It's also fascinating when origin NPCs have a life beyond these beginning tales. As you play through the game your origins are meshed with the overall narrative thrust of the game to such an extent that you struggle to imagine what would be happening to someone with a different background. These origins work brilliantly, not only as individual cases of playable lore but also in personalising the 70+ hours of gametime ahead of you.

Ferelden is far from a happy land of faerie-folk. It's in these origin tales that -BioWare begin as they mean to go on -covering themes of racial intolerance, power hunger, and institutional oppression, while spicing each one up with topics like child murder and gangrape. Whether you're a posh dwarf, a common dwarf, a mage, a City Elf, a noble human or a Dalish elf hiding out in the forest, no-one gets it particularly easy. Once you've selected your character, played around with their facial features, class and what-not you gallivant off into one of six separate two and a half hour(ish) prologues detailing your character's last traumatic experiences of his/her former life. In fact the whole piece feels like a Dorian Gray portrait of Middle-Earth - a familiar landscape tinged with an extra darkness, abused power and intolerance. As a fantasy world it's up there on a par with that of The Lord of The Rings' setting. The land of Ferelden feels real to the touch, so layered is it in history and so plagued by political and racial turmoil. BioWare have taken the complexities, bottomless depth and sheer epic nature of their early RPGs and mixed in the wit, pace and mind-bogglingly threaded and context-sensitive dialogue of their later Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect to astounding effect. In other games you hammer the keyboard to cycle through the chit-chat to get back into the action, in Dragon Age when you strike up a conversation you settle back in your chair and turn up the volume. These nascent psychological stirrings can only have been prompted by the fact that Dragon Age: Origins has some of the best realised characters, greatest storylines and most natural free-flowing dialogue ever ladled onto a PC's hard drive. When this business with the darkspawn is over, why don't we buy a cottage in the Ferelden countryside and hang out all the time? I often don't equip him with a helmet just so I can see his face. Say me and my gang are wandering through the Blight-ravaged wilderness and Alistair is cracking a joke with my other pals - good-girl paladin-type Leliana, and vampish side-boob witch Morrigan - even though we're in the middle of nowhere I just turn around to watch him. I equip him with all the best weaponry, I make sure he's satisfactorily buffed at all times. I haven't told him, as dialogue hasn't opened that up as an option, but he's probably worked it out as I take him everywhere I go.

I've developed a total boycrush on a friend called Alistair. Something Strange Is happening to me, and I hope you don't feel it rude if I share a little.

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