“Let’s say you fly in over a new region – the commander of the army might contact you and give you a number of recon missions,” offers Nedfors. “That’s what the military is interested in in a new area. Then it’s all about exploration for the player. You can travel with different attitudes – flying in on a big beast will probably see you getting attacked, but you can be a bit quieter about it.” What if you’ve already seen that area on your travels without being contacted? “You’ve still done that piece of the game, so you get all the benefits from it,” says Nedfors.

Nedfors is desperate to emphasise that AionGuard’s missions are designed to go up against the finest set-pieces videogaming has to offer, rather than the usual open-world fare. “We don’t have to restrain ourselves to walking up to a person for a mission, we can do something better than that. Rather than repeating ten moments, we put the resources into doing one moment really well.”

The game’s mechanics will apparently provide the moments of story-changing importance. Ahlgren proffers the example of Helm’s Deep: “Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan, when they break down from the hills, that’s a great moment in the story as well as a great action sequence. The quests carry story in the fantastic places and scenes you will see. In the military missions those ‘wow’ moments are the mechanics – like changing into a golem.” Ah, yes. Golems.

This was another proof-of-technology for the game’s major risks, that now stands as a fine showcase for its special sense of scale. The warrior-wizard stands in verdant countryside, hundreds of enemies approaching in formation. He begins casting a spell and the environment reacts, with soft petals lifting from the ground, accelerating into a vortex around him. The grass follows, and sods of earth are soon ripping out of the ground, growing larger until the stone beneath is torn into the air. This maelstrom of debris slows almost imperceptibly before clenching like a fist around the human figure, clothing him in a golem’s form as he rises to 60 feet in height.

The scale of the game changes seamlessly – the same size of figure on the screen is now looking over a world that stretches endlessly, populated by an advancing army of 4,000 tiny soldiers. These 4,000 warriors are running on a 360 debug unit, not a PC, thanks to AI scaling. The larger groups of enemies have a group AI that becomes individual once you begin interacting with it. The animations are currently placeholder, but the potential here is evident when the player begins smashing them to pieces – the braver souls jump on your legs and back, clambering up to find a weak spot, their comrades shooting arrows and dodging while others simply run away in terror. They can damage the golem through its translucent veins, so the creature is constantly shaking them off, crushing them underfoot and throwing them for miles over the horizon. This is being played for keeps.

A noise sounds, and the ground rumbles with it. A head appears above a hill, the visage of a magical beast formed from rocks, plates of steel and pure fire. This face is about three times larger than the golem’s body. It roars, the golem leaps to attack, and the demo freeze-finishes with annoying precision.

The full, unabridged version of this article can be found in Edge issue 198, which goes on sale today. Subscribe here to get your copy early (North America).