Alpha Protocol Interviews

Two new Alpha Protocol interviews have come out of GDC, starting with a video interview with SEGA’s Matt Hickman on G4. Topics in this particular interview include the game’s multiple “middles”, how your combat effectiveness is affected by character abilities, the balance the game provides for both action and RPG fans, and more.

The other interview is over at GameInformer, where producer Chris Parker provides the answers:

I’ve been really impressed by the dialogue system in the preview build. How has creating such a system compared to the one you used in KOTOR II? How does the amount of dialogue in Alpha Protocol compare to KOTOR II, in terms of hours or spoken lines?

When we started work on AP’s dialogue system, we knew we wanted to embrace the tension of an espionage movie, so we decided to force the player to make decisions in real-time. These goals led to a system that works great and people really enjoy, but we definitely had some hurdles along the way.

One system-side example: we needed some way for the player to know, even before a choice came up, how they are probably going to respond in a situation. We developed the stance system for this where your choices map to variations of being Suave, Aggressive or Professional. This solution worked great, but sometimes writing conversations that fit into this template proved quite challenging.

From an artist standpoint we needed to be able to make a lot of conversations, but have outstanding quality in each one. We created what we called the ‘sound stage’, a generic lighting and placement rig for all the characters which allowed a conversation to be set up quickly. This was great, but we found we really wanted more custom cameras and animations and we had to invest far more resources in this area than we planned.

The quality of words/dialogue is on a par with KotOR II or NWN2, and there is more branching and reactivity than in any of our previous games. The overall appearance and emotion with which they are delivered is incredible – we’re confident the end result is something players are going to love.