For Mass Effect, developer BioWare studied the basics of cinema to make the conversations between characters look cinematic. All Mass Effect images © BioWare Corp.

"One of the achievements of cinematic design was creating systems that gave us a good head start in creating content, such as the digital acting and the camera work," says Ken Thain, lead cinematics designer. "We had cinematography tools that allowed us to add depth of field to camera shots automatically, and that would allow facial expressions on the digital character just by choosing an emotion."

While Mass Effect was built on top of the Unreal 3 game engine, which BioWare licensed from Epic, enough customization and proprietary tools have been added to make the engine essentially a proprietary one.

The tools made it possible to place the camera for a close-up or an establishing shot "just by assigning a number to a line," he says. "We were able to generate a lot of high quality content in a short amount of time."

That was important with more than 20,000 lines of dialog written and recorded for the game. Still, it was also important to have the cinematics match the story and emotions of the characters within it. Thus, the tools also allowed for an easy override of the auto-generated material.

"If I'd created a digital acting performance where I just felt that line or that moment needed a bit more attention, I could jump in and modify it and up the dramatic level of he performance," he says.

The digital acting performance in Mass Effect was important to BioWare. Between 2,500 and 5,000 of the game's 20,000 lines required some extra attention and were tweaked.

Between 2,500 and 5,000 of the game's 20,000 lines required some extra attention, Thain offers. "We'd go in and tweak the performance a little bit, either through a facial expression or a body gesture or camera move to bring out the cinematic elements."

Thain says one of the goals of the game was to elevate the cinematic element for an RPG. "The history of cinema within games is rocky at best," he continues. "There's been some real glowing examples and some titles that have failed to meet that goal. But we really sat down and said, 'OK, what is it about cinema that keeps people interested? What's the grammar of film that has people understand the message and the stories?'"

After studying films by the likes of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, they introduced more film techniques into the game, including the use of depth of field, motion blur and trying to match the types of lenses cinematographers would use for similar shots. "It was really about raising the bar for cinema within the game to a level that the average person playing, the casual gamer, would relate to it a lot stronger," says Thain.

Planning all this out required close collaboration with the game's developers and writers -- a task made easier by their all being in-house at BioWare's offices in Edmonton, Alberta.

"If I needed to talk to a writer he was just down the hall," Thain says. "That level of accessibility within the team was really strong."