It's a new character who has his own back story, who has his own role in the game and whatnot. But they don't just come in and go, you know, 'I'm Wrex alternate,' or something like that.

How do we account for that?' And the big thing was - let's take Wrex for example - we had to limit to some degree the roles that those characters are going to play because we have to say, 'OK well they're coming back or they're not.' And then we had to say, 'Well what are their alternates?' So a lot of times there's characters that will fill their spot. You mean other than pulling out my hair and weeping at night, sort of, 'Oh my god, how am I going to do this?' It takes a lot of planning, obviously, but essentially what we did is we looked at it and said, 'Yeah we know that some of these guys are going to be dead. The big question we had is, 'How do you write a story where all the characters from the first game, or a lot of them, could be dead when you start out the second game?' We sent around email to everyone saying, 'What should we ask BioWare?' We discussed everything from the difficulties of penning a story for a game tons of choices to where BioWare currently stands on the portrayal of sweet, alien love-making. At PAX, we had a chance to catch up with Mac Walters, the lead writer for Mass Effect 2 at BioWare.

Bioware mac walters