Mass Effect - Interview @ Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail has a piece on Mass Effect's story and the Canadian Awards for Electronic and Animated Arts with input from writer Drew Karpshyn and project director Casey Hudson:

Casey Hudson, Mass Effect's project director, admitted that earlier BioWare games such as Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire had been criticized for being word heavy, as they required players to read pages of on-screen dialogue and narrative text.

The narrative dialogue system, Hudson said, was how the dialogue and the narrative storytelling were brought it into the interactive realm. “It's an innovation that is kind of deceptively simple but fundamentally changes the way that you can interact with characters in the game,” says Hudson.

Conversations in Mass Effect, Hudson explained, play out in real time because the player's dialogue choices appear before other characters have finished speaking. That way, conversations in the game can flow more naturally. And by providing players with paraphrased dialogue choices instead of full texts, players can flash read instead of having to read entire lines.