Alpha Protocol Interviews

Two separate Alpha Protocol interviews are now online, providing us with some updated answers to a range of questions about the spy-themed RPG.

Critical Gamer chats it up with Chris Avellone:

CG: How much of an impact on the story and gameplay will the moral choices offered to the player make? Can you give us any examples?

CA: The best example in the game is something you’ll have to play, but I can point to two of the minor examples and their consequences.

In Saudi Arabia, you track down a weapons dealer with the knowledge that he may be able to lead you to a terrorist leader when confronting him, however, you have a choice between capturing him and losing a potential lead to the terrorists but shutting down weapons traffic in the area, saving lives and reducing violence in the region. You can also choose to let him go in order to track his movements on the chance he’ll lead you to your target. but in so doing, this allows him to continue weapons trafficking and further destabilize the region. What do you do?

Another example occurs in Moscow, where you have a choice of going to see an informant. with the catch that simply the act of contacting the informant may cause him to sell you out to other (hostile) factions. With that in mind, you have a number of different approaches in how to talk to him.

One choice is if you’re going in Jack Bauer style, you can choose to be aggressive and take a quick, violent action to get the information you need without beating around the bush. saves time, effort, and gets you what you need. But in so doing, however, the action terrifies the informant into alerting the authorities to your presence and putting your next target on alert, bolstering the guards and the marines protecting him from the crazy American agent. This may seem like a disadvantage at first, but on the plus side, the informant actually ends up being too frightened to sell word of your presence to anyone else except the authorities that means other factions interested in the same target won’t be aware of you being there, which is bad news for them and a nice surprise when you cross paths later on. As a further bonus, the added personnel guarding your new target can switch to your side in the middle of the mission (resulting in more allies with better armor and equipment than if the target hadn’t been warned), and the added firepower and marine presence ends up being on your side and helping you out, rather than being turned against you. If the informant hadn’t been frightened, you’d have much weaker allies or no allies at all, which would leave you outnumbered and at a disadvantage during the mission.

From there, the ripple effects keep going throughout the Hub, and the aggressive path above is just one of three consequences that can occur just by speaking to a single character (and even speaking to the informant in the first place is entirely optional, so the player may not even see these effects in favor of ripple effects from other missions in Moscow). What we wanted to do was highlight the consequences, not in terms of good or bad, but just the reactivity of the world to what you do.

While VG247 grills Chris Avellone, Ryan Rucinski, and Matthew Rorie:

Alpha Protocol forgoes the nerdy mainstays of sci-fi and fantasy for spies and guns. Is Alpha Protocol meant to be a more mainstream-friendly RPG?

Ryan Rucinski: I wouldn’t say it is more mainstream-friendly, but it is definitely something a bit different. We are catering to the players that don’t mind action blended with a lot of the plot and character reactivity based on their actions. Depending on in-mission events (killing innocents, etc.) and what the player says and does, elements really do steer the story.

For example, I spent some of my money on intel to find out what kind of actions one of our characters had a predisposition to. I played up those elements to get on their good side, but as I went through the story I discovered that the character I was dealing with was a bit shady and not forthcoming with some of their true intentions.

I then put them in a position where they would, at their own risk, be helping me on a mission. When they got captured I had the option to forego my primary objective and rescue them or they could end up (perished.) You might say that after the mission they (literally) didn’t have the guts to betray me again.

I am not sure if that is mainstream, but it sure felt new and refreshing!

Chris Avellone: Ryan is a psychotic murderer masquerading as a producer and there were no witnesses to the events above: and that’s one of the play-styles you can take in Alpha Protocol and have fun with it. We’ve made the game’s mechanics accessible, but left a lot of the choices on how events unfold up to the player and their preferences.

I don’t know if that’s necessarily (mainstream,) but it was a hell of a lot of work on our end to make sure the game catered to different action styles and different attitude styles (professional (paladins,) pragmatic gung-ho soldiers, smooth talking operatives who just like getting in close to hear all the subjects have to say before silencing them with a takedown jab to the neck).