Last year, Dragon Age: Origins lead designer Mike Laidlaw spoke briefly about the importance he places on good writing in a video game. He took note of the technology curve, saying that "we're wrestling more with the uncanny valley than the number of pixels. I think a good story is what makes [a game] linger."

I think that's kind of BioWare's philosophy on RPGs in a nutshell, and it was kind of reinforced for me when I attended a GDC panel yesterday titled "Localizing Large RPGs, which was hosted by BioWare localization experts Ryan Warden and Chris Christou. I wasn't there so much to hear about the intricacies of their work flow -- though that was interesting too -- as to gain some insight into how they put the overall narrative together, and what I got was a glimpse at just how staggeringly huge these endeavors really are. As it turns out, all those conversation trees make for games with a pretty ridiculous word count.

From what I've read, the average 300 page novel clocks in at approximately 75,000 words. By comparison, the original Mass Effect contains approximately 300,000 words, Mass Effect 2 adds to that total with 450,000 words, and Dragon Age dwarfs them both with some 1,000,000 words. On top of that, Mass Effect 2 contains 140,000 lines of voice-over dialogue, which were recorded over the course of some 300 days at the studio with the help of more than 350 actors. The takeaway, of course, is that making an RPG is hard.

A lot of that has to do with BioWare's trademark dialogue trees. Rather than telling a straightforward story, they have to account for every single possibility that can arise from the available answers, and that includes differences that may have carried over from the first Mass Effect. To keep it all organized, the trees are basically presented as a series of expandable menus.

Take the conversation that occurs at the end of Miranda's loyalty mission, for example. Clicking the first line opens up a set of responses, and clicking those responses opens up even more responses. Each line has a notation on how Miranda is feeling at that moment, such as a "sad, frustrated," so that the voice actors have an idea of how they should be feeling. Open it all up, and it's like you have a whole game -- even a whole series -- right there in front of you.

BioWare also provided a glimpse of their Character Bible during the presentation, which I also found extremely interesting. The slide they put up had categories including species, age, general description and importance to the plot, and apparently would have stretched to the opposite wall if they had shown the whole thing. One character that was listed on the excel sheet was Admiral Han'Gerrel vas Neema, who appeared briefly during Tali's loyalty mission (spoilers, perhaps?). His importance to the plot was listed as "medium," and his description was as follows:

"Han'Gerrel is an old friend and comrade of Tali's missing father. He treats Tali like a niece, friendly and comforting in talks both before and after the trial. Han is, however, a firm believeer in the war with the geth. If the trial outcome does anything to hurt that, Han is incredibly angry with Tali."

Mass Effect 2 alone has some 571 more characters of varying importance beyond Han'Gerrel, and BioWare keeps detailed tabs on them all. It's been said before, but this panel only reinforces in my mind that understanding BioWare RPGs simply means understanding their approach to the dialogue and the characters. One interesting comment from Warden was that BioWare is always on the lookout for voice acting on the level of a film or television show in their games, which can be difficult to find at times.

"Some actors hear video game and get out their clown pants and slide whistle," Warden said during the panel's question and answer session. Those actors are quickly removed because BioWare RPGs put so much emphasis on story, which obviously isn't benefited by clown pants and slide whistles.

The reason I mention all this is because much of the debate concerning whether or not Mass Effect 2 is an RPG is based around the combat and the lack of an inventory (there's even another BioWare panel later this week titled "Where's my Inventory!") But the common thread in all of BioWare's games is always the dialogue trees, which is obviously what they consider to be the heart of an RPG. During the panel, the localization team talked about how the writers are tweaking and recording new dialogue up until the last weeks before Cert, and how a great deal of time and money is devoted toward making sure the dialogue is just right.

In some ways, I think BioWare is going down the same path as the one traced by Quantic Dreams and Heavy Rain, albeit with a more mechanical, action-oriented approach. For them, complete immersion seems to mean designing a sprawling world in which player actions have real consequences, and the best way they know how to do that is to write an insane amount of dialogue to account for every possibility. Really, if you want a glimpse of where BioWare sees RPGs going, I think all you need to do is take another look at Dragon Age's million word count. That might be all you need to know.