Alpha Protocol Preview on the Official Xbox Magazine

A new hands-on preview of Obsidian’s spy-themed RPG Alpha Protocol has surfaced over on the Official Xbox Magazine website.

Jan 14, 2009

WORDS BY: Paul Curthoys

RPGs have done plenty of swords and sorcery. They’ve secured the future of countless dewy-eyed princesses, and they’ve even bristled with lightsabers. But what they haven’t done before is spies. Alpha Protocol wants to make you feel like 008…but first you gotta start all the way down at 001 and work your way up.

As Obsidian executive producer Chris Parker tells the story, the game’s concept was born when “we had just finished Knights of the Old Republic II and were working on Neverwinter Nights 2 — two D20 games with hardcore rules systems. As we were putting together pitches for our next game, [we wanted to make] something more action-y. We started talking ideas, and one was spies. What about letting you be Jason Bourne? You’d start out as not much of an ass-kicker, but would become one over the course of the game…while figuring out what kind of espionage agent you’d make if you had the opportunity.”

Whoever you want to be, your name is Mike Thorton, who Parker describes as a competent, well-trained field agent on his first mission. You customize how he grows as a spy, but ultimately, he’s still Thorton. We need him to be this kind of leading man,” he explains. You spy on behalf of Alpha Protocol, a secret branch of a U.S. government agency that handles deniable operations. When things go tragically wrong on Thorton’s first op, “you’re doubly screwed,” laughs Parker, because not only will the U.S. not acknowledge you as an asset, but your own agency appears to be thrusting knives in your back as well.

Striking out on your own, you have just enough leads to start piecing together the big picture, and while the game is certainly about getting to the bottom of that, it’s also about learning your motivations as the player. Do you want Thorton to operate out of love of country? Or be a purely good guy if the U.S. is up to no good? Or wreak vengeance and retribution on all who harmed him?

Those decisions are a main thread of Alpha’s gameplay. “A big thing we wanted to go for was reactivity and consequences for your choices,” Parker says. Every call you make — a dialogue selection, a life spared or extinguished — will pay off with both equally valuable in-game rewards and changes to future missions and conversations. “We’ve all had a game culminate in a different ending,” offers assistant producer Nathan Davis. “But…we have different middles. Those can be subtle, or they can be big story points.”

Primed with that setup, we grabbed a controller and headed out on the first mission, which finds Thorton awakening in a medical bay, dazed and confused. Immediately, you choose whether to rip out your IV or leave it in. Of course, much weightier matters are often yours to decide, from the fate of major NPCs to whether you want to try to sweet-talk the ladies, you superspy you.

But at first, we blasted through a horde of guards in what turned out to be a cool mini-surprise that we ain’t spoiling. Alpha Protocol felt much more like a third-person shooter than an RPG — and that’s intentional. “Our biggest concern was that when you play a low-level D&D character, you kind of suck,” Parker says. “We spent a lot of time on a rules system that allows for player skill, [while granting] a lot of advantages based on your character’s [level] over the course of the game.”

So while you will see XP earnings pop up in all the usual places, we were also able to deftly connect with headshots right from the start. And in another mission, where Obsidian bestowed a much more advanced character on us, we got to see how those skills pan out. You can level up Thorton in 10 areas — half involve combat, but there’s also stealth, hacking, gadget use, and health. Improving in each earns you special abilities that Parker freely admits “are kind of like spells. They’re well beyond what a normal human can do.”

For instance, if you focus on stealth, there’s an evasion ability that gives you an extra second to retreat back out of an enemy’s line of sight before they notice you. Or, as Davis puts it, “you can just take that time to shoot them!” With a submachine gun, though, it’s hard to not have fun hosing down a room with Bullet Storm, which grants you unlimited ammo for a brief, reckless interlude. Or you can earn a Chain Shot with a pistol, which pauses the action like Fallout 3 does with VATS so you can plan and then unleash three shots.

Thorton can also earn perks, which are little rewards “that we toss at you all the time,” explains Parker. They’re not as powerful as Fallout 3’s and are more like Achievements. If you kill a bunch of enemies with a remotely detonated mine, that slaughter might net you a +5%-damage perk for any future mining you do.

The dialogue system also lets Alpha Protocol’s RPG flag fly. Cinematic in a way that recalls Mass Effect faster than Wrex can drop a grumpy one-liner, conversations present you with three options: professional, threatening, or suave. And there’s a timer running, so you’ve got to act fast. “We felt it was important for the genre of espionage that you need to make split-second decisions,” Parker says. In our game time, the choices affected how NPCs responded to us more than they changed far-reaching story points, but there will of course be some biggies, and the cumulative effect of changing NPC reactions will have a big impact over the course of the game, Parker tells us.

We put down the controller liking the framework that Obsidian has constructed for this game. Alpha Protocol is in early enough form that we salute Sega’s decision to push it back from a March release to the summer. And if Obsidian can use that time to weave together a complex, entertaining spy thriller that doesn’t take itself too seriously, we’ll be eager to earn our license to kill.