Alpha Protocol Roundtable Discussion

In case you missed some of the earlier Alpha Protocol roundtable coverage, you’ll find full transcripts of the entire meeting on Obsidian Entertainment’s website and the SEGA America Blog. An excerpt from part two:

Are the weapons fictional or based on real weapons? Does the main character have any special abilities to enhance these weapons, or that can be used outside of these weapons?

Chris: Obviously the weapons in Alpha Protocol are really important to us and they play a big role in the RPG system and they play a big role in combat. You don’t have to use them but I think that most people will defer to the shooting portion of the game. They’re loosly based on real-world counterparts. I mean we certainly got visual reference and tried to understand what modern day weapons are and how they work, but we aren’t basing them off of anything specifically. And that all ties into the role playing system; Mike has a skill for each of the four types of shooting weapons. He also has close quarter, hand-to-hand skills that he can use if he wants to, and of course he also has gadgets which can be lethal as well. But as you level up with any of these you get better in terms of damage, and you’ll get special abilities which we touched on earlier. Whatever you skill up in and whichever you’re using, the better you get at it and the easier it is going to be to defeat opponents with those things. The example of (chain-shot) that Nathan brought up earlier which is just a simple special ability that you can use that’s on a cool down that is used by the pistol so it’s pretty stealthy and you can have a suppressor on your pistol and use it silently and take down a bunch of guys really quickly is just an example of how the player can enhance their weapons over the course of the game.

In typical RPG’s, weapons are given stats to increase effectiveness and rarity in the world. Will Alpha Protocol have a stat based system for weapons, or will the player hold the stats that make them more effective?

Ryan: It’s kind of both. Basically over the course of the game the player can set some skills for the weapons, as well as they can find equipment that will actually increase the damage of the weapon, including modifications, ammunition, different parts of the gun, silencers and that sort of stuff. So it’s not really one or the other, it’s just really a mix of both. You could really suck at one and pick up enough modifications to make up for your lack of skill.