Star Wars: The Old Republic saw the addition of the Ancient Hypergate warzone just under week ago. The same update that introduced it, update 1.6, also introduced a bunch of changes to PvP and PvE gear, setting up what some have called “power creep”, but which seems to actually be a fairly positive thing overall when the long-term prospects of the game are considered.

However, the SWTOR-related article of the week comes from Gamasutra, and argues at length that the game’s free-to-play implementation is, overall, an exceedingly bad move for the game. It’s a lengthy one, but well worth the read.

Mass Effect was released for PlayStation 3 last week, and a few gaming sites — GameInformer and Eurogamer, most notably — have published performance comparisons of it against the Xbox version.

Also, a rumour that popped up and was subsequently rejected in the span of a day last week suggested that we should expect to see a new Mass Effect game in 2014 or 2015. Which actually doesn’t sound all that unrealistic, come to think of it.

BioWare will be presenting at GDC 2013, by the way. Oh, and don’t miss Rowan Kaiser’s analysis of how KOTOR (and also Morrowind) influenced RPGs.

Oh, and it should surprise nobody that Mass Effect was quickly blamed for the tragic shooting that took place on Newton, Connecticut, last week. It should also surprise nobody that such reports proved to be absurdly incorrect.