have to give it voice, stage actors
and build the models for it. So that’s the kind of accountability that
we as writers have. And if you write too much, it’s going to get cut. Or
you’re just going to anger a lot of people. You try to figure out what scope a mission should have and sit down
with the lead designer and producer to find out how many missions we
want in a game. We ask, are they 20 minute missions, 40 minute missions?
Then, my writing guys provide the right content. But they’re very free
within that realm of that sort of box we want to put in there. So I’ll
say, here’s the story and please fill in the blanks.
HG: Can you take me through the whole writing process?
MW: We have a sort of narrative review process where most levels will
start out just as a pitch, like a one-line raiser, maybe a short
summary of who’s involved and what’s going on. Then it goes on to a
player experience document, which is only about half a page. But it
says, this is what happens in my mission. After that’s approved, we meet
with cinematic designers to see what they could help us with. That’s
when it becomes a really collaborative process when we say, step by step
in a very detailed way, this is what happens in this mission. Once that’s all done, then they actually start writing the dialog. So
it can be two to eight weeks before you actually start writing. I often
tell my writers, the thing that makes our writing as good as it is is
not that any of you are Hemingways, it’s that we iterate, iterate,
iterate. We’re willing to let our babies go if we need to.
HG: And that good writing trickles down to even the more minor characters. Which of these do fans like?
MW: Emily Wong, Conrad Verner. They loved the fact that he would
follow you around in a kind of humorous way. A lot of times it’s the
hard to find characters who have something fun or unique for you. That’s
one of the beauties of doing a trilogy. We can actually react to what
fans like and do something else with them.
HG: Gus Mastrapa said that if you’re not playing the female commander
in ME2, you’re not getting the full experience. What do you think of
that?
MW: I think the key with all of what we do is that there’s
preference. Some of the romance lines are only available if you play as
fem Shepard or male Shepard. I encourage people to try them both and see
what they like.
HG: I’m sure other media inspires you. What have you read or watched that you might riff on in the next Mass Effect?
MW: By and large, I encourage that – to think about things that the
writers are already familiar with. A lot of times it’s things that are
happening or things that they’re interested in. A lot of times with
speculative fiction, with just a little twist, those kinds of things
will fit. Almost any news story you’d see on the Internet today, can
with a twist fit in our universe extremely well.
HG: What’s really hard to do?
MW: One of the hardest things to do is humor. We always want to
inject humor, but sometimes it can take away from the larger thing
you’re trying to do with these big epic themes. I also encourage people
to bring their own individual experiences in, their own voice. That’s
how we get such varied characters.
Part 3
HG: When you look at Mass Effect as a comic in particular, do you always look at what readers want today in comics generally?
MW: The comics kind of serve two purposes. If you’re a fan of the
game already, it’s a way to explore the universe in a way you couldn’t
in the game. Mass Effect Evolution actually takes us back in time almost
30 years. We’re probably not going to have a playable version of the
game that’s 30 years in the past. On the other hand, you get people who
haven’t experienced Mass Effect at all. That’s where the Dark Horse
expertise becomes so key.
HG: How so?
MW: I’ll say, here’s the story I want to tell. And they’ll say,
you’re pushing too much into a territory than an outside person wouldn’t
understand. In the first comic, for instance, I was a little too
referential in telling our story as far as what was going on. We changed
the start of it so that it opened up in a way that shows an awesome
blue alien kissing ass. You immediately wonder, who is she? What’s she doing? That doesn’t
necessarily demand that I know anything about the Mass Effect Universe.
Yet I think it makes people want to find out more about who this
character is and maybe pick up the game. So we center these comics on
interesting characters
.HG: And what does Dark Horse tell you about art? Where your eye goes
in a video game is so different than where your eye goes in a comic.
MW: Fortunately, I’m working with a very talented scripter, John
Jackson Miller. Especially for the first one, it’s me going, Here’s a
high level story of about 20 pages for four comics. It was up to him to
say, no, break that down, scene by scene, panel by panel in all of that.
I was pretty much the newbie. You try to keep it to a single action per
panel. And try to keep it to one idea per page. It was so different from
what I was used to in telling the story. I love it. But one of things
that transfers well is that Mass Effect is a cinematic game. So when I
think of a conversation, I’m not just thinking about the information
revealed. I’m also thinking about what happens visually in the scene,
about what’s happening in graphical and visual terms.
HG: In a sense it’s just as much conceptual work as the game because
you have to keep thinking about what moves the story forward and what
moves the eye forward.
MW: I’m a pretty harsh editor and I worked with a great editor at
Dark Horse, Dave Marshall. You don’t want to do too much, just the
essential thing to move it along. The action has to keep moving.
And Part 4
HG: What is the overarching role of the Illusive Man in the comics?
MW: He will do anything for the sake of humanity in the game, even
the horrible things sometimes, if that’s what’s necessary. But he’s a
very gray character. What is his moral stance? Can you trust him? But as
the name suggests, we didn’t give you a lot of hints about who he is.
The comic was a chance for us to go back in time and discover how he got
to be the head of this massive organization, Cerberus and what
established his pro-human world view. So we find out about the key
points in his life that made him what he is in the game. We have this
character who is cerebral, clearly very powerful, but what was he like
as a young man? Did he get out? Was he rough and tumble with a gun?
HG: In essence, he’s you and he’s me. This guy really in a sense is
EveryMan because we all have what he has in us. But he’s also like the
Smoking Man from The X-Files, and the Virtuous Man as well. Or are
people just riffing on what they think you’ve been inspired by?
MW: I’m sure it’s a bit of both. We’re all riffing on something and
our ideas are based on our experiences and what we’ve seen. But we
wanted him to be very unique and iconic, even down to the stage we
always witness him on. What is that sort of sleek, black room he sits in
with his chair while he has his drink and has a cigarette? Casey (Hudson) even had some people in real life to riff on, the
people at a party someone instantly gravitates to because they have a
strong presence. Plus, we’re fleshing out his back story. But because of
his nature, he’s never going to be the kind of character that we’re
going to learn too much about in the game. He’s not the kind of guy that will hang out with you and have windy
conversations about his past. So the comic gives us a snapshot of what
happened back in time. But not too much. When the comics starts, he’s
already in his thirties. So what did he do before that? What was his
childhood like? We want to leave that open to people’s imaginations or
for further story telling in the future.
HG: So what can you tell me about Mass Effect Evolution?
MW: It’s a new series of four comics, the first of which will hit in
the first quarter of next year, and then, one issue a month for four
months.
HG: What can you tell us about the plot?
MW: We’re not saying too much at this point. But if you’re familiar
with the universe, you’ll see people and places that you’re familiar
with. But they’ll be in situations you won’t expect to see them in.
HG: What about the Illusive Man?
MW: We’ll see him in a more active role that we’ve ever seen him
before. We’ll tell a little history about the First Contact War. So
we’ll know a bit more about these guys, the Turians. We’ll know more
about humanity’s first step and then misstep into the Mass Effect
universe and ending up in war with one of the powerful species there.
Through a person that we know now is so knowledgeable and has a wealth
of information at his disposal, what was the universe looking like to
him as one of the first humans to explore it?But each of the mediums has its own flavor. I worked with the Dark
Horse people to make sure this wasn’t just a good Mass Effect story.
First and foremost, it was a really good comic book story.
Some pretty relevant stuff in there I thought.
Hope you found it relevant.
nygamecritics.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/the-mac-waltersmass-effect-interview-part-1/
Modifié par Rivercurse, 20 février 2011 - 10:06 .
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Kahlee had memory loss, and despite all that time on the migrant fleet to due with the reapers, completely forgot who they were
