Well…Star Wars: The Old Republic is now free-to-play, officially. Will it be a net benefit to the game? It’s probably too early to tell, but at least BioWare Austin have been keeping on top of player concerns about the transition thus far, making concessions and adjustments as needed. The Cartel Market, for subscribers, is also now in full swing, and BioWare have continued the trend of publishing companion bios to bolster interest in the game.

Oh, and hey…Gamasutra has another GDC Vault embed up, this one being Rich Vogel and Dallas Dickinson’s presentation about the design foundations of the Star Wars-themed MMORPG.

As was confirmed last week, Dragon Age 3 is going to incorporate tons of customizations and lots of detailed environments. On these fronts, at least, it sounds like BioWare have learned a thing or three from the criticisms that many fans leveled at Dragon Age 2. We’ve also learned a few more things about the game since then, most of them promising-sounding…although some people will no doubt complain about the fact that the player’s character in Dragon Age 3 can only ever be a human, and not any of the other fantasy races that populate Thedas. But that issue aside, much of what we’ve learned about the game sounds extremely promising. Will it be enough? Will BioWare bounce back?

Mass Effect 3: Paragon Lost, the somewhat delayed Funimation movie centered around the character of James Vega from Mass Effect 3, is still not in wide release yet, but nine minutes of footage have been posted online…and they are (bizarrely) far less terrible than one might expect. The much-rumoured Mass Effect movie, meanwhile, has evidently had a proposed script rejected; another writer has evidently been called in.