1Up - The Streamlined Future

1Up's The Grind column examines the recent GDC presentations by BioWare Christina Norman and Square Enix' Motomu Toriyama and found common ground, despite the wildly different approach:

And ultimately, I think this is what Final Fantasy and Mass Effect have in common: Both series are looking beyond their own boundaries for cues to growth and evolution. Cliff Bleszinski famously said last year that the future of first-person shooters is RPGs, but more realistically the future of games is the blurring and breaking down of genre boundaries. Every genre has a little bit of RPG in it somewhere these days, and the RPG needs to continue to evolve in order to keep from seeming like a relic. Neither Toriyama nor Norman had much to say about the future of their respective series, but both made it clear that neither Mass Effect nor Final Fantasy will be lingering around the point they started, either.