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[pikey1969]

A fan on the SomethingAwful forums just posted a relatively casual Q&A with Patrick Weekes. This 'interview' is a recollection of a casual Q&A style conversation he had with Patrick Weekes. It should be noted that the following content has healthy deal of paraphrasing from the fan and simply the fan trying to recall the conversation after he left the convention.

Source.

DISCLOSURE: PLEASE bear in mind the following tweets from Weekes regarding this interview before continuing to read the 'interview'.



After that tweet, a few more tweets from him surfaced regarding the interview...

James isn't there to be dumb. He's often used as a voice for people new to series. That was one joking aside presented as my response. 

Also doesn't include second half of my response in re EDI: I WAS nervous, but I thought Chris Hepler aced her continuing character arc.

And second half of James was that I expected a basic marine and was blown away by what FPJ brought to the character. 

So please take that with a grain of salt.  (This was in response to the original interviewee's apologetic tweet)

Thanks, @sethjdickinson, no harm done. They were great questions. Just didn't want anyone to think I was slamming EDI/James. 


Sooooo, now on to the good stuff, the informal interview is 'quoted' below. 

Okay, here is what I asked Patrick Weekes, and his answers as best as I can remember them. I've paraphrased but I'm doing my best to stick to what he said rather than introduce any interpretation.

THESE ARE NOT DIRECT QUOTES.

-Is there still a setting to explore after the ending? Is everything ruined?

The setting is definitely not ruined. We still have a big, lively galaxy.

-Will long-distance superluminal travel still be possible post-Ending? (will Tali or Wrex or Garrus see their homeworlds again? Will everyone starve?)

Galactic civilization will rebuild. The mass relays were not necessary for interstellar flight. Remember, what does it say in the Codex about the speed of ships? That's right, 12 lightyears per (day? hour? minute?). And that's only the cruising speed, not the maximum speed.

People have never needed to research basic FTL improvements before because they have mass relays. With the relays gone, new technology will increase that speed. Additionally, the element zero cores of the dead/controlled Reapers can be used to improve FTL drives. Starflight will continue using conventional FTL.

-Why did Joker leave Shep behind?

Joker would never abandon Shep without a good reason. Hopefully this will be clear in the Expanded Cut.

-Why can EDI survive the Destroy ending?

We argued a lot about this, I said that she was made of Reapertech and should therefore be destroyed, but (unclear, don't remember - wish I'd been able to ask a followup as his response doesn't make much sense)

-Did anyone on the Citadel survive?

Yes. We would never, ever do anything that made the player feel, on replay, that it would be better for everyone on the Citadel if they just died. The Citadel has emergency shelters and kinetic barriers - even if it blows up, millions might survive.  You should assume that everyone plot-important on the Citadel survived. 

-Is it better for Kelly Chambers if we talk her into suicide?

No, see above.

-Who wrote the death of Joker's sister?

I did! We intentionally did not connect the dots. We were very interested to see how fast gamers figured it out.

-Whose idea was it to make the Rayya fall out of the sky if you destroy the Quarian fleet?

Someone in the audio department, it was brilliant.

-Did the mass relays pull an Arrival and go supernova?

No, they didn't. (i'm paraphrasing here, please don't interpret this too hard) They overloaded, they didn't rupture. We really didn't mean to imply that the whole galaxy had been destroyed. People interpreted the ending in ways we really didn't expect. 

(Mr. Weekes dropped a lot of hints that he really didn't like the ending. He also said something that was almost 100% verbatim from the Penny Arcade Forum post often attributed to him)

-Why did Legion pull a 180 from his Mass Effect 2 philosophy?

He and the Geth were backed into a corner. They'd been made a lot dumber by the attack on the Dyson swarm. There was no other choice for Geth survival.

-What was up with the Rachni story? Why did we get railroaded?

Welcome to game development. In some games (Alpha Protocol) they make a bold choice where some decisions can knock entire missions out of the story. At BioWare, we never want people to be locked out of content due to a decision several games ago. We just didn't have the resources to do an alternate for the Rachni mission, so we decided that the Rachni mission could occur whether or not players saved the Queen.

-Why didn't (X squadmate from ME2) return?

There was a very ugly month of development where we fought out who would return. We knew we had to have a smaller cast so we could fit in more squad banter. Eventually we decided to bring Garrus and Tali back, so they could be squadmates in all three games. We also knew we'd have Vega in order for new players to have someone dumber than they were.

I was very resentful of Vega at first because I thought he was taking a slot that could've gone to a ME2 character, but he grew on me.

-Why did EDI have cameltoe?

We don't get a lot of feedback from the art department but (unclear, wish I remembered this better  )

Lots of discussion about how he was uncomfortable doing Pinocchio stories for both Legion and EDI because 'EDI was fine, she was an AI, she was cool - do we really need her to turn into Commander Data? We had seven seasons of Data, that was enough.'

-Why did you write Pinocchio stories for all the synthetic characters?

See above

-What was up with the Human Reaper in ME2? Why did it look so dumb?

We wanted to use the Suicide Mission to show several steps of the Reaper development process, from human reaper embryo all the way to cuttlefish. But the mission grew too complicated so it was cut for time.

Do the Reapers really only generate one capital ship per cycle? How do they ever break even?

Well, we never totally pinned that down. But this cycle was really anomalous. They don't normally take any capital-size Reaper losses at all.

-What was up with Kai Leng? How do you feel about him?

We really wanted to have a recurring antagonist for Shep, a 'Darth Maul' (his words). But I feel like there was some definite conflict between cutscene and gameplay there, and I think it's something we have to work on.

'He was a great antagonist in the books' 

-Why did we only get top and bottom dialogue choices, no middle?

Part of it was resources. Part of it is that Mass Effect 3 is a war story and it's really hard for Shep to feel middling about the Reapers.

-How did YOU feel about the ending?

(I didn't ask this, but he seems to have gone to GREAT lengths to think ways around a lot of stuff the ending implied.)

Why no female (alien X?)

Resource limitations. They have a very strict budget for how many different characters they can use in a given area. Some are basically free - if you have human males you have Batarians because they're humans with funny heads, if you have human females you have asari, etc.

Where was Harbinger? Can we ASSUME DIRECT CONTROL of him?

I definitely want more closure on Harbinger. That'd be hilarious. Stop punching yourself, Harbinger.

How did the Reapers storm the Citadel? Why didn't they shut down the relays as per their original plan once they had control?

Originally we planned to have a cutscene of Reapers taking over, Reaper monsters punching buttons, et cetera. But we cut it, partially for resource reasons and partly because it disrupted the pacing.

The Reapers didn't shut down the mass relays because the Keepers interfered with that. (I wish I could've asked a follow-up here, it doesn't make much sense.)

Why don't Ken and Gabby have more dialogue?

They actually have a bunch more on disk, but we somehow introduced a bug where their dialogue is tied to your approval level with Ash. If Ash has low approval, or isn't present, most of Ken and Gabby's dialogue won't play.

Why do you guys do Star Wars style space battles instead of the battles described in the codex?

We want to provide a familiar, compelling visual experience for people who grew up on Star Wars and stuff like that. These are some of our favorite parts of the game.

***

Things I wish I'd asked:

Why the drat Starchild?

What was up with the Stargazer? (He touched on the Stargazer once and pretty much said 'oh, yeah, the Stargazer.'

Again: NOT DIRECT QUOTES. These are NOT OFFICIAL BIOWARE STATEMENTS. Please don't gently caress Patrick Weekes over by posting these as 'official BioWare PR' or whatever. Please feel free to ask me follow-up questions, as I definitely didn't cover the whole conversation with him.

My takeaway was: the epilogue DLC is probably going to do a lot of good and be pretty well written, and Patrick Weekes should've been lead writer on ME3.  

And there you have it. Everything in that quote box is the interview EXACTLY as it was posted on the SomethingAwful forums. Don't forget about the preceding section's additional Tweets from Weekes regarding this interview after this thread surfaced on BSN. Weekes, understandably, wanted to clarify some of the content in that interview as it was paraphrased from the interviewer's memory (before you send the fan shared that interview your hate mails, please note that he went through the trouble to share this information).

Additionally, check out these particular posts from Michale Gamble who dropped by in this thread and shared a couple thoughts.

Michael Gamble wrote...

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

Michael Gamble wrote...

Cmon - give us some time with the DLC, and let's try to avoid hatin' on Patrick or Jessica:P

Honestly, after all the valid and incisive criticism leveled at the Catalyst and his presence in the ending, why insist on keeping him around? 90% of what's wrong with the ending can be solved simply by retconning him out of existence.

Why not just answer this question directly?

Is your question about whether or not we are going to retcon the catalyst? The answer is no. We've already said we are not changing the endings, but again - there are many things that we *can* do without changing them. 

A lot of folks had questions that we want to answer for them - but just like any piece of content, we are not going to outline the specifics before release. 

Michael Gamble wrote...

By the way, Patrick, John, Reid myself - we were all ready to answer those kinds of questions in dialogue just like the original OP. It was the whole reason we came to PAX. In fact, a lot of people may have gotten a bit *too* much out of me

Either way, we met hundreds of folks - and we were so happy and pleased that everyone just wanted to talk and have some great convo.

All of us are feeling pax with a sense of...renewal, and we are ready to work our butts off in the months ahead.

Hope you all enjoy resurgence!

And that's all folks!

Personally, I still won't be fully satisfied with the RGB options as they exist, as I feel they were too artificially/arbitrarily weighted by 'moral dilemmas' (they REALLY need to at least add another option on top of the three or greatly alter certain aspects of the existing three). However, it looks to me like most of the people at Bioware are coming around to the fact the endings were not as quite 'complete' for the fans as shipped (caused by EA being pricks with deadlines/funding in my personal opinion). It also sounds like they'll have the full writing team fully dedicated and hard at work with this project now. On top of some of the revelations from above, there's a LOT of promising stuff here for the coming Extended Ending content update.

ps. I Weekes too.

Modifié par pikey1969, 08 avril 2012 - 07:35 .

[Allan Schumacher]

Pssh... Weekes stealing my thunder >.>

(Was fun to read the interview)

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 08 avril 2012 - 01:41 .

[Michael Gamble]

Luiginius wrote...

Weekes said those were his statements seen through the eyes of the person asking the questions.
I don't know what other confirmation you could ask for. In no way is it accurate, Weekes said that himself, but it's still the best PR piece concerning bioware.
Done by a fan, answers given by a man in the writing team, no pr people in sight.
Paints a pretty clear picture what is the other issue bioware is having besides the ending.

You know, most of us in game development would love to have all the time in the world to make our games, but that doesn't mean we put something out that we don't believe is quality.

As for some of this specifics of the questions...

Of course joker wouldn't abandon Shepard for no reason, and yes - let's not underestimate FTL here let's also not forget about quantum communication...or the incredible store of food rations that the Normandy has.

Cmon - give us some time with the DLC, and let's try to avoid hatin' on Patrick or Jessica:P

[Michael Gamble]

The Charnel Expanse wrote...

Michael Gamble wrote...

Cmon - give us some time with the DLC, and let's try to avoid hatin' on Patrick or Jessica:P

Honestly, after all the valid and incisive criticism leveled at the Catalyst and his presence in the ending, why insist on keeping him around? 90% of what's wrong with the ending can be solved simply by retconning him out of existence.

Why not just answer this question directly?

Is your question about whether or not we are going to retcon the catalyst? The answer is no. We've already said we are not changing the endings, but again - there are many things that we *can* do without changing them. 

A lot of folks had questions that we want to answer for them - but just like any piece of content, we are not going to outline the specifics before release. 

Modifié par Michael Gamble, 08 avril 2012 - 07:23 .

[Michael Gamble]

By the way, Patrick, John, Reid myself - we were all ready to answer those kinds of questions in dialogue just like the original OP. It was the whole reason we came to PAX. In fact, a lot of people may have gotten a bit *too* much out of me

Either way, we met hundreds of folks - and we were so happy and pleased that everyone just wanted to talk and have some great convo.

All of us are feeling pax with a sense of...renewal, and we are ready to work our butts off in the months ahead.

Hope you all enjoy resurgence!

[Michael Gamble]

classy. Good to see you appreciate our content. That was the one that made me leave the thread, btw.

[Allan Schumacher]

CronoDragoon wrote...

Fxnris wrote...


Synthesis seems to solve the whole problem of the reapers in the first place, the whole synthetics rebel etc, well everyone's partly synthetic now.

How does this stop synthetics from being created again?

I've been giving this some thought since I saw it asked yesterday.  I briefly touched on it in a different thread, but here are my thoughts on it again.

When determining why people create "AI" my best explanation is to use it as a tool.  I think that this is actually alluded to in discussions about the Quarian and the Geth, and why the Geth were created.  If the need to create the tools is gone as a result of the synthesis, then there's no reason for synthetics to be created.  Part of the problem with endings involving a form of transcendence is trying to understand what exactly that transcendence means.  I'm still human, so imagining I'm now something beyond is unfathomable.

An alternative might be that, by being part synthetic, there's some sort of connection there with future synthetics.  Or that due to this outcome it's actually impossible to create purely synthetic (or organic) life.  Quite the out there idea though.

[Allan Schumacher]

generalleo03 wrote...

Hmm, I'm not sure I totally agree with this.  This suggests that the source of conflict is that the desire for tools creates conflict?  I'm not sure I buy that, and I don't think it has been discussed anywhere within the narrative of Mass Effect.  In fact I think that Mass Effect describes the source of conflict as diversity, or the fear of diversity.  There was a great literary analysis of this that described it better than me.

I think it's more of an issue that "the need for tools to make our lives easier eventually results in an AI being made."  Once that AI is actually made, then things get... messy.

I completely agree that synthetics are created as tools, which is why I
have trouble believing the new hybrids won't need them. As far as we
know, synthesis does just that: merges synthetics with organics. I am
given no reason to believe everyone is now a miniature god that does not
need food, can teleport anywhere it wants, etc etc.

I don't think it's as much an issue as to whether or not we'd "need" them, but more whether we'd "desire" them.  It's all part of the confusion that transcendence gives me.  If we're in the next stage of evolution, does that mean that many of faults (laziness, stuff like that) no longer exist?  Just thinking out loud mostly.

Thing about that was Geth were not originally intended to be AI. Tali
says in ME1 that Geth were originally meant to be VI's that would
perform dangerious tasks like mining and such that most people who had
free will were unable or unwilling to do.  If you merged Synthetics and
Organics, I can only imagine, since there is no as of yet clarification
of what synthasis actually does, that people with free will still would
be unwilling to do dirty and dangerious jobs like there, or are unable
to do because of the fact that they still have some organic parts of
them.

Sorry, I wasn't clear what I meant with AI.  Given the ME context I used it incorrectly and should have used VI.  I was originally thinking AI as we real people use it hehe.

As for the results of synthesis, I agree.  It's a tough concept to wrap my head around.

[Allan Schumacher]

Hmm. You know, I don't mind that topic at all. It sounds interesting and cool. I just don't think it's part of Mass Effect. To be done properly, the story needs to reflect how making lives easier is an important part. It really creates a disjointed effort. I can definately see the logical flow of what you are saying, but it is not really clear from the series of Mass Effect. There is little to no exposition about making tools to try and make our lives easier. There is a lot more evidence to suggest that AI are a threat because they are an unknown, especially with the Council outlawing it for this very reason. I'm not saying it couldn't work, just that it would require a lot more explanation to make it in the Mass Effect series.

That was sort of the impression I got from why the Geth were created. Wasn't Legion originally an agricultural unit? Tali refers to them as tools, but once they became sentient they were now slaves.

[Allan Schumacher]

Lurchibald wrote...

1. With what resources will they build these extractors?
2. Yes, that is what's close to sol, what about 25 LY beyond that? and beyond that?
3. Again, they have minimal resources, pretty much any spare resources went into developing the crucible, With what can we research with?
4. Resources, Resources, Resources, What will they use to build these live-ships? The development/build time would be huge, the quarians have only ever needed enough food for themselves, so unless they want to starve they cant give much (if any) food to the Turians, Earth is almost desolate from what we see and we probably only have just enough food for our own people before anything will start to grow on Earth again.

To be fair, the Quarian fleet is going to have been pretty heavily beaten up.  Assuming both the live ships survived, it's entirely possible that the food demands of the Quarian fleet have dropped (maybe even significantly).  This is in addition to the demands of the Turians, and everyone else really.  The idea that they have a surplus of food is not unreasonable.

I think an interesting result would be to have whether or not Admiral Koris survives play an impact here.  Since he's so badass, his ability to keep the liveships safe throughout the battle seems acceptable to me.

[Allan Schumacher]

eromelcm7 wrote...

This is quite interesting, so lets continue this logic. Given that synthetics are the ultimate outcome of tools, it would follow to negate the need/desire for physical tools (as stated above). But synthesis does not accomplish this.

The desire for a tool starts with simpler physical need. The Geth tool was created from the simpler physical need for labor (like agriculture). The desire for these tools is only a desire in the sense that survival dictates it. This is not laziness. Tools follow as a solution to survival, which is continues and thus the development of tools is a continues advance. Really, the only way to stop this advancement is to eliminate the pressure of survival. But synthesis is "the finale evolution of life" right? So no more pressure to survive right? Right? Not that I can see...

We are told that a new format of DNA is created through the combination of synthetics. So we still have some form of "DNA" in this ending -- this is important. This means we are still self-replicating life. Nothing has really changed here, survival is still a factor and thus the creation of tools is inevitable. The forms of matter used as a "framework" of life are irrelevant, merely existing in the physical world as life bounds you to its rules. The only real solution would be to transcend the physical. If anything, AI are the closest thing to "the finale evolution of life" because they exist as software, as Javik says, "outside of nature". By what logic would AI feel the need to create subservient AI? They have no physical needs.

But this all just an extrapolation on the assumption synthesis is supposed to stop the creation of new synthetics and synthetics are somehow inherently bad as asserted by the Catalyst.

I agree that need plays a role, but eventually it sees diminishing returns.  If you look at most of the Western world, I don't think a lot of developments come from any sort of survival need, but just from a need to be more efficient and whatnot. 

It'd be like my job at work, in that I could go in and manually test over a sequence of data on a day to day basis, or I can write up a simple C# app that does it for me and outputs the results I need automatically.  As a result, I'm free to kick up my feet and drink some lattes while lurking in the forum to see what the ME crowd is up to.  And doesn't that just make the world a better place? >.>

Jokes aside, from a survival perspective, I don't see it as being much of a focus for our innovation moving forward at this stage in our history.  How this applies to a species that has not transcended is something that is tricky to answer.

[Allan Schumacher]

Dorryn wrote...

It is implied during the Geth Server mission. Are you confirming that the geth platform we see reaching for the sniper rifle really is Legion?

Haha I was curious about it.  A friend of mine said it was (I don't know if he saw something I missed or if he just felt more strongly about it) and since I was already open to the idea I figured it was probably the case

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 09 avril 2012 - 07:36 .

[Allan Schumacher]

BearlyHere wrote...

Yes, they did make it. I've been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate.

It might have been confusing since the forums were kept together, but Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian Entertainment.

http://en.wikipedia....winter_Nights_2


EDIT:  I should have refreshed the page before submitting this...

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 27 avril 2012 - 09:52 .