Obsidian Entertainment has always been in BioWare’s coattails. They followed BioWare releases with sequels for Knights of the Old Republic in 2004 and Neverwinter Nights in 2006.

Their upcoming action-based CIA yarn Alpha Protocol is the companies first new intellectual property, marking a break from BioWare and outdoing the RPG behemoth in an unusual respect: sex scenes.

Alpha Protocol promises explicit sexual relations with not just two, but all of the game’s female characters. MTV Multiplayer’s Tracey John talked with Senior Producer Ryan Rucinski about Alpha Protocol’s explicit intimacy.

There are several factions in the game that you can ally with or fight against, so the women Thorton meets can become collaborators or enemies. As a government operative, the player can acquire missions and assistance from the ladies Thorton’s wooed. But piss them off — by dating other girls, for instance — and there’s hell to pay.

‘It all depends on how you treat them,’ Rucinski said. If you have a strong relationship with female characters, they may help with missions. However, he told me that some of them are ‘bats–t insane’ and can get you into trouble. ‘One may ask you to assassinate a high-level person,’ he added. ‘Maybe that’s not something you want to do, but she’s really hot. But there are obvious repercussions.’

[Thorton] can ‘get’ all of the game’s women if he wanted to. Rucinski told me it was possible to have sex with all the females, and that the sex scenes were similar to how Mass Effect treated its intimate moments. But he was quick to assure me that, ‘It’s a mature game, it’s not [adults only].’

Alpha Protocol, which comes out next February, has achievements for being a ladies man, and for avoiding relationships altogether.

Like a good Hollywood flick, relationships in Mass Effect were well told and treated respectfully before things got dirty. Alpha Effect has a lot to live up to if it wants to avoid being written off as unnecessary smut as BioWare’s space opera almost was.