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. [...]
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.
