Alpha Protocol Retrospective

Killscreen Daily argues that it’s time to “reconsider Alpha Protocol” as part of their retrospective feature on the title. While the writer notes the many flaws of Obsidian’s ill-fated action-RPG in passing, he seems particularly interested in the way Alpha Protocol handled “moral choices”, or rather the lack of moral judgement attributed to your decisions in the game:

Any given meter of morality, from Mass Effect’s (paragon/renegade) bar, to Fallout’s numerical (karma) system, ultimately rests on a pre-determined good/bad dichotomy. Our choice is one of action, but never of ideology. In Mass Effect, for example, you couldn’t question the game’s assumption that shooting a rogue arms dealer is a (bad) action, any more than you could question it for assuming that killing hundreds on a quest to recover a family heirloom was a (good) action. Good is good, bad is bad, and you operate knowingly within that framework.

This is perhaps why, for all of its faults, the most impressive thing about Alpha Protocol was that it didn’t seem to care.

Alpha Protocol’s storyline constantly threatened to splinter off in any number of directions. The titular Alpha Protocol, a deep-cover intelligence gathering agency, is revealed at an early stage to be corrupt, leaving it up for grabs for a faction or entity of the player’s choice. With this end-point in mind, the player is set loose on an openly-structured series of missions: linear stealth crawls (or, depending on the player’s proclivities, shooting sprees) through any number of themed corridors, each bookended by and in a few cases consisting of extended dialogue trees, all of which silently determine who they will be cooperating with or fighting against going forward.

The narrative outcome can differ dramatically from one player to the next whether they decide to run the straight and narrow in the service of the American government, pander to the ego of corrupt capitalists, or collaborate with religious extremists in the Middle East. One of the few widely celebrated things about the game on release was its chameleon-like narrative structure, one that largely stayed true to its players’ whims.

For both better and worse, this leaves the game itself largely amoral. In the introduction, in an underground bunker labelled (The Graybox,) the player is told that (there are no bad choices, just results,) a line that the game itself follows to the letter. As a narrative device, the Alpha Protocol project seems to be constructed to give its agent the players as much ethical wiggle room as possible. By indulging in the fantasy of international espionage, they are granted the freedom to move as they see fit, divorced from scrutiny.