Obsidian's Chris Avellone

They're role-playing games as long as some choice you make causes some change in the environment, so not everyone has the same experience. Like, a character's attitude may change, or something. Chrono Trigger was clearly an RPG to me - one of the best ever, even. And the amount of choices and consequences you had in that game, like within the first hour, was just excellent. So if that falls under the umbrella of Japanese RPGs, which I'm guessing it would, then yes, they absolutely do.

Yeah, because we tried something different with it that I'm really happy about: we had less talking characters, which is a huge resource investment, and we just made them more reactive. I think the nice thing is that rather than just try and dump it into hundreds of different voice-acted parts, we chose a small selection of characters that you could more deeply interact with, and I know that from a narrative design standpoint, that ended up being far more satisfying to me.

Deus Ex had some influence. A lot of the system design stuff is probably better answered by our systems sub-lead, but... I don't know. Actually, just, really, the spy genre itself. That ended up being more of a reinforcement to me than any other actual games.

It might be. I think there's a lot of similarities in the presentation - you look at the screenshots and you see the, for example, layout of the dialogue system. At first glance, it appears very similar.

I think Alpha Protocol, however, takes a little bit of a different track in terms of exactly how you approach conversations. We tried to make sure that it didn't follow the RPG convention of always being able to go back and ask everybody everything. It was very much, like, "You're going to have one conversation; the timing of your responses is very important, and the attitude you take with each person is important, too."

You will want to have done your research, and you're going to want to pay attention to everything they're doing in dialogue, so you can figure out what their motivation is, so you can basically play them to get your mission accomplished.

In Alpha Protocol, you can get through the game without killing anyone. And I want to make the distinction there that there may be times where you can use non-lethal gadgets to subdue people, or to distract them so you can move around them.

I do not believe it's possible to get through the game without taking some sort of offensive action. Basically, you're going to need to do some offensive, non-lethal actions to get through certain areas. I'd be very surprised if people could get through it without firing a single shot or totally stealthing it.

But it was important to us and SEGA that you had the option of non-lethal force and stealth. A lot of the adversaries you face in Alpha Protocol are there for a variety of reasons in the mission, and to just go in there with guns blazing and murder everybody... Well, we wanted to make sure that for people who were trying to be, like, a professional, or a paladin-type character, they can just go through an area, quietly subdue everyone, get the mission done, get out, and do that without murdering anybody.