Alpha Protocol - Interview @ Eurogamer

Eurogamer  posts an interview with Obsidian's Chris Avellone on their upcoming espionage-themed rpg, Alpha Protocol, discussing characters, world, pace, choices and replayability, among other things. Here's a snip:

Eurogamer: How do dialogue choices affect the world?

Chris Avellone: It affects the game in a number of ways. It usually affects the reputation level of the person you interact with and potentially other characters you're talking about in that conversation. You can get reputation pluses and minuses in those conversations.

The other thing that takes place is you can gain dossier pieces, and dossier basically represents the amount of research you've done on a faction or individual. Once you achieve a full dossier or you find out secret facts about a characters, that will also give you game bonuses as well.

Another aspect that comes into play is, depending on the choices you make during a conversation, you can gain new gameplay mechanic quirks. For example, if you take a very heavy Jack Bauer route through the game and you decide you don't want to leave any enemies behind you, if you'd rather not talk to people and shoot them in the knees and have them spill their guts to you - you really don't have time to figure out where the missile is - we allow you to do those options and we award you perks based on those choices in the dialogue choices.