Santa Ana, California, is one of the ragged-edge cities flung out from the ever-expanding spill of Los Angeles. Not sleepy so much as lazy, its sun-lasered configurations of identikit buildings seem the results of early procedural graphics experiments rather than anything in the way of conscious design.

By day, the population toil in interminable business parks; by night, they eat roadkill steaks at a vinyl-boothed botulism incubator where dinner will typically leave you significant change from ten dollars, until you factor in the inevitable medical expenses incurred during digestion. In essence, Santa Ana’s the kind of city where you spend your time dreaming of escape – somewhat fitting since notable residents have included Philip K Dick, Marlon Brando, and now Obsidian Entertainment.

Obsidian has been dreaming of escape for years: it’s the MO of videogame developers. Until now it has confined those dreams to the heavily trodden worlds of space opera and high fantasy, making sequels to BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights. Its new production, Alpha Protocol, sees the studio escaping for real, breaking out of the role of franchise caretaker, and into the realms of fresh IP.

“Any time you have a license it’s both confining and very, very helpful,” muses Chris Parker, COO and executive producer at Obsidian. “It was very easy on KOTOR to say: ‘Does this fit in the world?’ Creating new IP, we can go in whatever direction we want. Creating boundaries for yourself – that’s the difficult part.”

If he sounds unduly muted, it’s purely a reflection of the company’s meticulous nature when approaching projects. In fact, the team looks ecstatic to be finally working on its own material.

“It feels great,” beams lead designer Chris Avellone, a man who, in certain lights, bears such a resemblance to T2’s Robert Patrick that you fear the wrong question might lead to a three-foot liquid-metal finger through the eye. But today, Avellone seems relaxed in his cluttered office, surrounded by Star Wars memorabilia and a figurine of piano-playing Schroeder from Peanuts, that model of heads-down attention to practice and craftsmanship. “An RPG set in the modern world, with people talking to each other about real subjects that players actually understand?” Avellone grins again. “It’s very exciting.”

Alpha Protocol tells the story of Michael Thorton, a rookie CIA operative forced to turn rogue following the near-compulsory betrayal of his team. Seeking answers or revenge, depending on your choices, Obsidian promises a globetrotting narrative of twists, gadgets and nose-crunching knee drops. Despite the setting, Alpha Protocol remains an RPG at heart, with an emphasis on character-shaping and branching storylines.

“We were looking at what we wanted to do after KOTOR,” says Parker. “There’s not a whole lot of player skill in Knights Of The Old Republic – strategic skill, but not running and shooting.” This decision to put the focus on what the team is calling ‘action skills’ is defining Alpha Protocol, but there’s little chance of Obsidian making a spy-based EDF clone. “RPGs are really what we do: that’s our shtick and we don’t intend to deviate from that. We’ve been working with d20 games forever, so it was a lot of fun to design a new system that does exactly what you want it to.”

The result is a classless system, with ten skill categories ranging from weapons to stealth and CQC. Sensibly, you’ll have a chance to see what you like doing before specializing, which allows chosen skills to cap at level 15 rather than ten. In keeping with tradition, the game’s economy is based around advancement points (experience gained from killing enemies and completing objectives) and loot, which can be sold to buy upgrades. “We said you can’t really find a treasure chest in a lair,” laughs Parker. “Then we thought, well, maybe you can, as long as it’s a safe filled with heroin.”

There won’t be charm spells, but the world of Alpha Protocol is not entirely realistic. “We started real-world,” sighs Parker. “It was boring, so we made it a little more extreme: not comic-book levels, but still, how realistic is it to blindfire a shotgun over your head?”

Obsidian’s term is ‘exaggerated realism’, and aside from several undisclosed semi-superhuman abilities gained during the game, it’s showing up most in the rest of the cast. Thorton himself may be blandly handsome at the moment (it’s uncertain how deep the character creation runs, but he currently resembles a man who might be demoing power tools at the local Homebase if he wasn’t firmly attached to the neck-breaking business) but Alpha Protocol’s supporting characters are a lot more extreme, ranging from a jailbait teen with twin handguns and a hoodie to a silver-fox general sporting the kind of outfit that gives you an insight into what SS uniforms would look like if they were designed by the Samsonite luggage team rather than Hugo Boss.

“Bad guys in suits was too much realism,” explains Parker. “We wanted characters who stood out and were unique.” Avellone sums it up more succinctly: “We’re Kill Bill.”

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