Good news for all you Mass Effect fans (or Tibby fans, for that matter):

First pass at Design Document for the next Mass Effect! #sorryforthetrees pic.twitter.com/EMG2QS4lie

— Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) June 18, 2013

Development on the game has been proceeding for a while now, of course, and it was also revealed (again, by Roy) that the Montreal-based team developing the game will be borrowing many game systems from the Dragon Age: Inquisition team in Edmonton. Which makes a fair bit of sense, since both games are being built atop the Frostbite 3 engine. Whether this means that Mass Effect 4 will turn out to offer the same expansive areas that the semi-open-world Inquisition evidently boasts remains to be seen; it would appear that the collaboration is more focused on core systems than anything else.

In other Mass Effect news, Pure Sophistry published the second part of their interview with former BioWare writer Drew Karypshyn, in which the author talks about his role in helping create the franchise’s universe and lore. He actually tries to dodge answering questions about Mass Effect 3 specifically, since he had essentially no input into it, but he did talk about some of the ideas that BioWare had been tossing around for how to end the series while he was still working on it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has begun offering “double XP” weekends again, by the way. If you were looking to level up in the game, Friday through Sunday would be a good span of time to block off for that purpose.

EA have clarified that Dragon Age: Inquisition really, properly, shouldn’t be called Dragon Age 3; BioWare really want to hammer home the idea that the narrative of the series is non-linear, and that (once again) the next Dragon Age game won’t directly follow after its prequel in linear fashion.

Which…probably means we won’t be playing the game as Hawke, or as our character from Origins.

Anyhow, there was also a cursory preview of the game published last week, as well as this interview with BioWare’s Aaryn Flynn about it.

BioWare also announced last week that they’ll be at the San Diego Comic Con. The GDC Vault, meanwhile, featured David Gaider’s talk on sexism and sexuality in video games last week; that might be of interest to some of you. Or not.