Alpha Protocol

Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Release Date: May 27, 2010

Time Played: About Nine Hours

Dubiosity: 4 out of 5

With All Apologies to: Matt Rorie

Would I play more? I beat the game. I don’t think I’m gonna play it again anytime soon.

To open Season 2 of everyone’s favorite Streaming/Blogging feature about playing the weird, obscure, and questionable representatives of the RPG genre, I ended up replaying Alpha Protocol. Despite not being the biggest fan of it back when I played it in 2011, over the years I’ve softened on AP, a lot of it having to do with a very rose-tinted view of its ambition and much-vaunted reactivity. There’s a lot of it that sticks out as interesting and unique, especially after BioWare’s reputation took a calamitous drop in the years following. I’ve always wanted to root for Obsidian as the scrappy underdog of RPGs, and for the most part I think that reputation held true right up until the Microsoft acquisition. You might have to squint a little, install a fan fix or two, but outside of Dungeon Siege III I don’t think you could accuse any of their games of being anything less than *interesting*.

Unfortunately, I’m here to say that I was right the first time. For as many interesting ideas as it throws out, Alpha Protocol isn’t a great game. That was sort of the consensus back then, but the bigger surprise in this most recent playthrough was seeing how little of the runtime is comprised by the stuff people remember fondly. Aside from the general tenor of Alpha Protocol very much being influenced by the geopolitics and espionage thrillers of the 2000s, it’s going for a pulpy tone with the writing that I found really hard to deal with. There is a concerted level of snark coming out of any of Michael Thorton’s three conversational styles (square, slimeball, sociopath), as well as most of the supporting cast that feels… maybe a little too much of its era? Basic cable? It’s not as sharp as it seems to think it is, and the embarrassing polar bear rape jokes and eye-rolling characterizations don’t really help either? It has a solid voice cast, outside of Michael’s VA having zero direction beyond a general layer of smarm, so it's mostly not a performance issue. I'm just a little past the kinds of highly pastiche'd espionage fiction archetypes this game traffics in, especially when it comes to the female characters. There are moments for sure, but a lot of them are drowned out

Now, the good news is that Alpha Protocol’s much-vaunted reactivity is still quite impressive, even if it’s a lot easier to see the strings. The funnel isn’t quite as obvious as Telltale’s various game series, but it’s a lot more evident when you realize exactly how much of the game is exactly the same regardless of the choices you make. Characters might make different comments, story events might play out slightly differently, and the ending can take a few dramatic turns if you basically follow a guide to get super-rare events to happen. The context might be different, some sequences might be easier or harder, there are a few optional boss fights, but you’re doing the same levels regardless. Even with that said, it’s still impressive to see all the ways the pieces can fit together. There was a lot of care put into making the game feel like it's constantly reacting to everything you've done, and if I hadn't soured on the general concept of "Your Choices have Real Consequences" in the aftermath of Mass Effect 3 and Telltale's various games, I think I'd still be enamored with it.

The part where you played AP wasn’t great in 2010 and I’d go as far as to say it’s barely functional in 2021. I’m not going to hammer on it too much because I feel like that’s almost included in its reputation, but it's a poor video game that looks bad, animates awkwardly, and is beset by egregiously bad minigames. Shooting bad, stealth OP, AI bad, pistols OP, bosses bad, etc. There’s enough recorded evidence in the form of my entire playthrough to make that point clear. At best, it’s something to be tolerated, but even when things are functioning like they’re supposed to (which, to be clear, they’re often not) it’s a breadth of ambition curtailed by the realities of budget and game design. And not in a fun, Eurojank sort of way. Two Worlds this isn’t, and I’m sorry to say that if you have fond memories of Alpha Protocol, it might be worth it to keep those memories locked as they are. If you do end up deciding to revisit it (which, given that it was pulled from Steam due to expiring music licenses and Sega not giving a shit, might be more or less difficult depending on where you want to play it) don't say I didn't warn you, but I'm also not closed to the idea that some enjoyment could be derived from it. It just didn't really hit for me.

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT

Thankfully, with that pain out of the way, I am excited to announce THE WHEEL OF DUBIOUS RPGs SEASON 2, back again with another 20* weird, questionable, and obscure examples of the role-playing genre. Not only am I back with some CRPG “classics” that were overlooked in season 1, but also some “high quality” console and Japanese RPGs for the first time! That's right, all the bullshit I spent months planning, all the older PS2 games I have my hands on, all the console streaming solutions I've acquired... lead up to this. You're Welcome.

*Titles are subject to change if I can’t get shit to run properly with OBS or my Elgato.

That’s right. It’s back. It’s better than ever(?) and I hope you’ll join me along the way starting next week. Look forward to it. Shadow Hearts write-up soon? Maybe?

When I saw you playing this, I said something along the lines of, "I will hear no ill words spoken of this game!"

I would just like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize. To say this game has aged poorly is to insult the very concept of aging. Jesus Christ. This game always had that Obsidian jank; Obsidian jank plus not being a genre they specialize in plus a decade makes this particularly rough.

I'm gonna equip my rose-tinted glasses and not look too closely.

Ooooooooooooh there are some OOFs I've played on that list there.

This will be dubious indeed.

There is a single game in that list that I would say is just an unqualified Good Time and a bunch that I would I say "Now I like this game but don't play it."

I am looking forward for the next episodes of the wheel of dubious rpgs!

On Alpha Protocol, the strange thing now when I think, is how much I don't remember about the game at all, like watching your streams I often tried to remember if I did that too when I played, but most the time everything is sort of a blur. Like, I remember the dialogue wheel, some character and a handful parts of the stages, but that was all.

@valorianendymion: Wow, exactly the same. I remember lovinng so much about the game but as soon as I finished reading all of this I realized I remembered only bits and pieces at best? It's such a wild thing for a game I recall so fondly in so many ways.

I have never understood how people came around to thinking Alpha Protocol was good actually. Like Matt Rories Alpha Protocol is a funny goof and all but man...this games bad.

I AM HERE TO DEFEND ALPHA PROTOCOL.

Sort of.

I have played it multiple times over the years (last playthrough was about a year ago? I think?), and each time I end up liking the game more.

The gameplay is horrible, yep. I got more used to it each time, which is not to say it's good or requires mastery of any sort, but just that that became less of a factor for me personally each time around. The graphics are, um... also egregiously bad. I also knew, even on my first playthrough, that the writing was not as sharp as some people were making it out to be.

So with all of that said, each time I played it was just exploring the reactivity more, and it's truly excellent. The way it reacts, not just to dialogue choices, but ways you play missions, what intel you bought from pre-mission vendors, even down to characters commenting on what you're wearing... damn. To go from my first playthrough where Scarlet Lake blindsides me with a sniper rifle, to then teaming up with her on the next run, going from destroying AP to creating my own insidious shadow network, and not as a single dialogue choice (like certain recent singleplayer RPGS cough cough Cyberpunk cough) but from the cumulative effect of all the manipulating and networking I had done was mind-blowing.

Now that's all well-worn praise for this game, so in my (mild) defense of Alpha Protocol let me bring up something that I don't think gets brought up enough -- the economy and systems of that game and how they support the themes works really well. Spending money and scrounging for intelligence that then gives you dialogue options or opens up new routes in levels or affects what enemies are in the levels is great. This is one of the few games where I was compelled to read each Dossier, and then the game recognizes that I read the Dossier!

I think Alpha Protocol does what KOTOR 2 did as well, in deconstructing socializing and relationships in games to a near nihilistic level. In KOTOR 2, everyone was influenced by what choices you made, but also had much pricklier relationship needs than in KOTOR 1. You coudn't just talk to them, you had to manipulate them, tease out their inner secrets and play them to your side, while potentially not meaning a word you were saying. AP is similar, except you now have a mechanical motivation to do so -- you are a spy and everyone is a tool to you. Michael Thorton has no values, no inner compass but what you give him, and I personally enjoy the "uber-bad" ending of creating your own Halbech equivalent. This extends to the "romances" in the game, which are incredibly slight, but in a weird way feed back into this theme that Thorton is a piece of shit using everyone around him for his own ends. One second Thorton can be all romantic with Mina (and I mean, why wouldn't he, you get more experience points for romancing everyone in the game) and then the next, he's learned she's an NSA plant that's standing in the way of his plans for Alpha Protocol, so he shoots her.

This isn't the kind of genre transcendence that consciously points out the ugly sides of game conventions and then avoids them, it just leans into them as hard as possible, making it painstakingly clear why the "talk to people to make numbers go up/make them like you" convention is so empty and manipulative. It does this incredible semiotic judo where, what gets in the way of emotionally connecting with other game stories that are going for verisimilitude in human interactions -- "isn't a 'relationship' rating kind of weird, human interactions are more nuanced than that?" -- actually support its morally bankrupt spy narrative.

So it pains me that the actual playing of the game 80% of the time is so garbage. I personally stay invested through multiple playthroughs because of how that gameplay can still affect the story, but I would never force someone to sit through it as well. I would love a take on Alpha Protocol from Obsidian or another dev as a point and click RPG, adventure game, or strategy game. That would feed into its strengths much better.

But the parts that are good hold up, dammit! :P

@efesell: I think it's because some people realize what the game could have been and then remember that as being the actual game rather than just unrealized potential.

@arbitrarywater: I agree about the cringy made-for-TV mid-2000's aspects of the game. Though I always wonder how Alpha Protocol would have turned out if the game had leaned less into trying to ape 24/Jason Bourne and went heavier into some of the sillier Metal Gear-like parts of the game.

Great write-up.. this game has sat on my shelf for what feels like a million years now, and i always *almost* play it. I am sure i will get to it eventually (2041 is just around the corner) but now i have a better idea of what to expect.

This game always gets people giddy around these parts so i felt compelled to check it out a long chunk of time ago. There were definitly some cool ideas and i'm always up for spy-shit, but actually playing the game feels rough in a way that even a way older game like NOLF doesn't.

That was a fun playthrough, quality of the game aside. That list of games for the wheel has me interested, and while I really don't think some of the stuff on that list is dubious at all, I guess that's for you to find out.

I'm really curious about the combat in Tales of Zestiria. Tales of Xillia (the game before it) was such a significant step forward for the franchise in terms of both the second to second combat and companion AI, and has made returning to anything released before it a struggle to play. If nothing else, I do hope they keep the Linking System (overhaul to companion AI).

I started another playthrough of this towards the end of last year. The gameplay is fine... Not good, but fine. And yes, Michael is too smarmy regardless of actual choices, but the picking apart and putting together of missions and the interconnected nature is still more compelling than what many more recent games have tried. I would love to see a sequel with more functional gameplay.

@lapsariangiraff: Hey, I just wanna say thanks for your post. I do think Thorton being a manipulative trash-person is absolutely canon, and in general I feel like the writing is a lot more... mean spirited than I remembered it being? Like, I know [FORMER PROMINENT RPG WRITER] has been outed as a manipulative scumbag himself, but I feel like there's a lot of that energy here.

FWIW, I also think you can absolutely still find merit in the game's ideas. I just found the execution way more abysmal than I remembered. Admittedly, I've played and derived more enjoyment from broken-ass weirdo games salvaged from the corpses of cancelled MMOs, so my tastes might be a little broken in this regard.

Eh, it's fine. I think there's still... merit to this game? Like, divorced from the fact that it's bad, it has a lot of good ideas. Makes you wonder how the Aliens RPG was going if this is the one that Sega decided to keep afloat.

Sounds like a ringing endorsement to me! I'm genuinely curious what the big red flags are for the people here. For my part, I think the ones I'm most concerned about are also the ones that might require some... finagling to work properly. King's Quest VIII seems like a nightmare disaster after watching it on GDQ and realizing it was an RPG, while Konung seems... very Russian. In a way that might be fun, and might be disastrous. Oh, I guess Underworld Ascendant also exists, but I'm already aware of how much of a tire-fire that entire game's scope is.

Oh, and don't worry, if I can't get KQ8 and such to play nicely with OBS, I have... backup games.

I think it's absolutely a hindsight thing, because even I was like "you know there are things about Alpha Protocol that no other game does as well" before this playthrough, and I feel like I gaslit myself a little bit. I do think the game does reactivity super well, but... I think the general value I place on reactivity isn't what it used to be.

The game absolutely leans towards schlock in a way that doesn't endear itself to me, especially when it starts treading its toes onto actual Bush-era Geopolitical stuff. I was gonna make a comparison to Burn Notice (which, IIRC, Jeff Gerstmann also made around the time of the game's release) but I think that'd be mean to Burn Notice. At least that show was episodic and extremely light and had Bruce Campbell.

Having played NOLF recently, on stream, I think I'd rather play that than AP, despite my general sense from those first few hours that... it maybe doesn't hold up so great either? Eh, maybe I'll play some NOLF 2, see how that one compares. The Wheel of Dubious FPSes sure is a topic that has been floated around, unironically.

Tales of Xillia *did* have very good combat, and at some point I'm thinking of doing a "Load Our Last Save" sort of dealio for it and seeing how much I can remember from my 30 hours in save file.

Zestiria, for what it's worth, sounds like the combat is fine and everything else is the problem. I don't think you can link, but the main character can basically Fusion with most of the other party members? I opted for it over Graces F, partially because it sounds like we're gonna be playing it for the podcast soon, and partially because that game is notorious for having "the best combat in a Tales game and the absolute worst story"

Hm, i think it's a hard game to return to if you don't have any nostalgia for that game. Like the gameplay and graphics are serviceable but it's nothing to write home about. I will say though that that game has some amazing 'guards complaining about being an employee in a big evil corporation' chatter that makes you want to stealth your way through each room to get as much of that dialog as possible. There's also some extremely wild voice acting happening throughout that game that will not land with everyone.

Personally i thought NOLF1 was the better game over NOLF2 when i replayed both of them. NOLF2 tries to open up it's levels a bit, as if some are connected to eachother. But sadly that only gets used to great effect once. It also feels very maze-like at times which is especially a problem because enemies keep respawning in certain buildings while you're going from room to room figuring out where the exit is :D

I absolutely loved this game when it came out - I still do. I can vividly remember many ofthe exciting moments I had with it and how pleasantly surprised I was when they occurred.

A few years back I tried replaying it and - I just dont have the free time anymore to invest in suffering through shitty gameplay.

That being said I will forever look back fondly on those memories.

Highlight: There is a mission where you need to infiltrate some CIA listening station and sabotage them from knowing you're in town. I went through the horrible trial of doing a 100% ghost walkthrough for that mission and was rewarded by the Chapter Boss not knowing I was there until our meeting where he showed surprise or atleast commented on it. I remember thinking that was so cool.

I love stealth games but quite often there is no benefit from suffering through a 100% ghost playthrough when its just funner to Dishonored stab your way through - (Or in this case abuse an invisibility cool down that lets you Judo Chop your way to victory unmolested.) So it was nice to have a payoff.

Legend of Dragoon is another game in the category of people who remember it fondly should never look at it ever again.

@junkerman: Man, the weird fondness I have for like just stabbing dudes completely out in the open yet somehow "invisible" is something I never want to go away and is also why I probably will just never go back to that game and just lean into how I feel about it as opposed to how it probably is.

Holy wowza looking forward to some Konung. Glad the wheel is back here at Giant Bomb Dot Com, where Stupid Bullshit lives.

@sethmode: Ha totally! IF on that playthrough I managed to unlock that ability before running out of steam I may have even finished it!

Other memorably moment for me was the "Turn Up the Radio" bossfight against that russian guy, Konstantine or something. I vaguely remember the fight to be a bit bad and broken, but the style and sound choice somehow turned it into a positive memory.