He certainly seems to be taking such choices seriously: we’re shown a mission’s flowchart and a sample dialogue tree, and they both look like master documents for a space shuttle launch. It remains to be seen whether this dangerous complexity will result in an engaging story.

Central to that answer is the Dialogue Stance System, or DSS. Working a lot like the Mass Effect dialogue wheel, it has a few crucial additions. The first of these is a Fahrenheit-style time limit for each response.

“We want to force decisions in dialogue to preserve tension,” explains Parker, adding that “once you’ve made a choice, you’ve made a choice.”

There’s no playing back through dialogue trees to get a better outcome. (Avoiding the potential for frustration this may cause, there is no wrong answer in most circumstances, just different consequences and different rewards.) The second refinement is that rather than choosing a specific paraphrased response, you choose one of three stances: aggressive, professional, or suave.

As expected, when our group is asked to vote on which stance to take in a sexually charged encounter between Thorton and a mysterious photojournalist, Scarlet Lake, the overwhelming winner is aggressive. Avellone seems unconcerned that it could be unbalanced, however.

“I think we just had a particularly aggressive bunch of journalists in there,” he laughs. “We haven’t tracked this yet, but it seems to break down pretty evenly on how players choose to react.”

The system seems to be cleverly nuanced: aggression in this case actually plays out as a kind of oppressive uninterest from Thorton, forcing Lane into over-compensating, revealing more than she may have wanted to. Paradoxically, playing back with the suave approach leads Thorton too far into flirtation, making Lane defensive. Clearly, the most obvious approach isn’t always the best – certain characters will even abuse you if you’re too nice, deciding it must be a weakness.

So instead we immerse them in the world, Even more than that seen in Mass Effect, Obsidian is working to turn dialogue into something of a puzzle rather than just a means of switching the pace and getting boring story out the way. It’s also encouraging that the quality of the dialogue both here and in the missions is uniformly high, favoring subtext over exposition, and brimming with surprising one-liners.

So, Alpha Protocol shows a lot of promise, but it’s too early to tell whether its desire for accessibility can also provide depth for those that want it. This is something Avellone has thought about rather a lot lately:

“The challenge for RPGs going ahead is that there’s always been a problem with accessibility. One issue we had with Neverwinter Nights 2 is when you have a lot of interface screens that show a lot of number-crunching before you allow people to use the number-crunching – that’s a problem. So instead we immerse them in the world, get them playing in the first place, and then allow for those additional developments. We don’t flood the players all at once.”

The team has still made some potentially controversial choices, however, such as offering unlimited ammo (except in the case of very special weapons), and an inability to pick up guns from enemies. Obsidian is explicit that it really wants players to get to the end – or ends – of their game, but there’s a danger that this streamlining of resource management, coupled with Alpha Protocol’s brand of simplified stealth, may result in a game that has removed too much of the challenge for some of its audience. Alongside the ditching of classes and the – increasingly clichéd – morality meter, some may argue that Obsidian is dismantling scary amounts of its own beloved RPG architecture.

Avellone remains confident his team is on the right track, though. “The concern we have is that if we specialize too much we’ll dilute the experience. We could make a super-intensive stealth game, but we wanted to immerse the player in the story rather than get involved in the super nitty-gritty.”

Some will say that with a move towards shooting and a dialogue system similar to Mass Effect, Obsidian is still following in the footsteps of BioWare, but that would be unfair. Alpha Protocol seems less self-consciously grandiose and po-faced in its ambitions, and potentially more competent with its action: without the stilted, dice-roll firefights of the former title, combat is already feeling more complex and involving.

What’s certain is that the game’s blend of twisty story and tightly focused mission design is already starting to reap rewards – and Obsidian is growing increasingly confident.

“I’ll probably be found dead a week later for saying this, but I felt that KOTOR2 was perhaps a C+ because it wasn’t finished,” says Avellone. “That’s my fault. It was an ambitious project but that doesn’t excuse the fact that you should work within the resources that you have. Things got better with Neverwinter 2, but I do not consider it to be an A product. More of a B-. Part of the issue is you’re still trying to form a team. But eventually everybody understands how everybody works, and the pipelines get more finalized and you get a lot more support. The expansion pack for Neverwinter 2 was an A-, and I have very high expectations for the future – we’re just going to get better.”

If that’s true, then the cold business of spying just got a lot warmer, and Obsidian’s days under the radar may be gone for good.