Alpha Protocol Roundtable Q&A

GameZone is offering up some coverage of a pre-E3 roundtable discussion with key members of the Alpha Protocol development team…

When designing the skill upgrades for Alpha Protocol, Parker says that they (created a system that we hope is both simple to understand but still allows a lot of depth in your character’s customization.) Players will be able to upgrade their weapon skills and damage resistance, as well as their ability to hack and pick locks. Obsidian wasn’t ready to talk about any other possible upgrades at this time.

Parker continues: (The average FPS player who might not be familiar with RPGs or the idea of building up their character can really just pick a class, almost like a background, and that will sort of give them a number of stats that will auto level-up during the game and that will be very straightforward.

(However, if you’re more hardcore you can decide exactly what you want and where you want to spend those [stat] points and how you want to build your character. We hope that the balance of not having too many things to choose between and having them be fairly straightforward yet having a lot of depth in how they work hopefully that’ll appeal to gamers. Thus far internally people are really excited for it.)

…which then leads into a full Q&A with executive producer Chris Parker:

Talk about the weapons of Alpha Protocol. Are they 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?

CP: The weapons in Alpha Protocol are very important to us. They play a big role in the RPG system and play a big role in combat. You don’t have to use them but I think a lot of people will. They’re not based on real-world counterparts. They’re loosely based on them. I mean, we went out and got a visual reference and tried to understand what modern-day weapons are, how they work and things like that. But we’re not basing them on anything specific. That all ties into the role-playing system. You might have a skill for each type of shooting weapon. We also have close quarters hand-to-hand combat that you can use if you want to. And of course we have gadgets, which can be lethal as well.