Alpha Protocol Roundtable Conference Transcript

The editors at Sega Nerds were able to sit in on an Alpha Protocol roundtable conference with a number of Obsidian developers and are offering a transcript of the entire meeting. Essentially it makes for a really big 12-page interview.

Do you think you’re running a risk of being mistaken for just another game in the crowded action-shooter genre when you’re actually trying something fairly original?

Chris: We think that there is a risk there but I don’t think that if we get our message out and actually show what we are doing with gameplay and how we are doing it, I don’t think we are running a big risk there. The thing is that the way that we’ve approached the shooter and RPG aspects is really to blend them together and if people never play the game they might get the idea that it’s just another generic shooter but as soon as they actually pick it up and play it and start to see what we’ve done with the RPG elements and how well the shooter elements work and how all these things play together, they’re going to realize that this isn’t your ordinary shooter game. It really is something new and really cool. I really hope that it’s going to open up the eyes of many FPS people and get them really excited about something that they may have never played before which is a really driven, story based role playing game with these really cool action elements in it.
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Alpha Protocol seems to use the increasingly popular over-the-shoulder camera, which like Mass Effect adds more of an action flavor. Do you think that the direction is indicative of a trend in Western RPG’s, and do you have any other thoughts on the genre’s future?

Ryan: Finally, a question I can answer! When we were playing around with Alpha Protocol we found that the over-the-shoulder camera worked the best. You get to see your character especially when he’s sneaking around and doing that type of stuff. It feels more like you can get into it. It probably could work first person as well but when you’re trying to do cover and looking around it’s kind of more cinematic in the respect that you can see stuff coming. It just works for our game. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s becoming a trend because there are other games that don’t do it: Bioshock didn’t do it and it has some RPG elements to it. Over the shoulder just seems to work the best for our game. You get to see all the outfits and stuff.

Very few games have attempted what you’re going for in Alpha Protocol, but what titles are you drawing inspiration from? Has Deus Ex informed the game’s development at all as one of the first games to blend action and RPG elements?

Abia: There have been a lot of games that we’ve looked at during the development of this game. Deus Ex is definitely something that we looked at as a game that just shows great action RPG gameplay. More recently Mass Effect has kind of laid some great groundwork for al lot of things that we were already thinking about. When that game came out it was nice to see that we were doing some things that were on the right track and we’ve modified some other things. But it kind of confirmed where we were going. I think very early on we were looking at Resident Evil 4. That was a game that we looked at a lot. Half Life 2 is another one. And we are using the Unreal 3 Engine so a lot of Unreal games were things we were looking at on the technical side. Gears of War was a game that we looked at for a while. And very recently I know that our animation team loves Uncharted. It’s just a great, incredible game that we’ve been looking at as a great example of good, third person action gameplay.