It wants you to think, to immerse yourself in cultural conflicts that don't try very hard to conceal their real life parallels, to juggle questions of faith and free will, justice and security, revenge and passion.

Choosing to save or destroy some sacred ashes feels like small beans next to some of the decisions you have to make here. Things still have a natural tendency to eventually boil down to either-or choices, but the path to get there at least takes you through a lot of grey areas. Often, the best you can hope for is to pick the lesser of two evils.

If the gloriously messy stat-heavy guts of the RPGs of old are being carved out and replaced by simple mechanisms, it's not because the Bioware designers want to appeal to drooling simpletons. It's because they want us to engage with story rather than statistics.

Eurogamer: I've seen scores as low as a 6/10 - what do you think when you read those?

Mike Laidlaw: Well it's hard to know exactly what's going on with scores that are really, really negative. One possible culprit could just be a change backlash, i.e. this isn't Origins and I wanted Origins 2. There may be some degree of what I would honestly say is emotional investment in the Origins story, or in the way Origins was presented which is leading to a stronger than average reaction of disappointment. That's understandable, and if anything that really is a compliment to the work on Origins. I'm not sure it's an entirely fair assessment to say all games must be like the previous game. I think we would have seen just as much negativity if we just, as I used to joke, stapled two Archdemons together and called it a super blight. It boils down to a game that challenges a fair amount of convention: it doesn't tell the usual fantasy story or present the usual fantasy combat, and in doing so it does run the risk of someone going, "Wow, this is just too different and I cannot handle it."