Dragon Age: Origins

Our fans are definitely very excited; they've been waiting a long time for a fantasy RPG from BioWare and we defintely showed them what they wanted to see.

Well we've always said we were going to deliver a core fantasy RPG experience for our core users; this is like we mentioned at E3 of really returning to our roots. This was really the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and honestly I think we really delivered on that.

The actual Origins stories are actually your first two hours of gameplay, where you actually play your origins. And the choices that you make within your origin stories really change the lens on the way you perceive the world and the way the world perceives you. What's unique there is not just selecting your class, your character - although you are doing all of that, but you're actually playing your origins, playing the birth of your character. Honestly, rather than just selecting your character class, you're actually role-playing your character right from the very beginning and creating that character.

I can't really go into the full details, but a subtle Origins example is something that I found very emotionally compelling. I was playing one of our origins stories and I actually had a situation where I had a very, very close friend within my origin... And to become a Grey Warden I had to make a difficult choice and had to leave my friend behind to what I felt was certain death. Playing through the game several hours later, I was actually doing a dungeon crawl underneath the city and I came across a prison area, and one of the individuals in one of the prison cells was my friend that I left behind, and I was actually elated because I had the opportunity to actually save him. Now I had picked any other origins he would have been some non-discreet player, but to me he was my friend. So it's a very subtle thing but very emotionally compelling.

I'm not, obviously, going to give away any spoilers, and you'll see much more at Leipzig about what we're doing with origin stories.

Absoulety it is not, yeah. We're based entirely on our own rule-set. We spent a lot of time developing the Dragon Age universe, and really the rule-set within the universe, the fiction within the universe, the characters, the people that inhabit it, the creatures... Dragon Age: Origins is really just the beginning, the first entertainment that we can put in the universe. We've got a lot of great plans for the universe.

I talked a little bit at E3 about the spell combos, which is a feature I'm really, really excited about, where you can actually use spells to interact with each other. We hope this encourages a lot of exploration and experimentation. I've often used two mages in my party, which is really awesome because we can sort of tag-team spells together. Obviously, as well, all the classes have talents and skills, and all of those through levelling up can be grown.