By Joseph Leray
For “Mass Effect” obsessives like myself, the most recent of the sci-fi series’ numerous dust-ups has been what to call the next installment. “To call the next game ‘Mass Effect 4’ or ‘ME4’ is doing it a disservice and seems to cause a lot of confusion here,” Chris Priestly, BioWare’s community manager, explained on their forums.
“We have already said that the Commander Shepard trilogy is over and that the next game will not feature him/her. That is the only detail you have on the game,” he continued. “I see people saying ‘Well, they’ll have to pick a canon ending.’ No, because the game does not have to come after. Or before. Or off to the side. Or with characters you know.”
Yannick Roy, the head of the BioWare Montreal studio working on the ambiguously-named title, later dropped in to clarify his colleague’s somewhat testy assertions: “Thinking of the next ‘Mass Effect’ game as ‘Mass Effect 4’ would imply a certain linearity, a straight evolution of the gameplay and story of the first three games.”
Read More...
"Mass Effect" fans desperate for details on BioWare's sequel are in luck; we've just been told a teaser trailer for "Mass Effect 2" has 
I haven't played "Baldur's Gate," but I have played BioWare's spiritual successor, "Dragon Age: Origins," and after a 10-minute session (albeit one without a proper tutorial), it planted the idea this style of RPG might not resonate with players who've come to expect differently from BioWare. 
BioWare announced "Mass Effect" as a sci-fi trilogy, but the studio made no such declarations with "Dragon Age," a return to their PC-based "Baldur's Gate" roots, a conscious decision by the "Dragon Age" team, the game's exec. producer told me last week.