In DAO, everything revolves around the battle against the Blight and the Dark Spawn. A very long time ago, mages were the undisputed rulers of the Dragon Age world, but in their arrogance they decided to create a portal to the celestial home of the Creator in order to take his place. Unfortunately for them, the Golden City, as Heaven was known at the time, became corrupted and was transformed in the Dark City, while the mages that attempted this celestial coup became corrupted themselves, thus becoming the first Dark Spawn.

Furious at their insolence, the Creator banished the mages back to earth, and they were forced underground due to their aversion to light. Then they started worshiping dragons, which were themselves banished by the Creator as punishment for lying to the humans and pretending to be Gods. This is why the Dark Spawn are relentlessly looking for dragons, and when they find one, it becomes corrupted, so much so that it transforms into an Arch Demon, which then leads his minions to the surface in a campaign of conquest and destruction. This is known as the Blight. To counter this menace, the humans formed the order of the Grey Wardens, whose primary objective is to battle the Blight. However, after the last invasion was repelled, the humans believed that the Dark Spawn are no longer a threat, so at the beginning of the game, when a new Arch Demon appears, the number of Grey Wardens is greatly reduced.​

One of the interesting features of DAO will be the Origin chapters, three to four hours long, which will determine how your character views the world and how the world perceives him (or her). Serving as a prologue, they will paint a picture of the universe you are in, and the characters you encounter in this introductive part may even appear later on as adversaries, depending on the decisions you make. The dialogues will also be specific to the character you create (...)​

Aside from the player character being treated according to his Origin story, we were shown how quests can be solved in various ways. As a very simple example, there was a prisoner who begged us to bring him some food and water, rewarding us with a key to a chest containing some magic potions if we did. One of the options was to convince the guard to give up his food ration. The poor sod was about to be executed anyway, but it still took some persuasion.

Another option was to find out where the chest and the key were, and then kill the prisoner. But that meant that the guard would have some questions for us, with a new variety of options to deal with this new situation, the most radical being “I’m a Grey Warden and I don’t have to justify myself to you”. The end result was the same, as the guard left us alone, but Dan Tudge explained that these outbursts will be counted in the grand scheme of things and in the end we will have to face the consequences of our decisions. We were also told that “playing nice” won't always be the best course of action.​