This painting by artist Andrew Ryan (not that one) re-imagines the cast of Mass Effect as a band of warriors, mages, knights and archers from Dragon Age. The Normandy is a high dragon ridden by Joker, Garrus is an awesome crossbow-wielding knight, Jack's a blood mage elf, EDI is a golem. It works quite brilliantly.

Kotaku received word from the artist that the work was finally complete. Each character was designed separately before being combined in the final diorama. According to his Deviant Art page, Ryan is a recent graduate of the Manhattan School of Visual Arts and is "always looking for new and exciting art opportunities, primarily related to concept art/books illustration/ or card game art." Read on for more close ups of the individual characters. Which one is your favourite?

Executive producer of the Mass Effect series, Casey Hudson, has been asking fans where they'd like to see Mass Effect go next. "Parsing through your thoughts on the next #ME game," said Casey in a tweet spotted by Eurogamer, "Would you be more interested in a game that takes place before the trilogy, or after?" AFTER. No, wait. BEFORE. No wait, I DON'T CARE JUST LET ME BE A KROGAN.

The universe is left in quite a state after Mass Effect 3's ending, but it'd be possible to work around those multiple endings if the fourth game is set far enough in the future, and it'd be interesting to see how far each species has evolved in the centuries after the Reaper invasion. It'd also allow for the introduction of entirely new sentient species able to flourish in the wake of the Reapers' demise.

But there are many stories to be told before the trilogy takes place, too. There's the first contact war between the humans and Turians, and there's the situation that led to the creation of the Genophage. Of course, now Shepard's story is done, there's no reason we'd have to even play as a human in Mass Effect 4. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Jelly McJello, first Hanar Spectre. Oh yes.

ME4 is being developed by Bioware's Montreal studio while the folk at Edmonton work on something new. It'll use Frostbite, and will be “enhanced by many of the systems that the Dragon Age III team has already spent a lot of time building," according to Montreal studio director Yanick Roy. "You can still expect the pillars the franchise is known for to be fully intact though, including diverse alien races, a huge galaxy to explore, and of course rich, cinematic storytelling," he says.

What do you think, sequel or prequel?

Gamers on the Steam community forums, Reddit and the Call of Duty forums are reporting that when they try to install disc 2 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, they instead get Mass Effect 2. So that's what Treyarch meant when they said they were adding moral choices to the campaign.

Early reports were confirmed when PCGamesN discovered a video by zeroiez (embedded above) showing him inserting a CoDBlOps2 disc into his machine before getting a prompt to install BioWare's Mass Effect 2 instead.

Exactly how an EA game ended up in an Activision case is uncertain, but it's possible the two publishing giants contract the same company to produce discs, and there was a disc image mixup at the factory. We've reached out to Activision for comment.

So far the error seems to have affected a relatively small number of people, but if you're one of them your best bet is to use your CD key to download the game directly from Steam instead. I hope your internet is up to the task.

Meanwhile, we've got Martin hard at work playing the real Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 for our review. He's just gotten to the bit where you meet Garrus.

At some point between frantically disarming the 20th planet-devastating bomb and punching mono-gendered aliens in their vestigial fringe in Mass Effect, I realized the notion of more than one hero safeguarding the sprawling galaxy isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, it worked in Star Wars -- not only did Luke Skywalker's heroics mature only at the very end of Return of the Jedi (before that he mostly sat around complaining about power converters), they couldn't happen without the just-as-potent heroism of the people around him. To that end, BioWare Montreal Producer Fabrice Condominas told VG247 that Mass Effect 4 definitely won't include Shepard in any capacity.

"There is one thing we're absolutely sure of: There'll be no more Shepard, and the trilogy is over," Conominas said. "This is really our starting point. The Mass Effect universe is vast and very rich. So, at this point in time, we don’t even know what kind of time frame we’re going to be in. All we’re doing is gathering ideas from the teams and gathering feedback."

BioWare confirmed the development of the sci-fi fourth-quel shortly after co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk split from gaming for good mid-September. Like the eternal mystery of why Shepard's dance routine never improves, scant details surround the project.

"We don’t want to make ‘Shepard 2′ or Mass Effect 4 with like, ‘Oh, there’s no more Shepard, but you’re a soldier in the universe’," Conominas added. "So, this will be a very different context for sure. Nothing has been decided on the rest.”

While we wait for a dedicated team of modders to recreate the epic space battles of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, we'll have to make do with this ambitious, and very likely cease-and-desistable, Sins of a Solar Empire mod, based on the space operatics of Mass Effect. As briefly mentioned yesterday, Mass Effect: Dawn of the Reapers will feature three factions - the Council, Cerberus, and the Reapers - with "asymmetrical gameplay unique to each race." That presumably means the robotic death-gods will be as all-powerful as they were in BioWare's original trilogy.

Cerberus Skunkworks, the aptly named team behind it, are obviously adding a bunch of new models and weapons to the game, including - rather amazingly - the Crucible, the doomsday weapon from Mass Effect 3. Befitting its awesome power, the team reassure that it will be a "tough research" and "the very last thing on the tech tree". If it's not capable of wiping out every last unit on the map, they've missed a trick.

Though this stupidly exciting mod hasn't matured to the point of a beta version, there are several videos, a metric ton of concept images, and frequent updates on its moddb page. We'll let you know as soon as it's released - or as soon as it's been squashed under the steel-capped boots of EA's legal team. Whatever the case, we'll always have this moderately awesome trailer.

Today's serving of collection of news croutons is best paired with a baby spinach, bullets, and blasters. On the menu: Far Cry 3 system specs and a trailer, a Guild Wars 2 patch, dead people lusting for your flesh in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Rift's nose-tweak to Pandaria, and more.

Far Cry 3's system requirements includes one-time online activation instead of a persistent connection. Neat. Even better: Islands drive people insane. Wait, that might actually not be better on second thought.
Let's hope your windmills keep up with the shred-tastic music in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2's zombie mode reveal trailer.
The Secret World Issue #3--"The Cat God"--resumes Funcom's fast-paced update schedule with two new missions and a new load of Lairs.
Every pre-order for Rift: Storm Legion until October 3 donates $1 to the Pandas International charity. Cheeky, Trion--but clever.
Hearts of Iron III: Their Finest Hour's release trailer still doesn't explain how a heart entirely made of iron would work.
The latest Guild Wars 2 patch fixed up dungeon loot vendors and adjusted the difficulty of some story fixes, among numerous squashed bugs.
Patch 1.4 for Star Wars: The Old Republic zapped in from hyperspace this morning with a brand new Operation, planet, and obligatory loot.
The $60 Mass Effect Trilogy releases November 6 and packages the entirety of Shepard's saga in an appropriately sleek box.
"The poultry has been planted."

Mass Effect 3's Leviathan DLC will add extra dialogue to the ending according to code pulled from the recently released Extended Cut DLC. Eurogamer spotted chatter on this (very spoilery) Bioware forum thread, which contains a link to this pastebin with new script lines referring to the upcoming DLC pack.

And that's as much as I'll say about that in case your eyes betray you skip a few sentences and start automatically absorbing spoilers at a rate of three twists per minute. Like mercury sinking into skin, once that knowledge is in there, it ain't coming out. However, you might be interested in the other files found in recent Mass Effect 3 updates, which subtly hint at some DLC related to Mass Effect's wretched hive of scum and villainy, Omega. Mass Effect 3 spoilers lie ahead.

During Mass Effect 3, Omega is occupied by Cerberus, but there's some Aria dialogue hidden in the game files that hint at a mission to retake the space station from the Illusive Man. Some new weapon mod upgrades are contained within the recent Firefight DLC pack, with six "Omg" maps listed, including one called "OmgHub," suggesting that we could be revisiting Omega in a future chunk of DLC.

That'll be a bit further off, though, and there's still no release date for Leviathan. Here's the Leviathan trailer via IGN, snipped from the EA Summer Showcase.

The free Earth DLC for Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode is arriving tomorrow, adding six new powerful N7 elite characters three new weapons and three maps set in London, Rio and Vancouver. For those of us who play Mass Effect 3's surprisingly good multiplayer mode a lot, tomorrow is frankly too long to wait. I want to see the new Vanguard character have a swordfight with a Phantom right now. I want to see the new Sentinel's melee attack, which allows him to block an attack before finishing a foe with a deft backhand. And I want to see the new weapons, including the rapid fire shotgun and the noisy new submachinegun.

Luckily, Gamespot attended Comic-con 2012 over the weekend and took the chance to shoot the breeze and show footage of all of those things. Watch, and try to figure out how these characters can be used to beat the new Platinum difficulty setting, which Bioware's Mike Gamble admits is so hard that only a "handful of people at the office itself have ever beat it.”

Back in February, former BioWare writer Chris L'Etoile posted part of their office 'quotes file': a log of entertainingly out of context quotes from the developers as they worked on Mass Effect 1 and 2. I just stumbled on it over at the Broken Forum, and it's a funny and very human glimpse of life at a major game developer.

According to his page on the Mass Effect wiki, Chris wrote the dialogue for Ashley Williams, Thane, and Legion, amongst much else. He says he's left out anything non-development related or under NDA, and BioWare couldn't exactly fire him anyway: he's since left to work at Zenimax Online. That leaves 42 quotes - here are some of our favourites.

"Wow. There are 23 bugs about eyelids."
- Patrick

Preston: "Geopolitics wants us to change the name of the ship from 'Normandy.'"
Georg: "Why? Are they afraid Germans will be offended by the loss of France?"

"You don't need to call him a prick or a dick when you can call him an ass."
- Drew, on language standards

"It's like being hit by a truck. Well, a small truck. Driven by a circus clown."
- Preston, describing Telekinetic Throw

"How does any writing come out of this buffoon factory?"
- Preston

"Is your X-Box on fire? No? Build passed!"
- Mac

"You want a painting that says, "Wow! Look! It's SCIENCE!"
- Drew

Patrick: "I'll only be paying attention for the first 15 minutes. I'll spend the rest of the time playing rock, paper, scissors with myself."
Drew: "Is that a euphemism for masturbating?"
Patrick: "Only if I always choose rock."

"If we could give people a magic hat that would create for them the exact RPG experience they'd always dreamed of, they'd complain about the color of the hat."
-

"You didn't give life to any of the words in Mass Effect; you just killed the ones that didn't deserve to live."
- Drew, to Cookie the editor

"Cookie's making audio porn with the VO clips. She's turned Tali into the dirtiest cybernetic girl in the galaxy."
- JasonA

"Mac's in my office. He's holding a ping-pong paddle, so I figured he was ready for a meeting."
- Preston

"My youngest - he only sees me in the morning before I leave. So he now thinks 'da-da' means 'bye.' He'll wave to people leaving and say, 'Da-da!'"
- Mac, working crunch

Preston: "If your light content plot involves you killing ten panthers..."
ChrisL: "You're fired?"
JamesH: "No, you're going to Austin!"
* Note: James later went to Austin
** PCG note: BioWare Austin developed Star Wars MMO The Old Republic. Relatedly:

"The best jokes are the ones you need to patiently explain."
- ChrisP

See the full list here.

Bioware announce that they'll be releasing an extended cut of Mass Effect 3 that will expand upon its controversial ending with extra cinematics and epilogue scenes that aim to provide "more closure with even more context and clarity," and deliver an ending that "will feel more personalized for each player".

"Since launch, we have had time to listen to the feedback from our most passionate fans and we are responding. With the Mass Effect 3: Extended Cut we think we have struck a good balance in delivering the answers players are looking for while maintaining the team's artistic vision for the end of this story arc in the Mass Effect universe," says Bioware co-founder, Ray Muzyka.

Bioware announced that they'd be adding new "game content initiatives" a few weeks ago to cater to fans disappointed by Mass Effect 3's conclusion. The Extended Cut DLC is set to be released this summer, for free.

It's a bold move from Bioware, and it'll be interesting to see to what extent these extra bits alter perceptions of the finale. Will extended cutscenes and a bit of epilogue action be enough for fans who truly hated ME3's ending?