BioWare's Dr Greg Zeschuk

I think it is. It's more interesting that way, and I think that's why maybe we take a little longer than some developers and we do spend an awful lot of time in pre-production. It's because, once the writers are armed with that information, the world gets that much easier to build, the quests are that much richer, you don't see things as a deluxe FedEx quest. No, it's actually a really interesting quest to solve all the mysteries of the world.

Exactly. You start to see the story in their faces. I just did this one other quest where it was really neat: I kind of knew what the story was, but I'd kind of forgotten how it went. We prototype a lot of our games on the Neverwinter Nights engine, and I'd played this sequence on the Neverwinter Nights version but I couldn't remember who the good guys and the bad guys were in this particular scenario. Then, to be playing in the final engine with the lighting, digital acting and the recorded dialogue: it was awesome. I noticed this one guy was acting kind of shifty, kind of weird, and I wondered if he was the baddy, and lo and behold, a few twists later... It was amazing. It was subtleties in the digital acting which made me suspicious of his motivations. I compare that to the 16 pixels of Baldur's Gate: that was compelling at the time, but this is so much more compelling.

Absolutely. There's a very specific thing when Casey [Hudson, executive producer on Mass Effect 2] was talking about Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. He was chatting about this very concept - using facial expression instead of lines - and he said that when we started writing Mass Effect we had yet to actually finish the conversation system, and really we didn't reach the pinnacle of digital acting until the very end of the Mass Effect cycle, so you couldn't go back and go, "Oh, we don't have to say I'm really angry, we can just make this guy look angry!" But it was too late. So now we're able to use that: you can convincingly make a character look happy and, you know, the big gross emotions. But I was actually really impressed with this suspicious guy from earlier, I was like, "Wow, that's pretty subtle." In Baldur's Gate, you'd have a bracket saying "So-and-so looks around suspiciously," and now you're actually paying attention and thinking, "That guy's acting weird". That's a real improvement.

"He just screwed me! What's going on?" Well, we could have special subtitles for Asperger's players.