It has been confirmed that Morrigan will not be featured as a party member in Dragon Age: Inquisition, although her ultimate fate will be decided in the game, and she will play a significant role in the game.

And I think it might have been mentioned last week that playable races — elves and dwarves, in addition to humans — were returning to the Dragon Age series with Inquisition. If not, well…they are, and now you know. I guess BioWare put that release delay to good use!

GameInformer has some footage of how combat will work in Inquisition. Several developers comment on the changes coming in Inquisition, including some neat features where different circumstances can combine to aid — or inconvenience — a player in attacking an enemy. And AusGamers managed to snag an interview with BioWare’s Cameron Lee about the game.

There was also a spin-off game, Heroes of Dragon Age, announced for mobile today. It seems like a fairly straight-up brawler title, with a Dragon Age veneer.

GameInformer is running a feature right now which purports to examine the best BioWare characters through the years. RPGamer, meanwhile, editorializes on the matter of sequel slump, and puts some focus in particular on Mass Effect 2.

Speaking of Mass Effect…check out this papier mache statue of Jack from Mass Effect. This offer, in which you can win a voicemail greeting recorded by Mark “Commander Shepard” Meer. It’s part of the Drop Zone charity auction here in Edmonton.

The latest patch for Star Wars: The Old Republic brought a number of tweaks to the game’s PvP component.

And circling back to Dragon Age for a minute…it was a busy week for writers that have worked on that series. Story lead David Gaider had some interesting things to say about the makeup of storytelling teams in the modern age, and of course there was the whole Jennifer Helper story that lit up the pages, real and virtual, of the gaming press over the weekend. Helper is leaving BioWare to pursue freelance and textbook-writing work, but of course this departure got caught up in another story about the death threats she and her family received over Dragon Age 2…a bit of local flavour on a industry-spanning story about fan entitlement gone ugly.