Procedural generation of conversations allowed for a great base-line conversation that included facial, body and camerawork, leaving them to only be improved by cinematic designers. ~70% were touched by hand, leaving 30% procedural only, like this one.

Battle for Interactivity

BioWare traditionally used black bars to denote interactive conversations, but we won a heated argument to remove them from Mass Effect to blur the line between interactive dialogue and cutscenes. This allowed us to seamlessly weave interactivity into dramatic cinematic scenes.

Fighting The Dead Stare

Every gameplay animation in Mass Effect had the eyes constrained forward by default to overcome the dead stare commonly found in games. This detail afforded design access to all 1200 animations for the conversation system, applying additional eye motion on top per line as required.