I’m still really looking forward to the conclusion of BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy with the final installment — Mass Effect 3 — due out this March. I’ve nurtured three different characters along the path set out by the first two games, and ensured that each character made wildly different personal and moral decisions along the way. I’m hoping — possibly against hope — that BioWare will have the necessary courage as a developer to thrust wildly different outcomes upon my three characters, attaching huge and significant consequences to each decision they have made along the way.

Failing that, I’m looking forward to three more outings at three very different Commander Shepards, and to a well-told action-RPG tale with the fate of the Earth and the galaxy hanging in the balance.

BioWare will, of course, be releasing a Mass Effect 3 demo prior to the game’s launch.

It has, since that tweet was sent, been confirmed that said demo will be released on February 14th, 2012…because apparently people who would actually bother to play a demo for Mass Effect 3 wouldn’t have anything better to do on that day anway.

And of course: the Mass Effect 3 demo will unlock a couple special items — weapons and armour — in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which will have been out for a week by Valentine’s Day.

Mass Effect 3 will be an Origin exclusive at launch.

That means you won’t be able to buy it through Steam or any other digital distribution service, at least not initially. That said, the game will only require a one-time authorization against the Origin servers; the single-player game will not require a continuous online connection.

GameInformer has a preview of Mass Effect 3, of course.

And a “lawyer-friendly” summary has been posted to the BioWare Social forums.

Be warned: spoilers at the link!

The voice acting of Mass Effect 3.

A new trailer gives you a peek at the recording sessions for Commander Shepard’s lines.

Casey Hudson talks about Mass Effect 3‘s game modes.

For those of you who haven’t heard, BioWare is shipping ME3 with three different game modes: role-playing mode (which offers the vanilla experience, story mode (which tones down the combat and makes it a bit harder to die), and action mode (which automates most of the dialogue responses and amps up the action).

And actually, I kind of like this idea, because it caters to different player types without (hopefully without) sacrificing too much in the way of what enthusiasts of any one particular game type are looking for.

Also, from the full interview that Joystiq links to, there is this interesting element:

There is a progression mechanic to the story…which is that it is in a way almost a World War II story. Since everyone is involved, you want the war to go well so that you have high morale and you have people that are going to fight. You want to conquer territories so that you have lots of assets at your disposal. That?s part of what you?re doing as Commander Shepard is the war to obtain all these assets. Some of those come through in the high-level story ? large campaigns that involve entire civilizations. What you do in those missions to resolve those storylines will give you some really big assets, like the Quarian fleet, massive armies, and stuff like that.

This sounds promising, and offers a tease of certain strategic management elements in the game. May I just say: I do so hope!

And, of course, the game’s system requirements have been released.

They’re about what you’d expect for a cross-platform Unreal Engine 3 game. Nothing too steep.