Dragon Age: Origins

No matter - however your party's made-up, Dragon Age gives you some entertaining options, the first party using its mage's deadly feminine wiles to intimidate the guard into letting them past, while the second, predictably, lets the eight-foot warrior handle the negotiations. Rather less predictably, however, he turns out to be the softer touch of the two, choosing not to threaten the guard with violence, but bribe him with the prospect of some home-made cookies. Just to be clear: not making this bit up. Cookies and sex, eh? Three minutes in and it's already hard to tell which side of the Canadian border BioWare is generally found on.

Differing parties has given us a nice range of options, then, but it's hardly an earth-shattering example of game divergence. On the other bank of the river, however, events quickly get a lot more complex. Heading into a mysterious Mage Tower, fraught with all kinds of deadly supernatural hi-jinks, both parties are met by Gregor, the captain of the Templars. Depending on the choices made earlier in the story, players may or may not have already met Gregor (one team has, in this case, and one hasn't) and if they haven't, they won't be aware that he can't be trusted - an important piece of information that could result in a rather different interpretation of the wider mission.

From there, things get even more complicated, when both parties come across a powerful mage named Wynne further on in the tower. One of the two groups we're following is able to recruit her into the team - a bonus, as she's the most powerful healer in the entire game - while the other (it's all because of that pesky sexy sorceress again - and a couple of clumsy dialogue decisions) quickly falls out with her and has to fight her to the death. Clubbing a nice magical old lady into the ground is bad enough in any circumstances, but when Wynne finally expires, we're immediately shown a brief film detailing her potential impact on the rest of the game - what the world could have looked like, in other words, if we hadn't just put our enchanted shoe through her head. It seems we'll be missing out on quite a bit.

It's seamlessly done: small choices making invisible ripples that spread throughout the narrative, often causing the unlikeliest of consequences. But the real kicker comes at the end of the presentation when we realise what we've been shown: two or three decisions, some made early on in the game, some playing out in conversations, significantly impacting just 10 minutes of gameplay, in a game that eventually clocks in at about 60 hours. The potential is staggering.

Two PCs and two monitors is an effective way for the developer to make a point, but perhaps it's also a sign of nervousness on the part of BioWare - a move suggesting that the team isn't sure people have quite clicked with the property yet, confused by the muddle of sex and violence that's been shown so far, or unsure of what to make of the game's unusually dark take on fantasy. There's also the wider question of how, with its dozens of spells and handful of party members to control, the game will work when it's running on a console instead of a PC, and that, luckily, is where the next stop on our mini-tour of Dragon Age takes us.