Mass Effect 2 Interview

Joystiq has posted the results of a conversation they had with Mass Effect 2 lead writer Mac Walters during this year's Penny Arcade Expo. The focus shifts between all three games in the series, though, so there's something here for everyone:
You've written a lot of dialogue. Do you have like a ballpark figure? Like how much dialogue you've done? Like hours, pages?

I can tell you line count. So Mass Effect 1 was about 26,000 lines but that includes things like sound sets, that includes all the lines of dialogue that we have, everything that's VO'd. We're close to about 30,000 on Mass Effect 2. Yeah. So we've actually gone up. It wasn't our intention, but what we've talked about already was the choices, right? We had to account for multiple variations of things. And the game is a bit wider. There is a bit more options. So I think that's partly why it bloated a little bit. It's funny though because we actually, I think the take back is one of the things we tried to do was reduce the overall words per line; trying to make it a quicker dialogue experience. So I think the word count is similar but the actual line count is higher.