Alpha Protocol: The (Complex) Basics
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Hey guys, and welcome to Alpha Protocol’s blog here on IGN. From now until launch, we’re going to be giving you some behind-the-scenes look at Sega and Obsidian’s new espionage RPG, which is coming out this October.
In case you’re new to the world of Alpha Protocol, the game puts you in the shoes of Michael Thorton, a new operative in a shadowy government organization known as, well, Alpha Protocol. Your first operation, in which you are tasked with tracking a set of stolen missiles through Saudi Arabia, ends…poorly. Having been disavowed by the government, you’re forced to proceed deep undercover and travel the world, attempting to unravel a global conspiracy.
One of our goals with Alpha Protocol was to highlight player choice, and, perhaps more importantly, ensure that the choices you make are meaningful and have an impact on the world. As an RPG, we of course allow the player to choose between a number of different skills for Mike Thorton, so if you want to go balls-to-the-wall with assault rifles and increased health, you can specialize in the associated skills, or if you want to play a quiet, leave-nothing-behind-but-footprints character, you can max out your stealth and your skill in silenced pistols. Or if you prefer to hack through your troubles, you can specialize in technical skills and gadgets. Or you can try to mix and match skills that you find intriguing and try the jack-of-all-trades approach!
Grigori can be sweettalked, or headslammed; the conversation – and Mike’s future missions – will play out differently depending on what you choose.
On top of the skills system, though, we also have a deep dialogue system that lets you interact with our cast of dozens of supporting characters. With each character you encounter, you’ll be asked to make choices in how you interact with them, and each character that you interact with will have different responses to the differing attitudes that you take, which are generally grouped into suave, aggressive, or professional stances. Your boss Yancy, for instance, might get pissed off if you try to sweet-talk him; he prefers agents who don’t try to brownnose and simply cut to the chase. The Russian informant Grigori, however, might react kindly to a suave approach; he’s been around the block enough to know that many undercover operatives are not above beating information out of their contacts, and appreciates it if you use a little tact with him. (Of course, if you want to beat info out of him, that option is readily available – don’t expect Grigori to like you much, however.)
Every character has a reputation meter with you, allowing you to track how much they like or dislike you. Sometimes being disliked can be as advantageous as being liked, however, as many characters will react to you based on how well you are liked or disliked by another character. (And sometime’s it’s just plain fun to piss off a character if you don’t sympathize with their motivations.) So, if you decide to anger one character, you might get some negative consequences from that, but chances are another character will wind up liking you more. Our goal has been to give players choices without clearly delineated “This is the Good Choice” vs. “This is the Bad Choice” reactions; instead, most of the choices you make, especially in your interactions with characters, will have some positive and negative consequences, some of which won’t become clear until hours later in the game.
Characters remember how you treat them…assuming you leave them alive.
These choices you make wouldn’t mean much unless the world reacted to them, of course, and we believe that this is where Alpha Protocol is going to offer a substantially different gameplay experience than anything you’ve played before. Reactivity has been the watchword for Alpha Protocol all through its development, and we want to ensure that the choices you make throughout the game have actual consequences that are measurable, whether they are dramatic or subtle, or whether they are immediate or pop up 15 hours after you make a decision.
To give you an example from our E3 demo, you will likely meet SIE, a German mercenary, the first time you reach the Leningradski Station in Moscow, where you are tracking down weapons shipments that you believe to have been sent through the train station. Like you, she’s interested in getting past the Russian mafiya members who are guarding the station and, while you are an unknown quantity to her, she proposes a deal: help her men infiltrate the station, and you will, for the moment, not be shot by them. Refuse, and you’ll have to fight everyone you come across. Which might not be such a bad thing; the extra enemies to fight will give you some more experience and more loot drops if you choose to take on SIE and her men, as well. But later on in the game, your decision to not ally with SIE will probably prevent her from coming to your aid in a later level in Moscow. However, there is another character in Moscow, named Albatross, who will be more inclined to help you if he knows you and SIE dislike each other (since their organizations are opposed), although his method of dealing with future challenges will be markedly different than SIE’s. Allying with SIE will get you tips on fighting through levels in a straightforward fashion (since she’s a no-nonsense mercenary), while Albatross will give you tips on proceeding through levels stealthily.
Of course, after the talking, there’s always a little wetwork to be done.
So, hopefully that little example will express some of the myriad ways in which your choices affect the game. And that’s just one choice in one level; that same level features multiple choices that will influence your cash supplies, your relationships with multiple characters, your ability to buy new weapons, and so on and so forth.
In the end, we hope to make a game where no two playthroughs of Alpha Protocol will be precisely the same. We’ve tried to ensure this is the case by giving the player a huge number of choices. We have three hubs that can be played through in any order (the levels within a hub can be played through in any order as well); you have a large number of characters that you can choose to ally with, antagonize, kill, or romance (in the case of our female characters); you have multiple methods of building your character, each of which will result in a very different style of play; and of course, all of these choices will have rippling effects throughout the game and during the endgame.
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this surface-level look at the world of Alpha Protocol. We’ll have plenty more updates over the next couple of months, so bookmark this page for all the Alpha Protocol info you can handle!
-Matthew Rorie, Marketing/PR Producer, Obsidian Entertainment
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