Alpha Protocol Preview

NowGamer has doled out a hefty four-page preview of Alpha Protocol, arriving at the conclusion that the game will be “potentially quite impressive” when it ships in a couple of months.

Our question, then, remains: just how much of either genre has seeped into Alpha Protocol’s absorbent frame? At a basic level, Obsidian have created a series of ‘˜hub’ safe houses in which players obtain, then carry out, missions according to an overall goal. Thorton will have a pad in Rome, Moscow and Taipei, and may travel between the three pretty much as he sees fit, after the ubiquitous tutorial section. While there’s this quantifiable degree of freedom then, Davis is happy to point out its limitations. (It’s not an open world. In the safe houses you do all the stuff you would usually do inside a town buying equipment [for Thorton], outfitting him, finding information through email) – in so doing negating the need for tiresome treks with no discernable end, but also reducing exploratory sequences to an average day at work. Open email. Send reply. Kill the terrorist. It’s your regular nine-to-five. While this distillation of the experience into several hub rooms and a host of set-piece levels may cause some to question just where the action ends and role-playing begins, forgiveness comes quickly when there’s so much invention around. (We had to define for ourselves what makes a real-world RPG) he confirms, (because there’s a certain level of disbelief that a player has to buy into when they’re seeing their character run around being hit by bullets and not dying.

When you’re a super high-level character, you expect that.) The reward for such selective ignorance comes through a discernable BioWare effect, as the order in which missions are completed within this highly selective structure will ultimately determines factors as varied as which factions players will encounter and how relationships with NPCs will develop. Besides, do any of us question why a mage’s flame attack doesn’t actually roast someone until crisp and tender? (For some of the stuff you’ll have to suspend disbelief you can buy weapons through the black market online basically, and they’ll immediately show up in your safe house. We toyed with the idea of having them actually arrive in some sort of package, but figured that was kind of silly.) Not as silly as allowing the most hardened of US agents to swan around impersonating Cuba’s communist leader, but there you go.

I like this sentence, too:

We’re just struggling a little to compute why exactly Obsidian didn’t choose to focus on the action-oriented aspects of its title to a greater degree, and whether every perfect, non-lethal headshot and disastrous stealth discovery will leave players frustrated or willing to put in the necessary grind to improve.

A lack of typical shooter action? A distinct need to further develop your character in order to pull off lethal attacks and stealthy maneuvers? Sign me up!