Alpha Protocol

[HandsomeDead]

Have a trailer, its pretty cool.

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Who wants some Mass Effect but with spies?! I do, and those guys at Obsidian are at the helm. The 28th May should be in your calender.

Its looking nicer than when it was last shown, not quite ME2 standard but still pretty good.

[HandsomeDead]

Alpha Protocol 2 confirmed?...

Four years in development, Alpha Protocol is finally going to hit North American shelves on June 1. Though you haven't begun to unravel the game's conspiracies, Sega and developer Obsidian have certainly already thought about what's next.

"We have a lot of plans for where we want to take it," producer Tim Ernst tells me during a demo during Game Developers Conference, speaking on the future of the series. "Being a new IP and everything else, we're not going to jump out with a new one in six months. We're going to take our time, and we also want to analyse how everyone kind of plays it through."

Alpha Protocol is a game about choices, choices which will not only affect the game's end, but many of the events leading up to its conclusion. It's not the first game in this style to do this; BioWare's popular Mass Effect comes to mind.

"We've been working on this game for four years," he tells me, "so even before Mass Effect came out we were talking about these kinds of issues. I think every game is taking choices in a different direction. What we try to do is we have conversations, and depending on the choices you're going to see your reputation change. It's not this grand 'good or bad' scale; you're going to see different reputations with each person."

"On top of that, we want to make it very clear when you have these penultimate moments of choices," he explains.

Take note that actions you take in Alpha Protocol will affect events in any potential sequels, so choose wisely.

"Any sequel will definitely play into how you played [the original] Alpha Protocol," he teases. "But we're going to keep that a little quiet for the moment. [This first game] doesn't have 'wait for the sequel' written in it."

You can't help but not mention Mass Effect when talking about this game, I guess its 'cos its like Mass Effect. If you're gonna borrow much inspiration then Mass Effect is a good fountain to drink from. I hope it does sell well enough for the sequel to made and we can see these decisions carry over, like the decisions in Mass Effect.

... Mass Effect.

[Hendo]

"Mass Effect with spies" does make it sound interesting, but I'll wait and see what the reaction is like when others have started playing it.

[HandsomeDead]

Un-named Obsidian dev is well unimpressed.

I worked on this game (a fact of which I am not proud). I’m not here to defend it; I agree with all these reviews.

There was a ton of work put into this game. The problem is that is was a ton of undirected work, or work on things that were just stupid. The Executive Producer for the game, Chris Parker (also an owner of the company), seemed to think he was the world’s greatest designer ever, and created all these absolutely shitty systems and wouldn’t listen to any of the real designers or devs about things that just didn’t work. And you can’t exactly argue with one of the owners of the company when he doesn’t want to listen. He basically took over the game and dictated exactly how everything would work (or not work, as the case may be). The other producers realized this early on and just gave up, leaving Parker to micromanage all the designers and programmers directly.

Sega also was a factor, because they kept changing the design requirements (yes they had heavy influence there), which never gave the producers and designers time to actually decide on one set of features to make and polish. The blame is still mostly Obsidian’s because the execution was absolutely terrible, and it was obvious 2 years ago that this game should have been scrapped. Instead, though, they focused on adding still more features and never fixed the ones they already had. That is a recipe for tons of bugs and no polish… as is obvious.

This game was just an absolute failure of production, and it’s no wonder that so many of the developers left the company, even after the 40% staff layoffs. I am still happy about some of Obsidian’s other current projects, New Vegas included, because they are going pretty well. Their big unannounced project is looking great and is already much better than AP ever was, and that may end up being the game that everyone was looking for with AP.

Sega should have canceled AP instead of Aliens…

This is a rant by (apparently) one of the devs at Obsidian, and a rant made during the games release, which isn't good for morale. But it sounds like development was an absolute cluster fuck. It looks like they need new management. Their games usually have a bumpy development and at this rate they are never going to make that amazing game that they are capable of doing, the talent is there, it just looks like they don't know what they're doing.

Anyway, my copy will be with me tomorrow and I'm actually excited to play it, it's been pulling in review scores from 2 to 8 so it looks like the only way I'll know what it's like is when I play it for myself.

[TopGunKnacker]

i think its good that he posted that (anonymously of course), if bringing it up directly will get him fired then this indirect approach may actually make the other big cheeses at obsidian keep a closer eye on this mr parker without the grunts being punished for dissent

[HandsomeDead]

I suppose it comes off better than blaming reviewers for not playing it properly.

I'm a bit annoyed, it didn't turn up today, I wanna play this shit game.

[Hendo]

I watched the GB quicklook and it looks like a poor man's Mass Effect, albeit with spies rather than Space Rangers.

[HandsomeDead]

I make a point not to watch the quick looks of games I'm getting, spoilers and all but I did see some of Alpha P's. I was expecting something between ME1 and 2 in terms of build quality but it looks more along the lines of ME1 which is about 3 years old now and was a bit of a mess then.

I think the fact I like this type of game will see me get something from it but it is a missed opportunity.