Alpha Protocol - Is the great RPG of the last Gen @ Kotaku

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HiddenX

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Phil Owen (Kotaku) likes Alpha Protocol and tells us why:
In the “objective video game review” sense, Alpha Protocol is pretty much the worst. It’s super irritating to play, and every time I speak with somebody from Obsidian, the studio that made it, they just shake their head. But on the Phil Owen “Was This A Big Waste Of Time?” Scale, however, Alpha Protocol comes out on the good end every time I go back to it.

When it was released five years ago, everybody hated it. Like, it was so widely disliked that whenever I tweet about it being the best game ever people think I’m making a joke. But I’m not. I’m serious. Deadly serious. Let’s talk about why I like the janky, buggy mess so much.

-It’s very short. If you look at HowLongToBeat, you’ll see the average completion time is like 13 hours. And people on the forums and in Steam reviews often claim it’s upwards of 20. Those estimates are largely incorrect, though I suppose if you go full stealth it will lengthen the game. My normal playthroughs of Alpha Protocol, though, are under eight hours. The key there is to always always always play on easy, because that minimizes the irritation of the brokenness of the “game stuff.” What makes Alpha Protocol great isn’t stealth karate chopping or shooting bad guys anyway. Like all the great Bioware RPGs, the “gameplay” is what you suffer through to get to the good stuff.

-The ways the game changes based on how to treat people and the tactics you use during missions are super interesting, and make the game feel worth playing multiple times. There are major characters you might never even meet if you play the missions in a certain order. This is why it’s good that the game is so short—the longer a game is, the more prohibitive it is to play more than once, which is clearly a bad thing for games which have “branching story = replay value” as a marketing hook (coughmasseffectcough). When I played Alpha Protocol for review at FileFront back in the day, I played it through three times. That’s the only time I’ve done that in my career writing about games.

-It has the most hilarious RPG protagonist ever. Alpha Protocol’s dialogue wheel is tone-based, and player character Mike Thorton has three tones: super dull and matter of fact, humongous impatient asshole and smarmy piece of shit. It’s incredible. You can play it like “this is just what Mike is like” by picking the same one every time or you can use the different tones as affected spy personas, but either way this system which at first comes off as limiting turns out to be far more fun than more robust or straightforward dialogue systems in other games.

Much to my surprise, Alpha Protocol has seen a pretty remarkable public perception turnaround lately. It was widely maligned upon release, but on Steam right now the user review consensus is “very positive” and if you type “alpha protocol is” into Google you’ll get some surprising suggestions.

It’s so good people still want to pirate it!

And before you tell me about how you’ll never have time to play Alpha Protocol with that backlog you’ve got, remember this: it’s way shorter than that Witcher game you still haven’t finished.https://twitter.com/philrowen
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thats a good idea. i never finished it, but i was trying to play it normally.
cant say i ran into broken mechanics, more like im too dumb for it.
but ill go on easy i guess )
 
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I tried to play the game twice, but stopped both times. I liked it, but it couldn't hold my interest for too long. But that's probably just me. :)
 
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Crap ... not sure what happened to my comment before ... but what I basically said was that I consider myself one of the big supporters of the game here on the Watch ... and if Alpha Protocol is "the great RPG of the last Gen" ... what does that say about the last gen?!? Not great things!
 
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>something with the character creation of AP being the great RPG of any gen
 
I tried it at the time but just couldn't get into it - I found the mini-games for hacking etc annoying and the stealth sections a bit tedious. It's probably worth a second look I guess, I may have been a bit harsh....
 
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What separates this game from all the other FPSes? (if this is an old debate, maybe someone can summarise the last 10 years of arguments?)
 
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On PC?
Checkpoints.
 
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I loved Alpha Protocol for a lot of things, but the tech side was not of those things. Nor the stupid mini-games.

What people do not know is that many of the annoyances can be rectified by modifying some .ini files. A rather good guide is available on the Obsidian forums. Also, most of the mini-games can be avoided by using gadgets.

The one thing that can't be really avoided is the tedious and the unispired tutorial, which is rather long for its purpose.

What i loved: characters, the choicesand consequences system, the really high replayability. The game might be short (and, yeah 12-13 hours is about right, even if you do everything on stealth), but it opens really nice after the tutorial.

Unfortunately, most people will give up on it while playing the tutorial or in the Middle East part (which it's still part of the tutorial:))

The peeps that can muster their patience and master their nerves are rewarded with a rather nice game. Also, most people think that AP is a FPS. It's not. You want to be a great shot, you need to have skill points put into your favorite weapon. It's an RPG with shooting elements, kind of the reverse of the Borderlands (which is a FPS with RPG elements). As long as you treat the game as an RPG you will be fine. Treat it as a shooter and you will get a ton of frustration.
 
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The one thing that can't be really avoided is the tedious and the unispired tutorial, which is rather long for its purpose.
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Tweaking what .ini file can get rid of the atrocious writing/humor and the stupid boss fights?
 
How about the fact it isn't a First Person Shooter at all. Even if you ignore all the heavy RPG elements, and how the action barely hides the dice rolls, perspective denotes whether something is first person or third person. This game is third person FYI.

lackblogger said:
What separates this game from all the other FPSes? (if this is an old debate, maybe someone can summarise the last 10 years of arguments?)
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I genuinely enjoyed this game and played it several times.

What sets this game apart is its implementation of Choices & Consequences. The choices you make shape the game and it is easy to be oblivious to the underlying complexity of the C&C system…unless of course you replay the game.

txa1265 said:
Crap … not sure what happened to my comment before …
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For a moment, I was confused too but there is a similar thread in the "General RPG" section :).

lackblogger said:
What separates this game from all the other FPSes?
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Well, first of all, the "target audience" ;).

This game isn't supposed to be treated as a pure FPS. From what I understood, many did, and it got a lot of flak because of it as it didn't excell as a "plain shooter".
 
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PegasusOrgans said:
How about the fact it isn't a First Person Shooter at all. Even if you ignore all the heavy RPG elements, and how the action barely hides the dice rolls, perspective denotes whether something is first person or third person. This game is third person FYI.
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Some first-class pedantry there! Do games have to be in First Person to be bracketed in the FPS genre? I'm not sure pulling the camera back 6 feet changes the core genre elements of an FPS?

So, from yourself and wolf, the 'strong RPG element' is that actions are decided by dice-roll? And there's some C&C for replayability? I thought someone recently summarised the whole FPS genre as action games with some RPG elements?

I look at this game and see a single character walk around a compound hunched over like Quasimodo, occasionally strangling someone and occasionally shooting someone, mostly while dodging from cover to cover. Looks like an FPS/Action Adventure/stealth whatever'ish genre IMO. But I guess I can see how those who love that genre can see differences FPS averse types like me can't.
 
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Asdraguuhl said:
Well, first of all, the "target audience" ;).

This game isn't supposed to be treated as a pure FPS. From what I understood, many did, and it got a lot of flak because of it as it didn't excell as a "plain shooter".
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Well, that's what happens when you confuse genres... ????
 
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