Drew Karpyshyn
Karpyshyn is the writer BioWare kept losing and kept getting back. A Canadian who works in games and in prose, he was senior writer on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic in 2003 and lead writer on the first two Mass Effect games, which is to say he wrote the conversation trees a generation of players still quote at each other.
The credit that explains the rest is earlier: Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, in 2000. That is the tradition he comes out of, where a companion is defined by the argument you can have with him rather than by his stat block, and it carries straight through to the Normandy. His particular skill is the branching scene that lands emotionally no matter which branch the player takes, which is far harder than writing one good version of it.
He also writes the novels around his own games and around other people's. Mass Effect: Revelation, Ascension and Retribution fill in backstory the games only gesture at, and the Star Wars books, the Darth Bane origin story and the two Old Republic tie-ins, do the same for a universe he did not build. He left BioWare in 2012 to concentrate on his own Chaos Born fantasy novels, returned in 2015, and announced a second departure in March 2018 to go back to independent work.
Books (7)
Games (3)
Where to start with Drew Karpyshyn
Start with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It is the cleanest demonstration of what he does, a Star Wars story that works because of how the party members argue with you, and it still reads as the template for everything BioWare made afterwards. Then Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which packages the trilogy whose first two entries he led.
For the books, Mass Effect: Revelation is the right door, since it introduces people the first game assumes you already care about, and Mass Effect Ascension follows straight on. On the Star Wars side Darth Bane: Path of Destruction is the better novel, harder and colder than the tie-ins, though Star Wars - The Old Republic - Revan is the one to read if a certain game left you with questions. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn is the outlier here and the ancestor of all of it.
Drew Karpyshyn on CrossBinge
- Companion guide: BioWare: Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect and the Art of the Choice