BioWare Had Their Own Spy RPG in Development for a Time

Talking with Eurogamer, ex-BioWare and Overhaul Games honcho Trent Oster revealed that, before leaving the company, he worked for a time on BioWare's own spy RPG.

Going from Oster's words, it sounds like a game similar in spirit to Obsidian's Alpha Protocol, although EA apparently wasn't fully behind it and ultimately ended up canceling it:
"The concept was to do the other half of GoldenEye," Oster explained. "The idea being that James Bond isn't just a gun that walks around the world and shoots people. He's a suave manipulator, he's a talented martial artist, he's a secret agent. We wanted to cross that 007 with Jason Bourne, where he's been modified in some way; you're not sure what, but he's definitely deadly.

"We really wanted to push the acting side, the digital acting. We really wanted to be very high drama, very intense scenes. I always think of the scene in the second Bourne movie where Jason Bourne's choking the guy out with a book and he's right in his face and it's this very intense moment. That was one of the key things we wanted to carry off."

...

"Fundamentally EA didn't believe in the concept," Oster told me, "and if the company's not behind it, it doesn't matter how hard you struggle you just can't make it happen."

I personally would have been interested to see BioWare's own take on the spy genre, so I'm hoping that some early concepts for the canceled title eventually make their way to the internet.