Mass Effect 4 and Dragon Age 3: Inquisition will share several common features under the hood, developer BioWare has confirmed. The first draft of Mass Effect 4’s design document has also been completed.

First pass at Design Document for the next Mass Effect! #sorryforthetrees pic.twitter.com/EMG2QS4lie — Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) June 18, 2013

There it is; Mass Effect 4 in design document form. Don’t you wish you could just open it up and read it all cover-to-cover?

Well, BioWare Montreal studio director Yanick Roy followed up this teasing tweet by saying that the Mass Effect 4 team has pinched several systems from the Dragon Age 3 team:

@shinobi602 Don't worry: we have a large and talented team, we started a while ago, and we are "borrowing" a lot of game systems from DA3. — Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) June 18, 2013 Subscribe to the VG247 newsletter Get all the best bits of VG247 delivered to your inbox every Friday! Enable JavaScript to sign up to our newsletter

@chris23651 @shinobi602 Yes, since we share engine, we can start from some of DA3's core systems instead of from scratch. — Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) June 19, 2013

So does this mean an open world, like Dragon Age 3’s? What do you think?

BioWare is keeping coy about Mass Effect 4’s innards for now, as it’s clearly a long way off, but we do know that it won’t star Shepard. In fact, BioWare told me last year that the hero won’t just be ‘Shepard 2’ in terms of background and motivation. They will be a new character altogether.

What do you make of the above?

Thanks CVG.