Checkpoints

Alpha Protocol is a checkpoint based game. On one hand this is sort of justified – I can see how Obsidian chose this method to add gravity to the choices in the game. In most cases the dialog options bear a lot of weight and you can lose or gain a lot of reputation points with someone when you say something inappropriate. In most cases there is no easy way to recover after you blurted something out – not unless you feel like re-playing last 20 minutes or so. So the check-point based system does force you to pick your conversation options very, very carefully. The checkpoints in action-parts of the game are spaced very well – they are at logical points and near each other so there was no needless repetition. Death was not an issue, but rolling back the conversations and navigating them again was made difficult on purpose.

It makes sense, but I hated it. There were several moments in the game when I accidentally let the timer run out and ended up being stuck with a very undesirable dialog choice and no way to take it back. Also, at one point I forgot to save an NPC who was being tortured because I took the wrong door and had to start the whole mission over in order to fix that.

But I must admit that this was probably the few games I have ever played in which the checkpoint system was just an annoyance rather than a deal breaker. Or perhaps it was just that the game had other more annoying issues. I don’t know.

Timed Conversations

Another annoyance I absolutely hated in this game were the timed conversations. They reminded me of Fahrenheit/Project Indigo which used the same concept – though I felt that Alpha Protocol timer is actually much more forgiving and easy to use. In most cases it gives you plenty of time to choose an appropriate response but there were few instances where I really needed extra time to ponder the consequences and ran the clock out. Here is an example:

As you can see, the conversations are done Mass Effect style. The UI is a wheel with basic keywords that describe your general approach. So you get to pick the attitude or direction of the conversation, but what you actually say is not always clear. This leads to some confusion: choosing joking or fallacious attitude will usually result in some subtle smooth talking most of the time. But just for kicks Obsidian writers decided to make it backfire horribly every once in a while. So sometimes picking one of these options will end up in you blurting out something excessively crude and offensive. But that’s sort of standard for a lot of the wheel based conversation systems – Mass Effect games also suffered from this a bit.

IMHO the timer was very unnecessary and removing it would only improve the gameplay. But that’s just me.

No Jump Button

There is a point in the game where you are running around the subway tunnels trying to get to a specific location before the bad guy does. At some point you turn into a corridor and your character blurts out “It’s blocked! I’ll have to go around”. So you look ahead to see what is blocking the way, and it is a chain link fence about chest high. There is even no razor wire up top – just a neat railing, and lots of clearance to the ceiling.

But alas, you – the international super-spy – cannot possibly scale such an obstacle and must navigate a maze of tunnels instead. The game also loves to use knee high ledges to prevent you from back-tracking. You can jump off of them, but your character can’t possibly climb back out. I absolutely hate this in video games – it is one of my many pet peeves. It is just a lazy design. Every action game should have a jump button, and ability to scale obstacles such as chest high walls or chain link fences. If you don’t want a player to go somewhere just put a solid wall there. If you want to prevent him from back-tracking make him jump down a high ledge – high enough to inflict damage, but not high enough to kill. You know – make it realistic. How can you be a super-spy if you can’t even do a pull-up or jump over a waist high fence? It annoys the hell out of me.

Inconsistent Boss Difficulty

I chose to do the Russian mission set first, so one of my early boss fights was with Konstantim Brayko. He is easily the most difficult boss in the entire game. The difficulty stems mostly from the fact his specific set of moves is not explained very well. He starts off on a big stage shooting at you with his SMG’s. After you hit him few times, he snorts some coke, and then runs at you trying to attack you with his switch blade. For most people this seems like a perfect opportunity to unload a full magazine into him for massive damage. Unfortunately he is invulnerable during the whole melee sequence. Unfortunately you usually don’t notice because his 3 hit knife combo will instantly kill you at lower levels.

Once his coke high wears off he summons some bodyguards and goes back to shooting. So the secret to defeating him is to run away from him when he tries to close the distance for melee attacks, and shoot at him when he mellows out. Also, if you shoot him at the right moment you can prevent him from calling for reinforcements. It took me about 10 or attempts to defeat him, and I had to consult the wiki to make sure I wasn’t doing something wrong.

After Brago every other boss was a piece of cake. In fact, I was amused at how easily I defeated the final two bosses. They had nothing on the crazy coked up Russian that almost made me quit the whole damn game.

I heard people complaining about Omen Deng being a bit hard but by the time I faced him, I had my pistol skill maxed out and I could use the bullet time to land 6 head shots on him every time he stuck his head out from behind a pillar.

On the other hand, there was the Championchik fight which I thought was hilarious. The game makes a big deal how he is this former boxing champion, and he is a huge mountain of a man but I managed to take him down Indiana Jones style. I simply pulled out my pistol, used the multi-shot skill, landed 3 head shots and saw him just slump down onto the floor. Priceless! Best boss fight EVAR!

Bugs

This is an Obsidian game, which means it is required by law to contain a certain number of bugs. Here is a list of the major issues I encountered:

• Doing anything in the Clearinghouse would take about a minute. And by that I mean a minute per mouse click. Each time you switched a tab or clicked to purchase an item the whole game would freeze for a spell. There was absolutely no reason for this – my computer is a bit of a beast. I have plenty of memory, good video card and a fast CPU. Even with many enemies on the screen my frame rate would almost never drop. But the clearing house with static images of weapons and ammo made me feel as if I went back to the 90’s and was trying to browse the web using the AOL browser on 28k modem. Each visit was a harrowing experience, and none of the ini file tricks I found online resolved it.
• At several occasions the game would forget to load enemy models and I would end up running around empty rooms trying to figure out what to do. Most of the time this would happen after re-loading from a checkpoint during boss fights. The simple solution to fix this was to quit to main menu and reload again. Once I knew this was a bug, I knew how to deal with it – but first time around it really took me for a loop and made me waste about 20 minutes back-tracking all across the level because the boss just wouldn’t spawn.
• The camera was a bit wonky and it would swing around or stutter at times for no reason. It was a minor annoyance unless it happened in combat.

Other than that the game seemed fine. I haven’t experienced major crashes to the desktop and it never froze up on me. So in retrospect, Alpha Protocol was less buggy than Fallout 3 for me.

Mini-games

I was initially going to make a full post on this, but then I went and forgot to take screen shots or vid-caps of the mini games. I don’t feel like doing it right now, so I figured I might as well lump it into the complaint post.

The lock picking and security bypass mini-games were passable. I would say that the implementation was worse than that of Mass Effect 2 but conceptually comparable. The hacking mini-game on the other hand was downright atrocious. It didn’t have to be, but Obsidian developers clearly didn’t feel like re-designing it for the PC release. It was clearly designed to be solved with a console controller that has two analog thumb-sticks. It looks like this:

As you can see, it involves moving around two rectangular regions and placing them on a matching set of numbers. On a PC you move the left rectangle with the WASD keys and the left with the mouse. And you don’t actually get to point-and-click with the mouse. Just look at that video – you can briefly see the mouse cursor in it. That’s how you do it – you wave the mouse around and the rectangle sort off follows it.

The puzzle is not hard to solve – that’s not the case. It is just near impossible to accurately move the left rectangle with your mouse. The process is painfully slow and very error prone so you almost always run out of time. And this is in a game where failing a hacking attempt will cause an alarm to be sounded causing all the enemies on the level to swarm to your position.

Thankfully, spending two points on on in the Sabotage skill tree allows you to use your EMP charges to bypass all these mini games. So I diligently filled every single gadget slot with maximum available number of EMP charges and then strategically avoided hacking terminals that were not worth wasting a charge on.

Anyway, there is a usability lesson here: if your game requires use of two controller thumb-sticks do not port it directly to PC without changing that control scheme. If you simply make the mouse behave like an analog directional input device you will make your users go insane. The device was not made for that – it was made for pointing and clicking. Using it in any other way is just difficult. Look at it this way – there is a whole genre of casual flash games in which the challenge stems from using a mouse in a way you would use an analog joystick. If you want to do something like that, that’s fine – but in a timed mini-game that requires fast and precise motion this is just silly.

That’s all I have really. There are some annoying things in this game, it is far from perfect but it was fun. I recommend giving it a try despite the flaws I listed above. Especially since some of my complaints are not about actual game play flaws, but rather things that I personally do not enjoy.

It starts a little weak – you become a member of a super-secret spy organization and you are sent to investigate terrorist activity in the middle east because some bad guy got his hands on some dangerous rockets and shot down some passenger plains. Little bit boring, but that’s just the first few missions. Once you get through them, the thott plickens quite significantly. You end up with a roster full of double and triple agent NPC’s who work for organizations which are fronts for organizations secretly funded by fronts of companies that are not what they seem to be. One could even say it gets too complex. I finished the game once, but I’m not entirely sure I fully understood everything that happened in the game. But I loved every second of it. Well, except of the annoying parts but more on that later.

Michael Thornton played by Zach Galafinakis

What really amazed me in this game was the fact that your choices do matter. The game offers you 3 quest chains (Russia, Grece and Taiwan) that you are free to tackle in any order. But choices you make in each one, will affect the events not only in the current location but also affect things in the other two. Bribing the local weapon’s dealer may come back to haunt you when he sells the information about you to your enemies. Accidentally killing marines while infiltrating US embassy will definitely come up in the future. Failing to obtain evidence of an assassination plot will cause someone to die. The game has a definite replay value because different choices will not only generate different dialog options but also give you different game play experience.

Compare that to for example Mass Effect or Fallout 3 – both games which I love dearly – which offer you a mere illusion of choice. For example try playing Mass Effect 2 as a renegade right after finishing it as a paragon (or vice versa). The experience will be almost identical – the only difference is that at the key moments your character will use threats instead of persuasion. In Alpa Protocol being a jerk to the wrong NPC may cause a mission to be more difficult as they can betray you or send in troops to thwart your plan. On the other hand being a jerk to the right NPC may score you a bonus perk, or give you useful intelligence. You never know, until you screw yourself over and then it’s too late to change anything.

Btw, I still haven't exactly figured out what was the agenda of Albatros and his group. Probably because I antagonized them early on.

That’s the other thing that I love about this game – there is no universal karma meter. Obsidian did exactly what I have been asking for all this time. They implemented a reputation system that eschews some global counter in lieu of many smaller ones – each associated with a specific NPC. Gaining or losing reputation with one NPC does not affect your standing with others. More importantly, each NPC has a different personality – so the old RPG trick of always choosing the nice guy option won’t work in this game. Some NPC’s will like when you are a jerk to them because they will interpret it as a sign of strength. Some female NPC’s will love when you flirt with them, but others will shoot you down mercilessly. Some love joking around, while others prefer to keep things professional. You have to get a feel for each character in the game and choose the dialog options appropriately – you know, kinda like in real life.

Sie hates flirting, but she will totally throw herself on you when you are all professional and businesslike all the time.

Oh, and another thing – NPC’s don’t evesdrop on your private conversations. In Mass Effect 2 I spent a lot of time talking to Jack because I found her to be an interesting character. This inadvertently opened up the romance option with her. But then I found out that I could romance Tali – something I have been dying to do since Mass Effect 1. So I quickly started chatting her up – only to have other NPC’s tell me that I should break up with Jack if I want to pursue Tali. When I went to see Jack, she just cursed me out because she somehow magically found out what I was about to say to her. This sort of thing does not happen in Alpha Protocol I was totally James Bonding the crap out of every lady I have met (I mean, hell – I’m a spy, that sort of thing comes with the job, no?) and neither one knew about the other. Hell, I don’t even think my super-possessive and jealous handler have completely figured out why I chose to save Madison in the Spider-man Choice scene. Or maybe she did – but she never said anything because I was careful not to tell her what exactly I was up to with Madison.

I don't know what's on the news Madison. I've been out all day killing people while you sit here and watch TV. You tell me. Preferably in the bedroom over there while we undress.

And yes, the game is big on forcing you to make fucked up choices at critical points. There is one that is the classic Spider-man problem. On the left, bunch of innocent people. On the right, that girl you like. They are all going to die but you only have enough time to save one. Now choose! I chose the girl, because I thought I was Spider-man for a second there. I guess I’m too genre-savvy for my own good. I fully expected the game to reward me for choosing the girl by giving me enough time to save the innocent people as well. That’s exactly what would happen in a Bioware game for example. One of these would be the right choice, while the other one would totally suck. In Alpha Protocol both suck – and boy did I pay for that choice. I’m serious, the game kept rubbing it in calling my character impulsive, unprofessional, reckless, easily controlled and etc.. They kept guilt-tripping me about it – I chose to save some skirt and let bunch of innocent people die. It really made me feel horrible about my choice.

Mina does now know about my indiscretions. Also - my favorite thing to do: turning my back on the people I talk to on the big screen.

And this, ladies and gentlemen is what I want in my games. Difficult choices that mean something. Making a choice only to have it blow up in your face is maddening and frustrating but in a good way. This is the kind of frustration that I want to experience. There is the other kind – the kind where the game snatches the choice away from you at the last minute. The kind where you suddenly realize you have 4 dialog options but they all say the same thing – which is the opposite of what you wanted to say. This is a sort of staple – a standard operating protocol for Bethesda and Bioware as of late. And I was very pleased to see Obsidian chose to write their game differently.

All these things really made me rise my hopes for Fallout New Vegas. If they can combine this freedom of choice with the open ended sandbox environment of a Fallout game, we may have a hit on our hands. Of course these high hopes are sufficiently tampered by all that sucks about Alpha Protocol. But I will talk about this stuff next time.