Alpha Protocol First Impressions

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Role playing games are one of my favorite genre of video games. When I’m not min-maxing my character stats, I can spend hours just exploring the world and talking with the characters in it. I was looking forward to Obsidian Entertainment’s original product ever since they got the Game Informer April 2008 cover story. Unfortunately, the game finally released in 2010 to a mixed critical reception. I picked up an Xbox 360 copy of the game for $5, and I just tried to play through a few of the beginning missions to see why people on the internet claimed Alpha Protocol was a much better RPG experience than the action-heavy Mass Effect series for instance. I sort of understand why the game didn’t provide the action people were expecting, but like other Obsidian-developed titles, I really enjoy the writing that puts the narrative above others for a mature title.

Obsidian Entertainment has a specific philosophy when designing games. The following is a quotation from Josh Sawyer, one of the lead designers about the company, about how they make games. It is written about Obsidian’s newest title in development, but it could easily apply to Alpha Protocol too.

When we develop stories at Obsidian, we often ask ourselves (and each other), "What's the conflict and why do I care about it?" and, "What is my range of roles in resolving the conflict?" "RPG" means a lot of different things to different people. For us, it's important to let the player decide who he or she is in the story. That means when you set aside class, race, magic missiles, and all of the other goodies, the player needs to be able to define his or her own motivations, attitudes toward others, and ways of resolving problems in the story.

Pictured: Josh Sawyer Trolling the Something Awful Forums before Project Infinity Announcement

Alpha Protocol starts with a strong hook, and it expects the player to be paying a lot of attention. After a cinematic showing an airliner being shot down in the Middle East, the player gains control of Michael Thorton as he wakes up in a lab of an unknown facility. Immediately the player is asked to respond to a woman communicating via PDA, who tells Thorton he needs to escape. You can ask her to create a distraction by shorting a panel outside the room for the patrolling guard to check, or you can just ignore her. No matter what, you are quickly introduced to evading guards, picking locks, and hacking alarms and computers.

When you’re done with the initial escape, you are treated to a new orientation about firing weapons, handling gadgets, and moving around a location without detection. Each of these three orientations have bonus objectives that only appear if you do well in the corresponding courses, and that assumes you know how the score is calculated. I think I was able to score well on the gadgets orientation because I chose the tech background, but I didn’t know that critical hits in the weapons orientation were more important than a speedy time. You are even told that you can skip the orientation courses, but you miss out on the initial character interactions, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re going for a specific outcome.

The best part of Alpha Protocol is, without a doubt, the character interaction and conversations system. Alpha Protocol has a branching conversation system that allows Thorton to pick his general response to specific inquiries and decisions. The background you chose in the beginning is the difference between Thorton telling his boss that he reads technical manuals or whatever scraps of paper he finds on the job. However, you are free to reassign your initial skills, so a player picking the espionage background can still choose to go in guns blazing. In conversations, you can answer like Jason Bourne (Professional), Jack Bauer (Aggressive), James Bond (Suave/Casual), or Sterling Archer (attempting Suave but totally inappropriate instead). Different people react to different choices, so one character will dislike aggressive responses, and another will like professional ones. You’re given profiles on the people you meet and the organizations you encounter, so you can find out what responses you give to get the outcome you want. The game makes clear that you are free to piss your boss off because he dislikes smartasses, and you can even get a bonus if he dislikes you and if he’s your handler in a chosen mission. I tried not to make any of the characters angry with Thorton, but that’s not necessarily the best way of tackling the dialogues.

Most importantly, your attitude is everything in the discussion. Conversations are on a timer, so you only have a limited amount of time to decide Thorton’s next response. Ability cool downs and stamina regeneration run in real time, so you are allowed to prolong a discussion to get a breather or end it quickly to get in the first shot. You also don’t get to find out what Thorton will actually say. When I got to the first safe house (mission hub) in Saudi Arabia, I wanted to ask my boss about backup, but because it was the casual response, Thorton acted like a smartass and lost some favor with his boss. Then he got his boss to like him again when he bluffed his way through the gates of a weapons dealer’s palace. I chose the professional response, so the guards tripped the alarm after they realized Thorton didn’t have business with their boss like he told them. After watching someone else play the sequence, I found out that if Thorton is aggressive in the initial confrontation, he can bluff his way through without needing to disable an alarm later. Furthermore, there was an option to draw a weapon and start firing, adding to the game’s orphan count.

The game tracks your decisions and grants you rewards for them. Alpha Protocol’s statistics include the amount of orphans made from killing hostile forces encountered and amount of medical bills derived from getting stealthily knocked out, getting tranquilized in the head, and, my preferred method of neutralization, punching people out. I probably should not have cared about enemy lives lost in my first run of Alpha Protocol, but logic should be damned here. My Thorton values every life and will run through assault rifle barrages just to make sure a terrorist doesn’t get killed from what I assume to be the blowback from United States imperialism. But not really because this game could be about spies and industrial conspiracies, and I just have not reached that point.

Finally, each mission can have an effect on the game world as a whole. When you finally confront the weapons dealer, you can extort him, arrest him, or kill him. Letting the dealer go gives you a discount on black market equipment purchasable from the safe house. Arresting him drives prices up, and I assume killing him has a similar outcome. Because I arrested him, I got the “Due Process” perk, so it’s not a clear good/bad outcome, just the outcome you prefer. Obsidian game writing excels in morally gray areas unlike Bioware’s where the choice is committing galactic genocide or not.

Alpha Protocol promises to be a spy thriller action RPG, and as far as I know from playing a little, it delivered on the experience. I felt that I was free to make the decisions I thought were best for the character I wanted to play as. In an era of action gaming blockbusters that railroad you into watching grandiose set pieces before dumping you into multiplayer death matches, Alpha Protocol lets you choose your outcomes and rewards you for just about whatever you decide. The quality assurance might have been a bit lacking, but with a low price tag, I think it’s worth a quick look.