As the spiritual successor to BioWare's Baldur's Gate, one of the most successful role-playing games in the industry, Dragon Age: Origins represents BioWare's return to its roots, delivering a fusion of the best elements of existing fantasy works with stunning visuals, emotionally-driven narrative, heart-pounding combat, powerful magic abilities and credible digital actors. The spirit of classic RPGs comes of age, as Dragon Age: Origins features a dark and mature story and gameplay.

BioWare will be demonstrating some of the compelling features of Dragon Age: Origins behind closed doors at E3, including:

- Epic Party-Based Combat - Dragon Age: Origins will introduce an innovative, scalable combat system, as players face large-scale battles and use their party's special abilities to destroy hoardes of enemies and massive creatures.
- Powerful Magic - Raining down awesome destruction on enemies is even more compelling as players apply "spell combos," a way of combining together different spells to create emergent unique effects.
- Deep Customization - Players will develop their characters and gain powerful special abilities (spells, talents and skills) and discover ever-increasing weapons of destruction.
- Your Story, Your Way - With its emotionally compelling story, players choose with whom they wish to forge alliances or crush under their mighty fist, redefining the world with the choices they make and how they wield their power.
- Origin Stories - Players will select and play a unique prelude that provides the lens through which the player sees the world and how the world sees the player. The player's choice of Origin will determine who they are and where they begin the adventure, as they play through a customized story opening that profoundly impacts the course of every adventure.

Dragon Age: Origins is scheduled to ship for the PC in early 2009

A release window has been officially confirmed as early next year, and the game will ship exclusively on PC.

Lots is being made of its dark fantasy setting, which promises to be mature and littered with "credible" characters and voice acting. It is expected to be a "gritty" and "emotionally intense" epic.

Specifically we're told to expect a party-based system that scales from small encounters up to "hordes" of baddies and "massive creatures".

Players will be able to combine spells to create new effects, and there will be spells, skills and talents to customise characters with. Also, lots of magical loot.