“If we drag up the fantasy we like, much of the stuff we think of as special isn’t necessarily that well remembered today: Frank Herbert’s Dune, the stuff that Michael Moorcock did, Robert E Howard. Those things were fantasy before the actual idea of a fantasy genre,” continues Ahlgren.

“And they’ve been slightly sidelined but are still so great with so many cool things to think about. And even Star Wars is more like science-fantasy to us than science-fiction. Those kind of epic stories are very much what we’re aiming for.”

A major part of this feel lies in the remarkable creatures that populate AionGuard’s world, bringing a Jurassic scale to its human civilisation. But we’re shot a dark look when we refer to the flying beasts as dragons. “They are natural beasts of the world, they are not dragons,” insists Magnus Nedfors, the game’s director. “They’re not an intelligent race, they’re more like horses, and different tribes tame and use these beasts in their normal lives. If you want to be mean to their design they are a transportation system, as well as combat vessels.” That fly and breathe firebolts.

To be fair to AionGuard, the non-dragons are hardly the sole occupants of its bestiary, joined by countless other walking, slashing and flying creatures. “The mounts let us change the pace and scale of the game easily and seamlessly. We had an idea that we wanted all the beasts of the world to have equivalents to modern vehicles – the one you saw would be the equivalent of a fighter jet; there are others that might be more like a hobby plane; there are slow-moving beasts of burden that are like trucks or tractors. There are speedy lizards that can’t fly, which are Christofer’s contribution.”

It brings us to AionGuard themselves, the right arm of the Aiwon civilisation, who bond for life with a symbiotic armour that grants awesome magical powers. “The AionGuard are elites, anointed ones who wield terrible forces and serve as inspiration to the general army,” says Ahlgren. “They are like a mix of WWI dogfighter pilots, Samurai and medieval knights. But instead of swords and aeroplanes they wield magic.”

Their powers are remarkable in effect rather than their inspiration: projectile attacks of fire and ice that crash weightily or freeze enemies, shattering them into icicles that pierce their comrades, or the transcendence magic that binds an enemy in place as the battlemage circles, raining down offensive spells. There are no swords tucked away in that armour: “It’s a shooting mechanic at the core,” says Nedfors. “The spells are used close-up, there’s no melee attack, and the goal is to have a number of spells that we can combine in different ways, to let the player be creative and find out things about their arsenal. This means we need to find a balance. My favourite games that have done that is the Devil May Cry series, where a player can just mash buttons and they think they look really cool. I’m not that great at it, but when you watch pro players play you understand the game in a different way.”

This focus on combat is the result of your character’s relatively straightforward mission: re-conquer the world after the near-destruction of the Aiwon civilisation. This is an open world with narrative goals that are also structurally convenient, that divides its geography into regions and asks a question: how are you going to invade and take them back? There are two ways to begin.