Up until my visit to Sega at E3 this week, all I had seen of Obsidian Entertainment's spy thriller action RPG Alpha Protocol was a few screenshots. Yesterday I got a chance to see a demo of the game in action, and I can safely say that fans of BioWare's space epic Mass Effect should be extremely pleased. In fact, had the Obsidian folks at the demo not denied it, one could easily assume the two games were using the exact same engine, with a few tweaks in place to freshen things up a bit.

Rookie CIA agent Michael Thornton finds himself betrayed by his superiors and hunted by the U.S. government after a mission goes awry. In order to get to the bottom of a conspiracy, Michael initiates the Alpha Protocol, going undercover to clear his name and besmirch a few others in the process.

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Obsidian Entertainment says it's found the right mix of action and RPG, balancing subtlety with "over-the-top" visual style, and weighing realism carefully against the "abstraction" of fantasy elements.

Alpha Protocol, though billed as an "action-RPG", sounds a bit weighted more toward the former than the latter, aiming for a happy medium that hopes to make RPG elements accessible to twitch fans, while still adding the depth to please RPG purists. Not only that, but the team's touted a heavy emphasis on character interaction and player choice.

It sounds like a a tall order to fil, but when the developers' pedigree includes projects like KOTOR 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2

The Obsidian team held a conference call today to answer tons of questions about the game. Is it challenging to do a modern, realistic RPG (especially with Star Wars and NWN in your rearview)? How do the action elements balance with the RPG elements, and just how much influence will the players have? What kind of man is hero Michael Thorton?

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It's been quietly (very quietly) announced that a new expansion pack for classic PC title Neverwinter Nights 2 is in development at Obsidian. Called Storm of Zehir, it brings some pretty considerable changes to the game, like "full party customisation, dungeon crawling, and free exploration of a non-linear game world via an Overland Map". No idea on a release date, but seeing as the game's nearly three years old, I'm sure you can wait it out.

NX2 Anunciada: Storm of Zehir [Neverwintos, via IGN]