Alpha Protocol Preview

You can tell that Alpha Protocol is nearing its release date, as online coverage of the espionage-themed RPG has picked up considerably over the past couple of weeks. And so we move on to today’s newsworthy link, which is a two-page preview at VideoGamer:

In most RPGs this would simply be another throwaway morality choice, linked to a binary good/evil karma system but here, things aren’t so clear-cut. If you glass the informant he’ll run crying to the local authorities, so when you later turn up to burgle a local embassy you’ll find it staffed by grizzly marines. This might sound like a bad thing, but if you approach them in the right way you get nice and chummy with them – so when the embassy gets attacked by terrorists, ten minutes later, they’ll help you out. If, on the other hand, you were squeaky-clean and nice-as-pie with the initial informant, the embassy will be staffed by wimpy security guards. No prizes for guessing what happens to them when the bad guys show up.

If Obsidian manages to maintain this muddied morality throughout Alpha Protocol’s 20 hour span, it should be a lot more unpredictable than the average RPG outing. The developer on hand at SEGA’s recent showcase claimed to have finished the game five times without seeing the same plot arc twice, and that the full game will have somewhere in the region of 32 endings. There’ll be a certain amount of (rubber-banding) in terms of the way everything ties together minor variations on established events and structures but there will also be quite a few branching points too.