BioWare have promised that the next Mass Effect game — currently being worked on by their Montreal studio — will appeal to both longtime fans of the series and to newcomers. Which I suppose is standard boilerplate these days for studios; is there a developer out there that doesn’t want to both retain their extant audience and grow that audience with successive titles in a series?

It was also confirmed this week that the core team that worked on Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect at BioWare Edmonton are hard at work on a new sci-fi RPG IP. This includes Mass Effect producer Casey Hudson.

We actually first heard about this a while ago, although for the life of me I can’t find the link to where I first reported on it just now. I had speculated, at one point, that perhaps the team working on this IP would be moved over to develop a new Star Wars title in the wake of EA and Disney signing an exclusive deal concerning that IP, but it would appear that this is not the case.

BioWare has been adding new content to Star Wars: The Old Republic, however, and is already looking toward the update that will follow next month’s update to the MMORPG.

As well, the BioWare panel at PAX Australia let slip a number of details about BioWare’s aims for Dragon Age: Inquisition, almost all of which sound like very positive steps for the franchise…and positive advertisments for the game. Diversity of environments, exploration, potential upheavals to the dialogue system, combat that balances between Dragon Age 2’s kinetic “fluidity” and Dragon Age: Origins’ tactical battles…and of course the sense that this will be a game of a much larger scale than either of its predecessors.