--

“Do you want to stay down here or something?”

“For being the individual responsible for educating Shadow on ‘the power of friendship’, it seems you do not trust your friends.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“I have activated my emergency transponder. Help is on the way.”

“How do we know the signal’s gotten through all this concrete? Have you got a response from anyone?”

“Negative. There has been no response.”

“Then we could be stuck down here until we do something! Come on, work with me here, dude!”

“Did you inform anyone as to the location of your mission before you arrived here?”

“Did you?”

--

Omega speaks very formally, with long sentences and complete phrasing. Sonic, meanwhile, uses shorter, choppier phrases, sometimes with interjections or other slang words. Omega also doesn't use contractions whereas Sonic does. Even with the removal of Omega's speech quirk of using all caps, it's fairly obvious who's saying what in the dialogue above, even though I tried my damndest to pick dialogue that didn't have other context cues as to who was saying what.

Other characters have different speech quirks. Silver is rambly and has trouble communicating exactly what he means, Rouge uses a TON of cliché phrases and likes punctuating with pet names, and Shadow is actually my most "neutral" character voice, as he speaks evenly, plainly, and with just a slight tinge of formality.

I create these speech patterns for every character that I write with based on observations from canon game lines, but also a heavy dose of fanon from other fics that I read. So really, I guess this answer isn't so different from the one I gave regarding the voices I hear in my head- it's sort of a blend of everything, with a healthy dose of my own fine-tuning to even it out.

Technical stuff and trivia

back then Mass Effect was an Xbox exclusive; “there was no such thing as a PC version”

They used existing references to define a vision; Mass Effect was "Rainbow Six meets 24 in space"

A lot of ME architecture was inspired by Syd Mead

Used to have a video of the Mako breakdancing to techno music

The Mako was actually incredibly maneuverable via directional thrusters

CLZ: “Never ever ever autolevel up in a BW game, I don't know what they decided for leveling up... but it's the most inefficient terrible garbage ever”

Pressing the sprint button out of combat does not change the jogging speed, only the camera’s field of view, giving the illusion of speed. This is due to streaming - in combat, you’re locked into an area that’s fully loaded. However while exploring, sprinting could cause you to arrive in areas before they’re fully loaded, and break the game

Firing from hip, logically, meant less damage due to less accuracy. However they messed up and it was coded to actually have less damage, about a 30% reduction (note: so the next time you play ME1, remember to aim. Especially shotgun users)

“Hardening” is resistance to biotics and tech - the term was never really explained in game

N7 was a result of artists putting letters and numbers on stuff - they thought it looked cool, kept it, and just had the writers find a reason for its significance in lore

CLZ on the [Xbox] Inventory System: "I don't know, to this day, how this ever became a thing. Because it's just the most bizarre, counter-intuitive and horrendous inventory system in existence! I don't know how it got into the game!" "The one on the PC version is an improvement”

The circular icon that indicates a person or object that you can interact with is actually an invisible cube. At first assets had to be tweaked so they would have nodes to interact with, but later on this cube was introduced and made everything much easier

The original decryption minigame was a Simon Says with specific timing

Had huge animation libraries and were constantly requesting more for variations in cutscenes, also had access to animation weights + 8 different body weight shifting animations so that the characters didn’t look stiff while talking

Feet had to be anchored when ragdolled “in case something horrible happened that threw you out of the world”

Deaths from conversations happen offscreen because there was no good way to get the person shot out of there

After they tried having Shepard pull out weapons in conversations, they started doing it a lot because it looked cool. However, different situations had them pulling out different weapons (cutscenes pulled out rifles, conversations pulled out pistols), and they didn’t have a solution for that, so they implemented access to every weapon even if you didn't have training for it

The dialogue wheel went through several different looks before they settled

Doors, seats, and elevators are the “trifecta of go fuck yourself” - meaning they were seemingly mundane stuff that were an absolute pain to implement

Doors are mainly used as sight blockers - sometimes you can't interact with a panel until the other side has finished loading

You can't move in elevators because “everything colossally and horribly broke” if allowed to move around

Normandy’s Cockpit/Bridge is one of the most memory intensive areas in the game -  a lot of areas toed the red line with the amount of memory had. Massive cuts on textures

Long ride on a short elevator shaft because the game is simultaneously dumping and loading floors since the Normandy is memory-intensive

Pawns are super light on memory, hooked into something called the Action Station - they don't have existing animations on them, they just draw from the AS pool - disconnecting would drop them to t-pose. This method was used to populate levels like the Presidium w/o crushing memory

Lipsynching is done through software called FaceFX - depending on priority, varying levels of tweaking were done

There were a lot of animations to go into from from certain poses, like idling - surprisingly still not seen in a lot of other games. Times when the animations “popped” was a result of these not matching up to their respective ease-in, ease-out animations

For actions like leaning on railings, assets needed a set height so hands from different species did not float or clip into walls

“ME1 did not know what kind of shooter it wanted to be for a very long time”

they once had a Target Acquisition System - slo-mo after every kill, but thought it was weird

at another point it was pretty much like Halo

ultimately became a cover shooter when one of the animators - Jonathan Cooper - simulated cover shooting with animated movement and showed the higher ups

Grenades originally had an effect on party members and would cause them to go flying all over the place -  in the case of the area right before Chora’s Den, if the teammate fell into the middle it would break the game, so they took that out

The fight with Fist was originally in an open office with no cover. They added some cover, but when Wrex specifically took cover in those, a part of his collision stuck out a bit and could get him killed 

For dancing, they had to terminate the player’s velocity, but didn’t always work. As a solution, during the fadeout to dancing, it kills the velocity and input, restages Shepard to a specific position, and activates collision walls around you so you don’t slide across, and then everything is reset as you come out of the dance

Autosaves happening before unskippable cinematics - they can’t be skipped safely because it’s in-engine and not pre-rendered, therefore affecting the location of everyone in the scene and any other script firing under the hood at the same time (note: there are cutscenes that affect the objects in the scene, like those bugged scenes where characters are moving around in the background. Usually to account for the different companions you’re bringing, your armor, etc. Pre-rendered ones are the ones like the Battle of the Citadel, with scenes that don’t really change)

Brown crates are dynamic and can be moved around

A tell for missions that might end up in combat is that the people around don’t spawn since they had no way of making them leave the area. Shopkeepers just “crouch and take cover” 

Recurring outfits with minor color changes are due to memory constraints - they didn’t have enough memory to put varied outfits on people

A number of in-engine cinematics were run entirely through script (a large stack of delay-by-x commands, camera movements and cuts, teleportations, vfx activations, moving-to-waypoints) with no visual tools. Iteration meant they had to repeat stepping back into an area, eyeball things that needed fixing, tweak the script for adjustments, and repeat 

Cover is based on an algorithm of angle-checking when you push against something that's flat

Paraphrasing was a skill writers had to learn along the way, since it was redundant to write down what was meant to be said and then saying it again

LOD popping was due to issues with UE3 (note: those times when at the start of the cutscene, the low-res textures load in first then switch to the high-res ones

Coordinating writing/animations: writers work within the conversation system editors; they just went through those and asked writers directly for any questions - this is the dialogue, this is what were trying to to convey -- Cinematic Designer works on it. A lot of back and forth

The guy who put together Atlas Base in the Overlord DLC also put together the Suicide Mission

Patrick Weekes wrote conversations between companions and elevator news about events that had happened. Also wrote Mordin.

Stories from CLZ’s time at Bioware

[Christmas 2006] CLZ said they crunched for 9 months, and he tracked over 700 hours of unpaid overtime

Bioware values designers in a way that other studios don't

After ME1, they lost nearly every senior animator that wasn't on cinematic animation

People were hospitalized for sickness + the Edmonton cold

A lot of the design team referred to the project as the Bataan Death March

They were fighting with the tools, with the lack of direction, poor project management

It was easier on ME2 and ME3 since they had sorted out most of the issues during ME1, like the pipeline

When the development for MEA came around, they had to use a completely new engine - Frostbite - which is optimized for a very specific kind of shooter. They couldn’t use the pipeline they had established from ME1, so the experience was similar and just as or even more harrowing. The team it was given to have never released a full game before

ME was decided to be a trilogy early on; there were two other games build in UE3, of the sci-fi genre which were also slated to be trilogies releasing in the same timeframe. They had issues with UE3 that led to lawsuits, although ME team's did not.

During ME's development, Bioware Corporation was purchased by a group called Elevation Partners. Bioware Corporation became known as Bioware Pandemic, after being merged. They were bought by investment partners including Bono. 

Why did Bioware allow themselves to be bought? Because 

Unreal Engine licensing was not cheap 

Jade Empire did not sell that well because it dropped at the end of Xbox's life cycle when the 360 had been announced. 

Bioware didn't have a ton of money, and the studio would have died if they had not been bought. ”then they did what venture capitalists do, they flipped us to someone else for double and it was how EA ended up with Bioware”

EA were pretty hands off, they created the Bioware label instead of shoving them in to the existing workforce; the hands-off gradually became less and less

CLZ was not a fan of some of the things that happened while working; such as the time they had the go/no-go meeting with Microsoft so they could start marketing; it was whether to ramp crunch time up accordingly. They were told was a go, they ramped crunch up, and it later slipped that it was a no-go and they just wanted an excuse to make them stay in the office more

Much of game dev is hacks "building an airplane that's already in flight"

The UE3 engine everyone was working with unfinished, unoptimized tools and not a lot of support since Epic Games were trying to ship Gears of War and were preoccupied - they were cramming RPG stuff since ME3 was not a plain shooter game

Kismet - UE3′s visual scripting language - couldn’t do math. There were no reference subsequences, and it was missing a lot of things that were the norm for RPGs and nonlinear quest progression