It's the latter; we have a menu of missions that you select from in the safehouse. Mike warps to mission, beats up/stealthily passes by a bunch of bad guys, and then you return to the safehouse to check your news, emails, etc., and repeat the process.
Wow that's disappointing. I was hoping for some exploration in some of the major cities and such
im guessing the reason obsidian didnt want it free roam is because they dont want u going around killing people mindlessly because that is something u save for GTA.... also they said in the dev diarys that they wanted a story based RPG because people love those and they never get old..
they arent gonna change it to free roam now because its too late in the project to change that now plus im sure they r gonna have plenty of side quests and little challenges that willl keep u busy... or u could just make a different save file and do stuff completely different then ur last one, like, if u were a good guy on ur 1st file, then on ur next u could b completely renegade and kill anyone u see.. including that arms dealer and shaleed, and the russian guy in the video when u go to the alpha[rotocol home site (alphaprotocol.com)
i actually dont mind aslong as they have a lot of side missions to keep me busy... and guns... lots and lots of guns... and grenades... and rpgs... and some othere stuff too..... *cough* tazer *cough cough*