Mass Effect 4 will be friendly to both old and new players, according to BioWare Montreal’s studio director Yannick Roy. It also sounds like BioWare’s new IP – which is being developed right now by the core KOTOR team – is making good progress.

OXM spotted a few tasty nuggets from the studio on Twitter, starting with Roy’s response to Mass Effect 4 fan questions.

The first question below refers to Mass Effect’s Genesis ‘catch-up’ system, which relays the events of previous games to players and lets them make choices to help mould their character and world.

@simonjthomas Too soon to say, but we'll be sure to be friendly both to old fans and to newcomers. — Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) July 16, 2013

Mass Effect’s open-minded approach to sexuality and relationships will not waver it seems, as Roy confirmed fans have nothing to worry about.

@AC_E There is no reason to believe otherwise at this point, don't worry! 🙂 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 — Yanick Roy (@YanickRRoy) July 9, 2013

Meanwhile, BioWare’s new, unannounced IP was confirmed as in-development by Casey Hudson. He confirmed the team is made up of the core Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic developers who have worked at the core of Mass Effect all these years.

Most of our core team that worked on SWKOTOR has been together throughout the Mass Effect series, and now our new IP project. #KOTOR10 — Casey Hudson (@CaseyDHudson) July 15, 2013

Finally, the project’s senior producer Jonathan Warner suggested that the project is moving along nicely:

A successful first project review for our new IP project today. Life is good! — Jonathan Warner (@Bio_Warner) July 16, 2013

What we know of Mass Effect 4 is that it will run in Frostbite 2 and it will not star Shepard.

In fact, BioWare Montreal told me last year that it absolutely doesn’t want to simply make Mass Effect 4’s hero ‘Shepard 2’. Check out what hey said about this mysterious character here.