Alpha Protocol Retrospective | An Extremely Comprehensive Critique and History

something that's always really appealed to me is games that break out from what you'd usually expect from a genre there's just nothing quite like building up an idea of what you think a certain type of game should be like only to have your expectations completely blown apart by something that is genuinely original some of my favorite video game experiences of all time come from games that do exactly this the first time i stepped out into the art deco halls of rapture and realized that bioshock was going to be a lot more than just a first person shooter or exploring the chaotic streets of sigil as the nameless one in planescape torment expecting generic fantasy but getting a nightmarish abstract drama instead when you go back and list the games that fit this mould it's unsurprisingly a hall of fame of some of the greatest games of all time after all having a direction for your game that is truly unique and distinct from anything else is a contributing factor to a game being fantastic in our modern era of endless remakes remasters and sequels i think that these sorts of games that strive to be something different really need to be cherished held up as the gold standard of video game design in a world that loves more of the same the idea brings us nicely onto the subject of our video today a broken buggy and unfinished game which has absolutely no business being mentioned in the same breath as those seminal experiences and yet here i am doing exactly that today we're going to take an extremely lengthy look at alpha protocol a game that i've been dying to talk about not only because of its completely unique premise but because it represents one of the main arguments about what exactly makes a game good what is more important ambition or function is a game good because it runs well or because it has original ideas we're about to find out [Music] the video essay cliche but in order to understand alpha protocol properly we need to go back to the 1990s long before its creator obsidian was even formed and talk about black isle studios it's a name which has reached mythic levels of reverence thanks to the virtually unending string of classic rpgs that they developed while owned by parent company interplay the fallout series icewind dale and planescape torment all came from the same little studio led by fergus erkhart built on the back of the ideas of chris avalone and josh sawyer who've all gone on to become major figures in the video game industry as if that cv wasn't enough black isle also assisted bioware with the development and publishing of both baldur's gate 1 and 2 along with its console cousin the dark alliance series which obviously were all massive critical and financial successes it was a studio with serious chops in the rpg world and despite only being active for six years it made an impact that most niche developers can only dream of the issue that erkheart and co had was despite black isle's runaway success its holding company interplay wasn't doing well in the slightest in fact their poor financial situation led to them losing their dungeons and dragons license which meant that baldur's gate 3 already two years into development of black isle had to be cancelled with zero financial reparations a horrific situation for a studio that had built its entire reputation on creating digital versions of the famous pen and paper game the leadership at black isle was so frustrated with the situation interplay particularly with how little control they had over the dungeons and dragons situation that they decided to take the ultimate step away and form their own development studio in 2003 in irvine california obsidian entertainment was formed and the team of urquhart avalon sawyer monahan and jones struck out into the world of independent development ready to take the world by storm with their unique rpg making skills or at least that's what they thought would happen turns out independent video game development is actually quite a bit harder when publishers are circling you like sharks and the media are ready to tear you apart for the slightest misstep in an article for kotaku published in 2012 in the run-up to the release of pillars of eternity jason schreier interviewed the leadership at obsidian diving deep into what it was like to get the studio off the ground and the massive issues that they faced despite having a golden pedigree in the rpg world convincing publishers that this would convert to cold hard cash was a particular difficulty in those early days fergus erkhart who became the ceo of obsidian tells schreier how they had endless meetings with publishers but couldn't seem to actually win any work ea turned them down ubisoft turned them down take two turned them down none of them seem to have faith that this pc focused d d developer could turn their hand to console games this lack of clout with publishers might have stemmed from the unfortunate fact that when obsidian did get to work on major projects it often resulted in very difficult development and very uneven results lucasarts commissioned them to create knights of the old republic too and unfortunately despite huge media attention on the project obsidian struggled to keep to their deadlines and ended up producing what was essentially half a finished game that failed to match up to its predecessor's commercial success what made matters even worse was that the studio developed an awful habit of putting huge amounts of work into games that would eventually be cancelled they spent years developing a dark fantasy action rpg based on snow white only for disney to completely pull the plug after a change in leadership wanted them to move away from adult content the same thing happened with sega after obsidian were years into the development of an alien game alien covenant which even had a playable demo at e3 and was pretty close to completion before it was cancelled they just simply didn't have the weight as an independent studio to prevent themselves from being buffeted around by the whims of publishers all too keen to commission work and quick to can it if they didn't think it would make money i can only imagine how frustrating this was to go out on your own in order to be masters of your own destiny and end up with less control than you had before in 2006 an opportunity to change it all dropped in the lapse of the obsidian leadership despite cancelling alien covenant sega actually quite liked their work and offered obsidian the chance to pitch an original next-gen rpg no preconditions or license just obsidian's ideas on the xbox 360. what obsidian took to them was alpha protocol the idea was to make a spy rpg combining ideas from lots of different genres stealth action and role playing all bundled into something that hadn't been done before erkhart tells schreier that sega said hey this is different it's not dragons and phasers we love it so with the contract agreed to fund development and publish the game worldwide obsidian began development on their spy rpg the long-awaited first foray into the world of original ip development and their first attempt at a fully hd console game as we'll discover in the rest of this video things went even worse than they could ever imagine [Music] but before we do that let's take a look at the spy genre after all it was one of the main reasons that the game was even funded by sega in the first place i've always found it odd that there aren't more video games set in a spy and espionage setting especially when you consider just how monstrously huge the market for this genre is in almost every other entertainment medium at the movies franchises like james bond and mission impossible have been running for decades now still pulling in millions of movie goers with a mixture of high action crazy gadgets and globe trotting intrigue series like 24 and homeland they're critical smash hits on the small screen and the novels of authors like john le carre and joseph conrad are rightly considered classic all-time books that's why it always confuses me that it's not a saying that video game developers turn to more frequently the genre by its nature means that you can pull in a lot of different elements which should be really appealing to people who play video games before we go further down this point i need to state something from the off there is a huge difference between a spy game and a stealth game being a spy ain't just about sneaking around in the shadows silently taking people out and picking locks the espionage of classic spy thrillers is as much about being hidden in plain sight pretending to be someone else and extracting information through conversation as much as it is about thievery it's this conversational element that's missing from games like splinter cell and metal gear solid they're amazing games honestly two of the greatest series of all time but they're entirely focused on detection based gameplay and they really lack that tense lacarre face-to-face showdown element on top of this both those series and most others from hitman to thief to deus ex they all tend to punish you for breaking your cover and going in guns blazing while you're often given the choice to go full violence it's so obvious that the games are designed to be enjoyed from a position of anonymity with the biggest rewards reserved for those who never alert a soul to their presence now i don't need to have watched five seconds of 24 or mission impossible to know that sometimes in these stories [ __ ] hits the fan and you've got to go loud in fact that's often some of the greatest parts of the secret agent fantasy it covers blown deep in enemy territory and it's time to finally use that military super soldier training and fight your way out probably the most famous spy game of all time is double 07 goldeneye on the n64 it's a classic historic game i doubt anyone really believes that playing this game really makes you feel like james bond an international man of mystery it's about shooting people first and foremost and its legacy is about codifying multiplayer console shooting with very little to do with espionage or conspiracy the best representation of what i mean is a level in another james bond game 2002's double 07 nightfire the game is a positive romp through the various tropes we've discussed with sniper missions shootouts vehicle chases but what makes it stand out in the genre is there's an early level where you infiltrate a high society party without a stealth mechanic in sight you wander the halls of a swiss castle in a tux schmoozing with the guests and looking for your contact with a camera disguised as a lighter needing to be careful not to break your cover but remaining completely out in the open the whole section probably only takes about two minutes to complete but the flavor it adds is incredible bond isn't just a killing machine or an operator of sci-fi gadgets he's someone who can use his charisma and style to get into and out of the situation i think that's why we've never had this holy grail spy game that can deliver fully on the promise of the genre a game that lets you fight like jason bourne use gadgets and technology like ethan hunt and charm and manipulate people like james bond would be a damn ambitious game indeed likely extremely complicated and extremely expensive to make so let's go back to obsidian and sega because that is exactly what they pitched them the spy game action with choice-based dialogue role play mechanics and non-violent tactics stealth and romance gadgets and globe trying espionage alpha protocol was going to have it all it's partly why this game is still worth discussing and still interesting all these years later i love that after all of the pushback all the disappointment in cancelled games obsidian was still pitching absurdly ambitious games and backing themselves to deliver experiences that we'd never seen before problem is that sometimes things haven't been made for a reason an obsidian would quickly find that out for themselves [Music] to cut to the chase the development of alpha protocol was incredibly messy sega had signed obsidian to a two and a half year development contract the longest they'd ever been given to create a game so the feeding in-house was that they had plenty of time to get all their ideas out there the reality ended up being that the complete opposite happened with the game lurching into a complete state of crisis over a year and a half into the development cycle the main problem was that the pitch which had been used to secure the contract was only around five to six pages long which is abnormally short for a design document game designer chris parker in an interview with eurogamer talks about how the document ended up being somewhat useless as a guide to how the development needed to progress i remember it started in a narrative style and set up this idea of what alpha protocol was but that you were a burned agent it borrowed from burn notice which was a tv show at the time then it just kind of said yeah be jason bourne and james bond and jack bauer essentially it was an idea for a premise but not an actual game it also suffered massively from scope creep with more systems and ideas being added into the game with each passing month in fact the amount of cut content from the game is really quite staggering at certain points alpha protocol included a full parkour system for navigating around levels vehicle chase sequences where you ride jet skis and motorbikes an environmental interaction where walls could be destroyed it was just full of so much half developed stuff none of which really tied together in a cohesive game and by extension none of which was particularly fun the definitive moment came when obsidian showed their vertical slice to sega a chance to show where all the money had gone and to get a taste of what the final product would look like it was a high octane action sequence taking place on an aeroplane which had been hijacked by terrorists the player would fight their way through the plane in a series of quick time events before finally taking out the leader and parachuting away to safety it was a sequence that parker estimates had cost them around half a million dollars to develop and formed the cornerstone of what they saw alpha protocol being like unfortunately sega hated it the main issue was that sega felt they'd commissioned an rpg and this was absolutely not what they were being served up guns that killed people in one shot no stats quick time events they politely asked obsidian to scrap that version of the game and to start over it goes back to that problem we discussed in an earlier section of the video obsidian weren't in a position to be able to go toe to toe against a massive publisher like sega especially when he was actually keen to see a finished product and not just cancel the whole thing it meant that the whole sequence was scrapped along with the entire direction of the game half a million dollars and one whole year of development utterly wasted obsidian went into complete crisis mode a company-wide meeting was called and alpha protocol was completely torn apart they needed to find out exactly what sort of game they could make and importantly how to deliver what sega wanted big decisions were taken in the interest of saving money and reducing development time so they could hit their release date which at this point was only one year away it was decided that it should air a lot closer to what obsidian had worked on in the past trying to make something they were more familiar with out of the assets and work that had been done so far it was reworked from a third person shooter into more of an action rpg hybrid and a lot of time is spent working on the parts that they thought were salvageable namely the npc interaction and the dialogue system now i wish i could tell you that this meeting saved alpha protocol but sadly even after this watershed moment issues continued to plague development technical problems were right throughout the process with the team never really getting to grips with developing for the xbox 360 in such a short period of time their previous two games had both used engines that obsidian had helped to develop the odyssey and electron engines which they'd made in conjunction with bioware alpha protocol was the studio's first venture into the world of the unreal engine and they found it pretty tough going and not exactly suited to what they were trying to deliver matt mclean the lead systems designer during production talks about the issues they had the unreal engine 3 wasn't quite ready during development and we found stealth bloody hard to do enemies need brains to react to sneakers and levels need to be designed around it what was worse was there wasn't many people obsidian with the experience of making a shooter as the deadline drew closer time became really tight and more and more sacrifices to development and polish had to be taken as chris avalone outlines we put together a really cool ai system but it sucked up too much performance and it was eating frames from the game and we had to get the performance up we wound up making our guys stupider late in development because there just wasn't a good way to go back and change it at that point if we could have gone back in time we could have come up with a better overall system but it was just too late to do that the simple fact is that obsidian had to deliver a game within a year or face financial ruin so compromise on that initial enthusiastic vision was the only option available to them sadly things got even worse as the october 2009 release date loomed obsidian essentially got the game to a point where it was borderline ready to be released but just needed to go through a thorough qa period to make sure that it didn't launch as a bug-riddled mass it was something of particular importance for the obsidian leadership as they were desperate to throw off the reputation of creatives who couldn't program it's unclear as to why exactly they did this but in september 2009 sega announced that alpha protocol would be delayed by almost an entire year the main theory seems to be that sega did this to avoid having alpha protocols release overshadowed by bigger launchers as modern warfare 2 and uncharted 2 were due to release in the same month the issue is that the big releases just kept coming mass effect 2 released a month later then bad company 2 a month after that and then splinter cell conviction immediately after that clearly sega couldn't see a window that would suit their strange hybrid stealth action rpg and kept pushing it back until they could find somewhere that they thought was suitable this theory seems to be borne out by the experiences of obsidian matt mclean talks with huge frustration about this period and thinks it dramatically affected the quality of the game we've come this far how do you guys just leave it in the can and not put it directly on the shelves why can't we use this delay to fix more bugs it meant that when it did eventually release halfway through 2010 alpha protocol was about a million miles from where obsidian had originally wanted it to be reports from almost every outlet that covered it complained about performance issues bugs poor balance and an overall sloppy finish maybe worst of all sega's unexplained decision to delay the game ended up meaning the alpha protocol released a whole six months after bioware's mass effect 2. obsidian leadership knew that the game was a bit of a mess but they hope that people might be able to look past its faults and see the creative design and ideas underneath it all after all that happened with knights the old republic too the issue is that the market already had a game doing many of the exact same things but at a much higher level with an insane level of polish patrick mills in an interview with eurogamer pretty much sums up the feelings of the studio i'm like [ __ ] they did it before us and it actually feels good alpha protocol ended up peaking at number 13 in the uk charts a market where the xbox 360 and action rpgs were utterly dominating globally the game barely sold a million units after its first year underperforming in every territory but it wasn't just that the sales didn't hit expectations obsidian had hoped that alpha protocol might come in at around a 7 out of 10 but critics absolutely hated it with only managing to scrape a measly 63 on metacritic and infamously receiving a 2 out of 10 from destructoid's jim sterling it was a perfect storm of poor sales and poor critical reception essentially killing the game before it even had a chance to build any momentum at all to an outsider in 2010 it simply just looked like an awful game we're the it's this insane sequence of bad luck strange decisions and horrific initial reception that actually makes alpha protocol so damn interesting because despite everything we've just discussed it's actually an extremely creative and original game maybe not good in the traditional sense but without a doubt worth experiencing that chaotic development has resulted in an utterly chaotic game fall to the brim with random ideas and systems some of which are utterly awful in ways rarely seen in serious video games but some of which are so fantastic they more than make up for the myriad of problems our mission today is to give alpha protocol the proper reassessment that is always deserved we've done enough talking about history and the development so let's dive into the beautiful mess that is the game itself [Music] so as we discussed earlier alpha protocol was originally envisaged as a linear highly cinematic romp from set piece to set piece but quickly fell apart and had to be reordered it means that the final structure of the game is extremely odd a totally non-linear hub style game that's clearly been constructed out of sections of a once point a to point b game you start off a protocol by going through a sort of tutorial level where you're introduced to the basic mechanics and main players you play as agent mike thorton who wakes up in an unknown facility unaware of how he got there within seconds you're contacted by mina tang who informs you that you've been kidnapped and guides you on how to escape your captors of course in true spy novel tradition this is just a ruse and it's all actually an elaborate training simulation to make sure that you're ready to join the illustrious ranks of alpha protocol an american spy agency so secret that not even the president knows about it quite how this works is never really explained although you do get a long chat with yancey westridge chief of operations at alpha protocol who explains that you've been brought on board for a top secret mission in saudi arabia which of course only mike has the skill set to be able to complete now out in saudi arabia the game settles into its flow you have a safe house where you can adjust your equipment speak to your compatriots via tv link and buy new weapons and armor by clicking on the front door you're taken to a menu where you can choose from a selection of missions all of which have their own briefing and requirements sometimes it's tracking down an npc that has a key piece of information to the wider mission or hacking a computer that will weaken the defenses of your ultimate target the general idea being that you're building up to a climactic moment through completing smaller levels here the focus is operation desert spear where agent thornton needs to recover some stolen missiles from islamic terror organization al-samad and capture their leader ali shaheed who's responsible for a missile attack that we see in the opening moments of the game it's a kind of weird mixture of highly linear gameplay with non-linear structure the missions themselves are absolutely start here finish over here affairs always beginning and ending in the same fashion no matter how you tackle them but they're chopped up in a way that lets the player do them in whatever order they please despite the fact that they're so obviously just sections of a once linear game spliced up behind a level select screen it kind of works from both a gameplay and thematic perspective story-wise totally makes sense you have a secret base of operations from which thorton only leaves to take on his missions gameplay-wise as we'll discover later on there are actually a fair few systems that influence the order and manner with which you choose to tackle the individual levels saudi arabia culminates with a bombastic showdown with ali shaheed as you fire rockets and take out boss fight lieutenants which all comes to a head as you finally corner the culprit and complete your mission now this is where things get interesting you see alpha protocol actually has a pretty fantastic twist that comes really early in the game setting up the rest of the experience turns out shaheed wasn't actually the mastermind behind the missile robbery and attack but it's just a full guy who the crisis is being blamed on the weapons were actually stolen and sold off by halbeck corporation who are a massive multinational defense company with fingers in every pie across the globe including alpha protocol that's right alpha protocol are actually compromised and working for the bad guys thorton was brought in as the new guy in order to take out al-samad and then die in a missile strike that would wipe away any evidence of the truth obviously thorton lives and the rest of the game suddenly opens up into a trotting mystery where you're actually on the run from alpha protocol visiting three different countries to try and uncover evidence that you can use to prevent holbeck from starting a hyper profitable world war three it's pure naughties action movie schlock an agent falsely accused of a crime he didn't commit taking the law into his own hands to prevent a conspiracy to start a global war what more could you possibly want from a spy rpg what's even better is that the level structure from saudi arabia now opens up to include taiwan rome and moscow three more hubs with their own sets of missions their own safe houses and unique narratives that play into the wider story we'll go into more detail shortly but there exists a kind of crazy interlocking web of consequences that affects these hubs depending on decisions you make throughout your playthrough it's a beautiful way to somehow manage to make a completely non-linear linear game it's a structure i've not really seen before but alpha protocol somehow really makes it work you visit a hub sort yourself out head out into a mission and then return to base to survey the fallout of your decisions and deal with the consequences a wonderfully satisfying role-playing loop somehow stitched together out of the bones of a completely linear action game [Music] without a shadow of a doubt alpha protocols two saving graces are the way it handles your relationships with the many characters you meet and the way it deals out consequences for the decisions you make while playing we'll talk about the relationships first and then get into the web of decisions that sits behind it all the dialogue system and the way that thorton and by extension you the player interact with the game's host of npcs is in my opinion the single best element of the entire game a really unique system of communication that both mimics the cinematic confrontations of spy thrillers but also manages to wrap it up in some really good old-fashioned video game systems when thorton gets into a conversation and this can be anything from trying to get information from a police officer to interrogating a terrorist suspect you'll be given four options to respond with each relating to a different button on the controller usually in rpgs you'll have your responses spell out for you as in you can literally see word for word what your character is going to say if you choose said option but here things are different instead you're given just an indicator of the tone with which thorton will respond usually split into three categories suave professional and aggressive obsidian calls this the dialogue stance system as you're choosing a tone or stance rather than spelling out what your character is going to say now i can already sense the sweat rolling down the foreheads of the role players amongst you but it gets even more non-rpg not only can you not see what your responses will be before you give them but there's also a short timer with which you need to make your decision within thought and simply standing in stoic silence if you choose to say nothing this might sound absolutely horrible for an rpg utterly gutting your ability to role play effectively but as if it's a metaphor for the entire game this strange unique approach actually works incredibly well the three tones are broadly broken up into the three main spy archetypes from that pitch to sega the suave option sounds like james bond the charmer and womanizer making smooth jokes and teasing villains the professional tone is based on jason bourne cold calculated hyper focused on the mission and supremely effective the final aggressive option comes straight from kiefer sutherland's jack bauer angry vicious and not at all hesitant to use violence and intimidation to get what they want on top of this there's usually a fourth context-sensitive option you can go for often depending on decisions you've made earlier in the game it can be as simple as pulling a gun on someone if you feel threatened or it can get as complex as revealing some hidden information that you discovered hours earlier it means that despite being in the dark about the specifics of your response there's a surprisingly high level of control over exactly how you want your thorton to act and sound the writing of each of the different archetypes is never so cartoonish that it doesn't feel like you can't use them where appropriate in games like mass effect or fallout which rely on a much more binary good evil system your character can come across as a sort of schizophrenic maniac if you don't stick exclusively to one of the archetypes it's very clear that the developers have written two distinct characters and then design dialogue where you choose one of these to play as alpha pro calls three options never stray too far from one another it means it feels natural for your highly professional agent thorton to snap and get aggressive when face to face with a dangerous terrorist or that your suave and charming thornton might not finally step up to the plate and opt to be professional in a time of crisis none of the options ever feel ridiculous and it means that despite them being designed around three distinct characters you find yourself picking between them creating a much more fleshed out thought and who isn't just good or bad this fluid dialogue system isn't just meant for role playing though all of the npcs in the game have their own way of responding to thorton depending on which tone you go for and a scale that measures their opinion of you with story and gameplay consequences that depend on who likes you and who dislikes you it's a system that's clearly influenced by the party relationship system from knight seal republic too where obsidian crafted a really interesting mentor system for players to explore depending on what quests you completed and what dialogue options you chose you could either guide party members down the route of being a jedi or attempt them over to the darkness as a sith alpha protocol takes this system to a whole nother level with much more nuance to it certain characters might like you at first but start to dislike you based on how you act to a completely different npc who they have a relationship with others might only care about your actions rather than your words responding to things you do on missions rather than talk which they think is cheap it's all done through a really clever system of reading how the npc speaks or researching their backgrounds through intel that you can purchase or find and making a judgment call about exactly which michael thornton they would like for example scarlett lake is an investigative journalist that you meet on a plane journey who's coincidentally also investigating hallbeck corporation she's extremely friendly almost overtly flirty but she responds uncomfortably if thought and flirts back and comes on too strong preferring a more controlled and professional accomplice through making friends with her you can gain intel on other npcs or modifiers that might help with future missions all through reading the room and treating her as a professional you see alpha protocol isn't just about role playing as jack bauer james bond or jason bourne it's about playing as all of them at once the ultimate spy role-playing game where you take elements of all of the classic archetypes and use them as tools to manipulate situations to your advantage it's all tied together by that timer which keeps the pace moving along a much more natural speed as you've only got a few fleeting seconds to choose how you want to respond conversations have a really natural cinematic flow which is something completely absent from most lengthy video game conversations the stilted dialogue of bethesda and bioware games instead replaced with something paced more like an actual film or tv show because everything is so snappy there's also no way to go back and correct a misstep all of alpha protocol's conversations are forward moving beasts which means if you make a mistake and ask the wrong question there's no way to go back and make amends when paired with a pretty heavy-handed autosave it makes for a dialogue system that feels like it has real weight to it characters feel realistic and you'll want to try and understand their nuances not just because it's fun but because of the real consequences that it has for the gameplay and narrative for all of the game's horrible and hilarious flaws which we will discuss shortly alpha protocol absolutely excels in this area managing to somehow blend memorable npcs meaningful choices and sharp writing into one single package without a shred of hyperbole it's probably the best dialogue system in any role-playing game i've ever played and absolutely deserves to be held up as the gold standard to which other dramatic video games should aspire to be like [Music] the other system where alpha protocol hits an absolute home run and probably the main reason it's remembered at all is its extensive system of choices and consequences that make almost every single playthrough unique just before we go full gushing praise mode let me temper your expectations a little bit and explain exactly what i mean by choices and consequences the way i see it there are two ways of doing cause and effect in video game narratives i'm going to call the first the micro choice system essentially the plot is broadly set in stone but the player has lots of smaller decisions they can make which change many of the details along the way it's usually how choice works in big cinematic rpgs like mass effect or the witcher you can make a pretty huge spread of decisions which lead to characters dying or side stories not appearing but ultimately every player experiences the same plot and that plays out in broadly the same way the second system is the macro choice system this is the real branching storyline games with multiple endings where you can have two playthroughs that are totally different based on decisions you make they're a lot harder to come by which is obvious really as they're a lot harder to design but the few i've played really do make an incredible impact on you westwood's blade runner immediately jumps to mind which has 13 distinct endings some of which completely changed the entire plot of the game and a broadly non-linear structure which you have to navigate before you even get there alpha protocol somehow manages to have both of these systems with virtually all of the details of your story depending on small micro choices and some extremely large decisions that can branch the story off in wildly different directions but always with the same big climaxes in every game as we touched on in the last section thorton's relationship with the cast of npcs that you meet can all have some sort of effect on the game ranging from small to really quite game changing on the small scale there's a host of different ways that character relationships influence the moment-to-moment gameplay during each of the game's levels you can choose a handler to accompany you on the radio giving you unique information about your mission and even providing buffs that range from more health to decreased enemy vision it's all directly tied into your relationship score with the handler which means you're incentivized to keep these relationships improving at first you'll only have mina yang available but befriend more people and suddenly your options widen and give you some real decisions to make about who you bring with you it's not even always based on if npcs like you either there's actually distinct benefits for bringing along someone who hates you if yancy westridge hates you and is handling your mission thorton will get a huge damage bonus apparently driven by the will to hurt others in yancey's place bringing a version of scarlet who hates you will result in a huge cooldown reduction because he wants to get the mission over with as soon as possible and to stop having to listen to her another system that alpha protocol weaves into its character relationships is its clever intel system at first glance it's just a series of collectibles that provide further backstory about the npcs and factions that you interact with sometimes they're hidden in levels other times they're available to be purchased on the black market or they can be given by other npcs in information trades as you build a picture of a factional npc you'll get bonus damage against them which obviously means boss fights and missions against enemies you better understand are a lot easier it's a clever way to gamify that classic spy idea of collecting information about your enemy before carrying out a surgical strike what really makes the intel system clever though is it can impact the story as well as the gameplay completing a full dossier about any of the npcs or factions reveals a secret fact about them which can have a huge impact on their role within the narrative it's a strange system where micro choices that you make dialogue options collectibles and which missions you tackle end up building into a bigger macro choice without wanting to spoil every single fantastic thing about this beautiful web of secrets there are secret facts that completely change major situations later in the game or completely recontextualize the actions of certain factions it's a fantastic system that rewards your spying instincts it means that no single playthrough can truly reveal everything that alpha protocol has to offer of course obsidian has also loaded the game with plenty of those traditional big choices for you to agonize over although here of course the timer puts you under real pressure which makes the consequences feel all the more stark remember back at the end of the saudi arabia mission where we defeated ali saheed the terrorists and discovered that holbeck was actually behind the missile theft well at that point you're given a decision arrest shaheed kill shaheed or allow him to go all three decisions have huge ramifications for the rest of the game and each in their own surprising way aspiring professional agents might think that bringing him in to see justice in a court might be the best way to go but this actually causes him to die in a missile strike intended for thorton taking him and his faction completely out of the game of course there's always the vigilante option taking him and his dangerous faction of terrorists out of the picture personally but this actually causes an even more zealous second command to take over al-samad and wreak havoc throughout the rest of your playthrough constantly turning up in missions looking for revenge on you ironically the safest option is actually letting shaheed go which he barters for by saying he can get information about who's really behind the missile thefts taking this option might seem ridiculous this is a man who has literally just blown up a passenger airline and has been trying to kill you but it's actually a requirement of getting a complete picture of the story if you take this option shaheed will appear again just before the final mission where he contacts thorton with his promised information a bloodthirsty terrorist but clearly a man of his word what he gives you is the smoking gun that proves that alpha protocol are in league with holbeck and getting this valuable piece of intel allows you to fight a few additional bosses at the end of the game taking out alpha protocol along with holbeck getting true revenge on every party that betrayed you in fact how the ending can play out is one of the best parts of the game with a huge amount of factors that play into what specific version of the finale that you get during my playthrough i went on a vengeance fueled spree through the traitors in alpha protocol being supported all the while by allies i'd made along the way rival secret organizations and shaheed's religious zealots the boss fights were against those alpha protocol members that acted as tutorial characters at the start of the game so all sort of came full circle in a nice poetic way it all ended with a climactic showdown against harry leyland the ceo of holbeck who torments you throughout the course of the game in a sort of weird flash-forward interrogation scene where he second-guesses the decisions that you make throughout the game i defeated him finally putting an end to the tormenting and a stop to the threat to world peace with agent mike thornton driving off into the sunset in a speedboat pretty much as james bond as is possible to get what's interesting though is that there are actually quite a few different ways this can play out depending on decisions that you take throughout the game and who likes and dislikes you different final bosses different allies and a completely different route through the final mission entirely for example you can discover through filling out the intel options for both characters that the alpha protocol analyst alan parker has an estranged daughter who you become tangled up with an office administrator called madison st james now in my playthrough i simply thought madison was a damsel in distress style love interest someone for thought and to save in times of crisis with a mission in rome specifically based around either saving her or saving some hostages from a terrorist attack my mike sent her away in the end to protect her from the suicide mission he was about to undertake back at alpha protocol so she disappeared out of the plot entirely thing is if you save madison but also discover that she's alan parker's daughter you can later use that information to have parker abandon alpha protocol and switch sides over to you providing you with the information that not only brings down alpha protocol and hull back but ruins their reputation on a global level allowing some freedom to creep back onto the world stage things can take an even weirder turn than that though during the interrogation scenes with harry leyland his personality score is also tracked and if you and harry end up getting along he'll offer you a position at holdback replacing his second in command and essentially fast-tracking thornton to the top of the evil pyramid if you go down this route you're sent to collect the incriminating information that parker has fighting the total opposite factions and bosses that i did in my first playthrough where things get really clever though is that even though this looks like a bog standard evil ending you can actually still betray leyland at the last moment with thorton's moral blip nothing more than a facade to get the all-important intel and start his own alpha protocol one which won't be beholden to the whims of a mega corporation hell even in the more traditional good ending who kills leyland who's in the room why they're there and what they say is so variable that really describing the game as having endings at all is a little reductive considering just the huge web of options that there is that feed into all of them there are just far too many decisions and consequences both big and small to list them all here in this video it really is the crowning achievement of alpha protocol and basically the biggest reason to revisit the game in 2022 all of those development issues that we spoke about earlier somehow by some miracle weren't enough to prevent obsidian from crafting an rpg that truly lives up to the idea of making your own story no two playthroughs of alpha protocol are the same something that not even the best modern rpgs can boast and that's what makes this game worth talking about all these years later on top of this i think it's safe to say that alpha protocol really lives up to that premise of creating a spy game that isn't just rooted squarely in combat or stealth it's tense discussions that could have dangerous consequences collecting and using information manipulating people with your charm as much as your strength all those elements we discuss which have never really made their way into the design of spy video games are shining brightly and working perfectly despite the worst development cycle i've ever seen in this regard alfred progal is probably one of the greatest rpgs of all time an utterly sprawling ambitious masterpiece of tense choice and consequence the problem is though as we'll discovered next almost every single other element of the game is completely broken beyond belief [Music] so it's thematically lovely and the consequence and dialogue systems are pretty top tier if we were only judging alpha protocol on these elements alone it would be thought of as one of the greatest games of all time the problem is that we aren't and it very much isn't sadly there's also an action spy rpg in here somewhere which unsurprisingly considering the development process is a complete and utter mess sometimes that chaos conspires to make something surprisingly fun and other times it's one of the most underdeveloped frustrating experiences that i've ever seen committed to disc while the structure of the game is decidedly free form the actual levels themselves are extremely linear with almost none of them having alternative routes to find the goal or solutions for different builds it was something that was heavily criticized at the time and has only become more stark as expectations around stealth and rpgs have changed over time if you're advertising your game as a role-playing experience where you can go guns blazing sneak around in the shadows or attempt a pacifist run it's not really good enough to have that simply change the abilities that you use or the weapons you have access to thanks to games like dishonored or deus ex we've come to expect a lot more not only from the character building but from the level design as well giving the player multiple routes of attack that play into the different potential builds dishonored one's famous party level is the perfect example of a game absolutely nailing this varied approach you can wander the halls of the mansion peacefully scoping out your target without shedding a drop of blood you can use your powers to sneak into the rafters like some sort of magical cat burglar or you can just go full psychopath mode and burst in guns blazing this choice in gameplay is the truest expression of role play and it's an area where alpha protocol completely drops the ball through a combination of poor design and rushed development generally speaking you'll be dropped into a level from the loading screen and then simply travel across a zone to collect an item or confront a target sometimes it's in a big building sometimes it's outside in desert canyons sometimes it's a russian rail yard but it rarely ever deviates from the hardcore linear level design of traveling from point a to point b in with the loading screen and then back out with another one in addition to not really giving you much of a sandbox to explore or play around in this also means that alpha pro calls missions often really lack a sense of place you never return to any of these locations always moving onwards and upwards which means the distinction between different missions can often end up being incredibly thin to be honest while writing this script i've been looking over a list of the different levels and some of them i am really struggling to recall simply because of how short uneventful and uninteresting they were most of them are around 10 to 15 minutes long and a huge part of that simply comes from the fact that stealth if you're gameplay in a more run and gun style some of these missions can be blasted through in two to three minutes especially when you're further into the game and are heavily upgraded compared with how dramatic and impactful the conversation sections are it's really just amazing that the bulk of the game's missions are just so dreadfully uninventive that's not to say it's all bad in the level design department though there are some areas where obsidian have clearly tried to implement some of that choice and consequence and those moments easily shine the brightest in moscow there's a mission where you need to head to the u.s embassy to contact a businessman named cerkov who might have information about the holbeck missile theft when you get there you're immediately faced with two choices climb around the back of the embassy and infiltrate the building using your stealth abilities or simply walk up to the front door and schmooze your way in with your charisma it's the closest the game comes to that james bond fantasy giving you the choice of hiding in the shadows or hiding in plain sight of course there's always the option to go in like a maniac and blow everyone's head off but that of course makes for some pretty raw responses from your allies killing a bunch of innocent americans usually tends to do that within secret service circles the issue really is that the game never delivers a full level like this once you reach the second floor of the embassy you're immediately thrust into a zone where all the guards are on high alert and there are turrets that shoot you on site you're left with no choice but to take them all out which hardly makes any sense if you've gone into the building through peaceful conversation things hardly get any better when you do finally contact cerkov halbeck sends a pmc to assassinate him and you have to protect him escort quest style while he makes his escape the whole thing is just a complete jank fest with waves of enemies entering the courtyard circov ambling around randomly and a sniper rifle inexplicably placed on the embassy balcony for you to use that interesting gameplay choice from the start of the level quickly dissipates into something much more restrictive and directed which the systems don't really lend themselves to and aren't particularly enjoyable to play that way as much spoken about a level in rome which is almost always brought up as an example of alpha protocols creative level design instead of sneaking or talking or shooting you control thorton aiming down a high-tech sniper rifle for the entirety of the level looking for a specific attendee at a high class mansion party i think it's actually the perfect example of how these really controlled and directed moments don't suit alpha protocol at all and it ultimately makes for a really wonky mission essentially you hold the reticule over a pie guest and you have to scan them in order for your handler usually mean a tang to work out if they're the target the whole section is just boring to play through as the level is separated into three sections which you progress through in the same order every time advancing once you've scanned everybody it's extremely obvious that the target is going to be the final npc you scan so any tension or entry goes out the window as you essentially play where's wally with the npcs needed to progress once you do find the target the music swells up and you're given what looks like an incredibly important decision to pull the trigger or not all in the context of conflicting intel that he might either be a very dangerous man or a potential useful contact it's dressed up like a big moral decision and given everything else in the game you'd expect there to be some sort of huge game-changing consequence except there isn't the whole of the rome scenario plays out identically regardless of if you shoot or spare meaning the entire level is literally pointless it's the famous moment where alpha protocol mixes up its linear gameplay and it completely falls flat it's clearly due to the game's dysfunctional development cycle the alpha protocol's level design is so poor there's just so much here that's obvious artifacts of the first version of the game a much more action-focused linear adventure while the hub system essentially saves the overall structure of the game and the conversation system adds some incredible engagement to the narrative it doesn't look like anything can be done to save the individual levels which feel utterly at odds with the slower paced rpg mechanics the biggest issue with alpha protocol is that the gameplay is one of the strangest clashes of design choices that i've ever seen in a game it makes for one of the most confusing rpg hybrids i've ever played at first glance it might look like alpha pro call is somewhat of a traditional rpg you gain experience points for completing missions and killing enemies you invest them in skill points which improve your abilities you equip gear that you find out in the field or purchase on the black market the problem is that almost every single one of these systems interacts with the actual player-led gameplay in extremely weird ways it's one of the most obviously broken games ever made the stealth build involves investing skill points into surprise surprise the stealth skills and doing so unlocks the abilities you'll need to be able to play the game in this way going deeper into the line improves the skills and unlocks more tools that you can use in that playstyle it's a weird way to do stealth as it means it's not inherently baked into the game itself and the ability to detect guards and reliably get away from enemies who spot you is also trapped behind these upgrades there's no shadow system or obvious line of sight system which also means that the levels haven't been designed with stealth as a particularly big focus because players who are playing a run and gun build also need to be accommodated for it leads to one of the most hilarious stealth systems i've ever seen at level 6 stealth you unlock your main sneaking mechanic which is the ability to turn completely invisible there's zero explanation given for how exactly michael thornton does this or what gadget is supposed to be causing it but he quite literally disappear like harry potter under his invisibility cloak what's even crazier is the more you upgrade this ability the longer it lasts reaching an absurd 20 seconds which doesn't break if you take someone out it leads to some of the most insane sequences where thornton is just running around like the invisible man neck chopping guards to the floor while their compatriots simply stand gawking at what's happening it's obviously one of the worst stealth systems i've ever seen but also i can't in good faith tell you that it isn't fun charging around like an omniscient secret agent super being sprinting to your destination past turrets soldiers and bosses it's just absolutely hilarious it completely removes anything like a challenge from the game but honestly that's kind of okay when the gameplay is this funny it sort of takes that serious espionage tone and twists it into something more akin to archer or austin powers almost a spoof of the absurdity of the stealth genre rather than a serious attempt to be part of it it's utterly awful but unintentionally excellent a microcosm of everything about alpha protocol the other main play style in alpha protocol is a kind of rambo-esque third-person shooter which means you spend a great deal of time firing guns obsidian has yet again opted for an incredibly strange system which underpins this gameplay style instead of the traditional aiming used in most third-person shooters you know where you point a gun and pull the trigger and a bullet hits them what we've got is a sort of old-school crpg version of that where your accuracy is directly tied to your skill level with the weapon it means that at the start of the game you'll be aiming at enemies pressing fire and missing and that's actually on purpose it's yet again just an utterly baffling design choice although this time with much less funny results in the heat of a firefight it just feels like nothing really works and it essentially forces you to commit to a single weapon for the entire playthrough in order to get that accuracy up to a place where it feels remotely normal what's meant to counterbalance this is that the longer you hold the reticule over a target the better your aim will become with a critical hit landed as a reward for holding it down all the way it's again a weird choice though because it works well enough in a stealth playthrough where you can slowly pick your moments to snipe enemies being a full action shootout standing and waiting for the reticle to slowly shrink down just feels completely wrong the levels are also absolutely full of gears of war style chest high walls which are clearly meant to facilitate a huge amount of cover based shooting unfortunately alpha protocol's cover system is a wonky as hell and often just completely doesn't work because the game isn't entirely based around this system unlike gears of warsay the cover is often in weird positions or not even really helpful for the situation you find yourself in enemies don't exactly flank you so much as just wander around the battlefield so there's never really a moment where you feel like you've picked an excellent vantage point and can tactically pick off your foes it means in all of my playthroughs where i went balls to the wall action i mostly just equipped my heaviest armor invested a bunch of points into my health and ran around with an assault rifle shooting people like i was playing max payne or siphon filter again weirdly though it's not exactly high quality gameplay but i did kind of enjoy mowing through enemies like the terminator another strange example of alpha protocol being enjoyable despite itself now it's obviously completely unintentional but the best ability for all-out combat is actually one that's intended for stealth playthroughs the pistol's unlockable ability is a chain shot power obviously intended for a hidden thornton to take out multiple enemies at once with carefully placed headshots whilst it is useful for that although why would you ever need it with the invisibility powers its most potent use is simply stacking four or five headshots onto a single foe which pretty much takes out every single enemy in the entire game it means that stealth playthroughs essentially become speed runs of the game sprinting invisibly to the end goal of the level and then just blasting 15 bullets through the head of the boss seconds after it begins in fact let's take a moment and look at the boss fights in a bit more detail because they pretty much encapsulate everything wrong with alpha protocol [Music] boss fights in most games are meant to be one of two things they're either the ultimate expression of the gameplay or they're a narrative payoff that trades in drama and cinema old school games are obviously famous for their extremely hard bosses which are meant to test all of your reactions and skills while also eating up as many lives and quarters as they can it's a trend that's come roaring back into the video game world with the advent of the souls like genre where extremely difficult bosses are par for the course and the feeling of reward for beating them is essentially the entire point of the game on the other hand a huge amount of modern games that are less driven by player skill use their boss fights as more of a cinematic moment virtually all rpgs follow this format with most bosses simply being notable for hitting hard and having a lot of health action games also tend to go all cinema setting their boss fights in dramatic locations usually as the payoff at the end of an engaging story i'm obviously generalizing but the point i'm trying to make is that boss fights serve a purpose within the game providing some sort of climax for the player to experience alpha protocols bosses somehow don't really fit into either of these categories they're somehow neither the ultimate test of skill or a big narrative moment often feeling completely randomly designed and odds with each other when and where these boss fights happen isn't entirely consistent the majority of the game follows a format where you'll arrive in a hub have a short introduction to a villain character and then spend your time there tracking them down before a climactic confrontation in rome you spend your time going head-to-head with holbeck enforcer conrad marburg in taipei you're hunting down the mysterious oman deng a suspected political assassin and we've already discussed how saudi arabia is based around capturing ali shaheed for some reason though in moscow there are three boss fights all against characters who basically appear simply for you to fight them and then disappear out of the plot as quickly as they came in it's all just very random and obviously a holdover from the game's fractured development where the final version is cobbled together from what they had ready to go clearly some regions simply just had more boss fights and other regions have better developed ones it's not just that the placement of the fights is random though the actual fights themselves are without a doubt the most janky moments in the entire game being incredibly poorly designed and lacking any sort of proper testing for starters if you're playing a stealth build you are completely out of luck the fights are totally unsuited to any kind of stealth mechanics whatsoever usually starting with thorton out in the open legions of minions firing on you within seconds and the boss knowing exactly where you are at all times with your stealth abilities rendered basically useless it means that almost every single boss fight is an action rob requiring virtually no special tactics or setup you just pump out as much damage as possible and hope that you don't die in the process obviously it would be easy to blame this on the development that we've spoken about at such length but honestly i think this issue really stems from the genre itself rather than poor design frankly the stealth genre is just not a style of video game that particularly lends itself to mechanically complex or detailed boss fights in fact it's actually somewhat notorious for having terrible climactic confrontations deus ex human revolution is the ultimate example a borderline flawless rpg stealth game that lets you encounter objectives from all sorts of creative angles only to stick you in circular arenas and force head-on confrontations against bullet sponge bosses it's a misstep so harsh that they even released a replacement version of the game that tried to rebalance those encounters to make stealth more viable ultimately most stealth series just completely do away with the concept treating their targets more as a reward at the end of a complex level it's the way that hitman splinter cell and dishonored all approach it and that works a lot better when your game is about quick and decisive strikes the problem in alpha protocol clearly stems from its need to be balanced for all of the different play styles that obsidian has baked into the game it's not just a stealth game it's also a full-blown third-person shooter and the two design philosophies just don't mesh at all when things get even more ridiculous is that it's actually a stealth power chain shot that's by a million miles the most powerful tool in almost every single boss fight as i mentioned earlier it's intended uses for clearing an entire room of enemies with five different headshots but in boss fights you simply stack them all on the boss and with a strong enough pistol it essentially one shots almost every fight it leads to utterly absurd situations like the fight in moscow against champion chick a russian hulk of a man hired to protect sergey sukov if things turn south and he's told to break thorton's legs what should be an intimidating situation is remixed into a total fast by him being chained shot to death in mere seconds despite these moments being completely undesigned to work at all in any way with any of the stealth mechanics it's actually the most overpowered build handling these fights much more easily than walking in with a fully loaded shotgun or a rocket launcher there are however a few boss fights where this strategy doesn't work although again it's largely down to incredibly poor design in the final mission of the game there's a short section where you leave the walls of alpha protocol and end up in a protracted fight with an attack helicopter which rains down missiles and gunfire from the sky it's just one of those fights that feels utterly untested and if you're playing a stealth build with lighter armor and minimal health upgrades it can feel borderline impossible the only way to damage the flying bastard is to pick up rocket launchers which are dotted around the level and shoot it down with those the problem being that while you race around to find these you're being peppered with gunfire and the helicopters missiles of which just a handful will kill you once again stealth is completely useless and as soon as you fire the first rocket everyone automatically knows exactly where you are meaning the whole fight is basically luck based hoping that the helicopter misses and that you can take the soldiers out fast enough to be left alone somehow though this helicopter rocket jewel is not the worst boss fight in the game that honor goes to constantine braccio a strange tarantino s character who's the scourge of almost every single alpha protocol player and the reason for almost every single help request thread on game faqs we're hunting him down as he's supposedly responsible for the transport of the stolen hallback missiles and after a lengthy mansion infiltration mission you step into a sort of disco dj venue where brachio emerges from the floor it's actually pretty disappointing that this fight is as busted as it is because i love the strange tone shift that constantine represents he emerges from the floor dressed like some sort of washed up 80s pop star while sawing 80s rock blasts over the top of it i mean it's a boss fight that literally takes place on a 70s style disco floor what isn't amazing about that the idea is roughly that breaker will shoot you with these twin golden oozies and then when you've done enough damage to him he'll take a big sniff of cocaine and go into a berserker melee mode where he'll try and knife you rinse and repeat a few times and that's the mechanics of the fight that first base isn't all that bad but damn the drug section is just awful he does so much damage in this mode that unless you're running the heaviest armor with a fully upgraded health bar he'll kill you in two or three hits which are impossible to avoid as for some reason he's faster than you on top of this he also becomes unbelievably resistant to damage meaning you have to wait out this phase to be able to put more bullets into it it means if you're running a stealth build it's almost impossible to beat him as your chain shot will simply put him into berserk mode where he'll slice you up and force you to restart the whole thing there is an intel you can purchase on the black market before the mission that poisons his cocaine slowing him down and removing his damage resistance but why would anyone think they needed this especially given the laughable difficulty of almost every other boss in the game at this point it means that brachio for most people represents either having to replay the entire mission this time with the intel that you magically need to know about or simply slamming your head against the fight over and over until you get lucky enough to clear it rather than an amusing change of tone with a fun two-phase boss fight it's instead the most notorious point for people abandoning the game completely unwilling to put in the potential hundreds of attempts to get past this ridiculous drug-addled rock star it's the absurd situation of alpha pro called boss fights they're either over so fast that you struggle to remember what even happened or they're burned into the back of your eyes from a difficulty spike that would make sakiro blush so much of alpha protocol is fantastic much of it is so bad that it's actually quite good the boss fights are just simply bad irredeemable in a way that something only truly broken can be [Music] so as with any aspiring rpg there's still a whole bunch of systems that we've not touched on yet all of which play a secondary role to the primary gameplay of conversing and fighting first let's talk about the weird way that your equipment works in alpha protocol starting with your guns which function less like an arsenal in a third person shooter and more like options on a character sheet from dungeons and dragons as weapons have separate skill lines on the upgrade screen and because you're forced to invest so many of them to get the accuracy of your chosen weapon up to a usable level it means each playthrough you essentially specialize in a weapon that you'll use for the entirety of the game in my stealth playthrough i exclusively used pistols just about getting them to max skill by the end of the game and in the second action-focused playthrough i went for the assault rifle and sank everything into that it's a system that will be all too familiar to people who've played bowed as gay or elder scrolls but something that feels very odd when you're playing alpha protocol in a run and gun way most third person shooters are based around some degree of rock paper scissors mechanics where different enemies will have different weaknesses against different weapons or at the very least the game will serve you up different situations that require alternative approaches let me explain in resident evil 4 you could just play through the game entirely with the pistol thing is the game is clearly designed for you to have a spread of weapons that you use in different situations shotguns for crowds or tight quarters rifles for distant enemies and heavy weapons for boss fights or emergency situations it seems obvious but it's a core tenant of the third person shooter formula everything from dead space to gears of war to max payne uses some variety of this idea which is why it's so utterly perplexing that alpha protocol avoids it all together what i find particularly weird about the weapon system is that it's obvious that there must have been an intention for this to work slightly more traditionally at some point the weapons do have some slight different characteristics shotguns can knock down enemies including bosses assault rifles have the longest range and pistols can hit for critical damage i feel like there must be some early version of alpha protocol where an action playthrough felt somewhat more like what we've come to expect from that genre there's an arsenal that you switch between on the fly rather than being locked into a single armament for the entirety of your time with the game another element that you'd imagine would be front and center of any spy game worth its soul is the gadgets it's as ubiquitous within the genre as a sharp suit an aston martin or a shaken martini something that isn't just an expectation but a requirement after all what is james bond without a pen that shoots people or a watch with a garage in it the gadgets in alpha protocol are surprisingly quite boring and amazingly uninventive considering just how out there some of the game's influences get with their technology you have a spread of traditional third-person shooter equipment flashbangs health kits grenades of various kinds and a few different items that help stealth the stealth gadgets are obviously completely pointless as anyone playing a stealth character will have no need to distract enemies with fake radio signals as they're running around completely invisible the health kits are also strangely not as important as you'd think dotted around almost every level of cabinets that refresh your health when activated and as most of the levels are quite easy to beat this is generally speaking all you need to keep yourself in fighting for in addition thorton also has an additional armor bar above his health that regenerates when out of combat sort of similar to what master chief has in halo 1. with enough armor you'll essentially never take any meaningful damage which means being able to carry a whole bunch of health packs really isn't as important as you'd think in fact regularly when playing alpha protocol i'd load into a mission only to realize halfway through that i'd not restocked my health packs at the black market precisely because i never really used them the offensive gadgets aren't much more useful either there's remote mines incendiary bombs standard grenades and shock traps but again they never really come in much use because they're all so weak and combat situations are just not really designed to require crowd control grenades or preemptively setting up traps you rarely fight that many people at once really just sitting in cover firing when you can is always a better choice if you want you can upgrade their effectiveness by investing skill points but strangely the upgrades that improve your gadgets are split across two different tracks sabotage and technology which i think means that obsidian never really meant for there to be a sort of saboteur gameplay style it just costs far too many points for it to be viable so really they just turned into a dump start in the late game in fact the only gadget that i ended up buying with any frequency is the emp charge which brings us nicely onto the next strange system the obsidian plastered into alpha protocol [Music] let me start this section by saying there's absolutely nothing wrong with designing little mini games that repeat throughout the game in fact when done right having a sort of little secondary game that you can get to grips with while you progress through the main story is actually quite a cool little touch alpha protocol's version of this is clearly influenced by the world of the immersive sim where mini games aren't aside activity but serve as a functional representation of your character doing something hacking or lock picking or splicing cables not quite a major pillar of gameplay but also something not completely optional like gwent in witcher 3 or golf in grand theft auto there are three different mini-games that you'll do throughout any play through a line tracing puzzle where you activate different lines in order a sort of matching crossword where you have to spot a line of code that matches yours and a lock-picking one that functions exactly how every single lock-picking mini-game in history works the problem here isn't that they exist but that they are a pretty unfortunate mixture of tedious and repetitive i defy anyone to get to the end of a playthrough of alpha protocol and not be utterly sick to death of them you see virtually all of the dossiers and optional rooms that house money and equipment are all hidden behind these mini games which means you're basically forced to engage them if you want to broaden your resources the lock picking game isn't particularly hard it's really just the system from elder scrolls oblivion lifted wholesale but the other two they actually get quite difficult in places not because the puzzles are hard but because you're given increasingly little time to complete them sometimes your eyes simply just won't catch the code or you might make a slight misstep when tracing the lines make a single mistake and you completely fail the mini-game this wouldn't be an issue if you could simply just retry it or if maybe the reward for finally being it reduced the more attempts you took but no for some reason obsidian have elected to have failing a mini-game mean that the alarm for the entire level is set off instantly alerting every enemy to your presence and requiring you to seek out an alarm panel in order to turn it off this is incredibly annoying the alarm just drones on and on and being punished with the whole level being essentially ruined from a stealth perspective just because you tapped a wrong key when trying to open someone's email seems utterly disproportionate what's even worse is that to deactivate the alarm requires playing a damn mini game it can feel like your whole time playing alpha protocol just becomes consumed with this epileptic crossword or following numbered lines constantly what little gameplay flow there is constantly broken up with the same minigames over and over it feels like for every time you complete one and are rewarded with an important piece of intel there are five more where you simply get a small amount of money with very little way to tell these apart it means that you're compelled to open and hack everything despite the process being utterly painful and the rewards often being completely pointless this brings me back to the emp charge a gadget which allows you to bypass these games and take the spoils bother free i bought and used hundreds of these bad boys constantly making sure i was topped up before every mission just so i didn't have to play these damn mini games and hear that [ __ ] alarm the reality is that the mini games are just too undercooked and they don't add anything to the experience beyond pace breaking frustration that should have been left on the developmental cutting room floor series like deus ex and bioshock have shown that these actually can be fun little engaging brain teasers but importantly they need depth to sustain being played over and over and they can't be mandatory alpha protocol commits this cardinal sin in both areas and quite rightly the mini-games are one of the most criticized elements of the game [Music] the final gameplay systems i want to talk about relate to what you get up to between your espionage adventures out in the field each of the hubs has its own visually distinct base camp which thorton returns to in between each level all three are aesthetically unique and are supposed to invoke the feeling of the country you're adventuring in russian missions are conducted from a high-class apartment in downtown moscow in taipei you're hiding in an underground bunker and your flat in rome looks out across the sun-drenched city in lore their decommissioned secret service hideouts and in the gameplay they're your base that you choose missions from and also manage a whole host of little mini secondary systems you see you don't only impact your relationships through your actions or conversations but also through an email system whereby characters will send you over key information or ask for your opinions on matters giving you a chance to either build further rapport and gain key resources it's an extremely boring but kind of hilariously realistic system for a game trying to be all thrills in action you're a globetrotting super agent so sending off a few emails to keep in touch actually kind of makes complete sense while in a hub you'll generally only interact with the cast that are associated with that hub for example in taipei you spend most of your time with scala and stephen but that's not to say that madison in rome or meena back at alpha protocol aren't advancing their own interests and need mike to weigh in while he's off on the other side of the world it gives alpha protocol a very real feeling of being alive characters aren't frozen in time waiting for the player to activate them but a real people with real goals moving in real time it's a neat little system that seems incredibly boring and pointless on the surface but actually massively contributes to the sense of realism and the overall tone of the game another large part of these hubs is the black market which is alpha protocol's equivalent of the traditional rpg shop only with a futuristic spin befitting of the genre on the surface it looks about as traditional as turkey on christmas but there are actually a few pretty clever twists that differentiate itself for stars the items are available to buy depend completely on which factions you're aligned with and which characters like you at the start of the game in saudi arabia you're working for out for protocol which means that the shop has access to all of their contacts and seems pretty stocked with weapons gadgets and all manner of trinkets to upgrade yourself with only issue is once mike's kicked out and on the run he's lost his reputation and people won't deal with him anymore the shop shrinks down to just a handful of pretty useless items and you need to schmooze your way back into the good graces of the powers that run the underground black market it's actually pretty much the only instance i can think of where what items are being stocked in the shop is used as a way of hammering home a narrative point mike's status as an outlaw isn't really represented in the gameplay outside of this so it's actually a pretty big moment and the primary driver of feeding like you're out on your own depending on who you team up with and who you complement different characters will let you in on their rackets which means even the items you have access to can vary between different playthroughs and adds another level of decision making onto your relationship building do you keep a rival agency suite because you know they sell a powerful weapon that you've been eyeing up or do you betray them and side with an ally that you've been courting since the start of the game it's probably the most active and busy shop in any western rpg and it's something you might not even notice if you just played through the game once along with being able to purchase weapons armor and gadgets you'll also have access to the intel shop which is where the black market really shines it's a section of the shop that allows you to purchase information about characters factions and importantly upcoming missions we touched on it earlier with the brachio boss fight but these mission intel's allow you to change certain elements of future missions in a way that either makes them easier or opens up alternative paths sometimes it's through bribing security to be off shift or replacing a shipment of weapons with less powerful armaments it doesn't sound like much but it's actually an extremely clever way to handle modular difficulty almost like giving the player cheat codes but dressing them up with an in-game explanation i really wish more games approach difficulty in this way rather than the completely immersion breaking difficulty settings which often just change health and damage numbers and very little else it's a clever way to give the player more control over their experience but without breaking character this leads me nicely onto the final small system we're going to discuss alpha protocol's hidden progression system perks throughout the game depending on decisions you make in conversations or on missions you get these small pop-ups which alert you to a perk that you've unlocked each one carries some sort of stat change or bonus xp and essentially forms the different personality traits that make your michael thornton distinct from anyone else's a playthrough where you're combative with everyone might unlock the intimidating perk which reduces the cost of weapons or a playthrough where you never kill anyone will end up rewarding you with merciful that gives you a huge hp boost for protecting the sanctity of life most of the perks relate to the skills that unlock them which means the whole system turns into a kind of parallel way to improve yourself rather than just collecting xp what makes it really worthwhile is that a huge amount of weird and unexpected perks keep popping up throughout your playthrough if you make enough jokes in conversation you get the razor whip perk which reduces the cooldown timers of all of your abilities thanks to just how in tune with this comic timing thornton is there's the impatient perk which reduces the cooldowns of your offensive abilities if you keep cutting people off in conversation there's a gentleman perk which gives you 20 health regen but only if you politely refuse all of the sexual advances in the game we're talking well over a hundred different distinct perks but all react to the things you do and all help build this really juicy picture of the character that you're playing as each perk comes with a little description outlining why exactly that emotion or trait has developed and it just takes that role-playing element that alpha protocol does so well up a whole nother level it's funny really because in most games these little systems that orbit around the main gameplay loop are so often the least developed and most frustrating in a game full of utter frustration and unending broken gameplay these smaller rpg systems that just sit quietly in the safe house waiting for you to come home actually work incredibly well and provide a huge amount of the stitching that somehow turns alpha protocol into a coherent and enjoyable game [Music] so what about the chances of an alpha protocol ii surely alpha protocol is a perfect candidate for a sequel to hammer out all those kinks and double down on the great bits that actually work unfortunately that seems pretty unlikely and in fact in 2022 alpha protocol 2 seems further away than it's ever been after its disastrous release sega's u.s boss mike hayes almost immediately announced that there would not be an alpha protocol 2 claiming that while they loved the concept they decided that a sequel was just too large of a project to be worth the very poor sales that the first game generated while that was faint praise to the media behind the scenes sega's u.s department actually blamed their entire poor financial performance for the decade on the amount of money they'd wasted on alpha protocol without apparently generating a lot of internal bad blood it's an absolutely brutal damnation the likes of which we rarely see from big publishers literally singling out a specific game as the sole reason for its wider issues things would only get worse as the years went by alpha protocol was never cleared for backwards compatibility on the xbox one which means that as soon as we moved on from the 360 the only way to legally play the game was on steam on the particularly unstable pc port amazingly it doesn't finish there though in 2019 the publishing rights to the soundtrack expired which prompted sega to request that the game be removed from the online shop entirely and at the time of writing there is now no longer any way to legally buy the game first hand or to play on modern consoles if you do own a copy it's a level of tarmacking that i've never seen from a publisher before a game almost entirely wiped from existence like some sort of embarrassing black mark in sega's history that didn't stop obsidian though in an interview with eurogamer in 2019 director chris parker actually told them that a 40-page pitch for alpha protocol was completed with the aim of smoothing out the janky systems and focusing on the reactivity which they knew was fantastic once again sega turned down the option uninterested in revisiting the ip in any way which essentially put the issue to bed forever sega wanted to move on and with their second attempt in the bin obsidian did the same i'm sure many of you are presuming that they were eventually saved from ruin by the release of the other game that they were developing in 2010 a little cult classic known as fallout new vegas well surprisingly you'd actually be wrong in thinking that despite new vegas going on to enjoy huge acclaim and now being thought of as one of the finest rpgs ever made it didn't actually help obsidian in the way that they needed they'd agreed to a clause in their contract with publisher bethesda that meant that the game had to achieve an 85 on metacritic in order for them to receive full payment and crushingly only got an 84. as if that heartbreak wasn't bad enough its average was pulled down by harsh reviews from publications like edge and 1up that would eventually go on to list the game as among their greatest games ever obsidian were actually on the verge of bankruptcy in 2012 after they had another high-profile cancellation this time from microsoft who cancelled a big-budget rpg called stormlands in its final green light meeting things became incredibly dire and the company had to make big redundancies and let go of people who'd been part of the organization for years they finally after so much poor luck and so many disasters caught a break in 2013 when the company took one last huge risk and put together a kickstarter project for a modern take on the isometric crpg it was considered the company's final hail mary to save themselves and luckily it paid off more than they could have ever hoped the kickstarter which became known as pillars of eternity was a runaway success raising 1.1 million dollars in its first 24 hours and reaching a colossal 4 million by the time its goals closed it was a perfect blend of a genre that obsidian felt extremely confident developing and something that was about to experience a huge revival in mainstream popularity on release it became a huge commercial and critical success and basically single-handedly brought the crpg genre back to life they'd gone to follow up with the extremely well received white march dlc and a sequel in 2018 along with a separate crpg called tyranny which was also a huge success they even finally managed to get their original action rpg made with the outer worlds which was a sort of spiritual successor to new vegas and again was extremely successful both critically and commercially in fact obsidian would go on to be so successful that they were eventually purchased by microsoft as part of their huge expansion of the microsoft studios brand whether that's a good or bad thing for our plucky once independent developers is a discussion for another day but it's safe to say that our story has a happy ending and despite having possibly the worst luck of any video game studio in history obsidian finally made it work and became the household name that they always believed they could be [Music] so before we end let's return to the opening statement of the video and the whole reason i put this retrospective together i asked a question about what was more important to the legacy of a video game its ambition or its function does a game need to actually work for it to be considered good unfortunately i think there's a hyper focus at the moment on how well a game runs how good it looks and basically how well it functions as a product rather than as a piece of art game reviews are increasingly becoming like home electronics reviews a dispassionate list of how it runs on different consoles or which graphical features have been included or excluded from the settings menu it means that some of the biggest scandals and outrage in recent years have predominantly been focused on this side of video game discourse the biggest scandal possibly ever is the almighty outrage at cyberpunk 2077 which was released on playstation 4 and xbox one in a state that most buyers found completely unacceptable terrible frame rates poor resolution graphical bugs the whole lot as poor as that is i was more frustrated with the lack of choice in the gameplay how generic its mission design felt and how uninspired its take on a cyberpunk dystopia really was i still think to this day that the lack of ambition and creativity is a far greater sin to me being immersed in a game isn't about the frame rate being rock steady but about how captivated with the design i am i think part of what's causing me to think like this comes from looking at older games that sold themselves as being graphical powerhouses and how often that actually rarely stands the test of time games like final fantasy vii or star fox on the snes were considered huge leaps forward being our modern era of high definition 60 fps almost all of that wow factor that drew people in is completely lost it's even happening now games like rage or crisis were once flying off the shelves because of how far they pushed their platforms but they've effectively left zero legacy because that cutting edge is always shifting something that never shifts is creative and considered game design and i feel even more vindicated when i look at the list of games that considered the best of all time most of which have games in the top 10 that contain some pretty big technical issues ign's top 100 of all time has disco elysium and bloodborne both of which have absolutely awful load times and games radar has breath of the wild and dark souls 1 both of which have terrible frame rate issues in the long term when we're looking at how a game is remembered and what its legacy is i think that ambition creativity and being memorable all trump that functional obsession with tech and specs that rules so much review discourse games are original and break the mould remembered even if they have issues and games that are technically flawless but uninteresting are eventually lost to the sands of time so yeah in my opinion ambition totally trumps function in fact i'd go as far as to say that function isn't important at all some of my favorite game experiences of all time have come from games that are considered completely broken deadly premonition pathologic 2 fallout new vegas vampire the masquerade bloodlines all incredible transcendent experiences and all completely and utterly non-functional most of these games took a while to find their niche and i think it's become pretty clear where alpha pro calls niche is we spoke earlier about what makes a spy game and how in 2010 there hadn't really been anything made that nailed the experience of hiding in plain sight or the tension that can be had within a verbal confrontation here in 2022 there still hasn't really been anything made that fits this brief it means the alpha protocol is still the best game out there if you want to experience what it's like to be james bond or jason bourne or jack bauer or some frankenstein's monster mixture of all three on top of that since 2010 there's been an absolute explosion of interest in games that let you tell your own story and take meaningful choices in narrative games like heavy rain the walking dead and until dawn all trade exclusively in this an alpha protocol does all of that with a full spy rpg plus the best conversation system ever put to disk it means i think alpha protocol has been really hard done by it's been robbed of its chance to be reappraised and lifted up into that echelon of janky but completely worthwhile games because it's simply just not accessible for most gamers the fact that sega have de-listed it from steam and gog and never approved it for xbox backwards compatibility really was the nail in the coffin for its legacy when people simply can't play it it will eventually fade away it's partly why i wanted to make this video if sega had it their way we'd all just simply forget that it ever existed but i think that's a terrible way to approach the history of our medium games shouldn't just be kept alive because they're commercially successful but because they're notable moments in the media alpha protocol might have left no financial or critical legacy behind it but if we can keep its reputation alive through videos like this i'll consider that a job well done so let's accept that alpha pro call is completely broken let's revel in the fact that it was a complete commercial failure and that nobody can even play it now because the fact that people are still talking about it 10 years later is as big of a legacy as any game could possibly leave thanks for watching you

Channel: I Finished A Video Game

Views: 166,460

Keywords: alpha protocol, obsidian entertainment, xbox 360, RPG, retrospective, bioware, knights of the old republic, fallout new vegas, sega, deus ex, immersive sim, action RPG, alpha protocol review, alpha protocol retrospective, long form video, video essay, video game analysis, review, critique, chris avellone, the outer worlds, pillars of eternity, microsoft, james bond, mission impossible, thriller, 24, xbox one, narrative review, video games, gaming, game review

Id: UgrytJb2mNo

Length: 101min 1sec (6061 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2022