This decision to put the focus on what the team is calling ‘action skills’ is defining Alpha Protocol
Ehhh....this could be a bit disconcerting. Most developer's first forays into the action-side after strictly RPGs are...less than great. Jade Empire for one. That game was awful. Bloodlines was okay....but Ming Xiao's place and the sewers were some of the worst "dungeons" ever created and left a really sour taste on what could have, in keeping with the metaphor, been quite a tasty game.
“We said you can’t really find a treasure chest in a lair,” laughs Parker. “Then we thought, well, maybe you can, as long as it’s a safe filled with heroin.”
Ugh...an opportunity to bounce away from traditional RPG tropes and Obsidian goes crawling back to them. How about your choices open up "supply points" from differing suppliers? Maybe if you kill a lot of one faction, you close off the availability of supply requests from them, but perhaps open up bonus supplies at a reduced price from a happy enemy faction? It fits a hell of a lot better into the spy theme than looting and selling stuff too.
Even more than that seen in Mass Effect, Obsidian is working to turn dialogue into something of a puzzle rather than just a means of switching the pace and getting boring story out the way
That's encouraging....or perhaps it's just gaming critics being foolhardy as always.
So instead we immerse them in the world
but we wanted to immerse the player in the story rather than get involved in the super nitty-gritty.
Yay buzzwords! Obsidian can bullshit with the best I suppose.
Some will say that with a move towards shooting and a dialogue system similar to Mass Effect, Obsidian is still following in the footsteps of BioWare, but that would be unfair.
Why? Even if it's wholly coincidental, it is rather true. Same general structure when it comes to combat. A slightly similar skill system, with the main difference being Mass Effect's classes dictating the skills available to be used. Not to mention the idea that dumbing down dialogue is the best thing since sliced bread....
Things got better with Neverwinter 2, but I do not consider it to be an A product. More of a B-.
Sorry man, Neverwinter Nights 2 was pretty awful. Any more than a D+ would be pushing it.
Obsidian is explicit that it really wants players to get to the end – or ends – of their game, but there’s a danger that this streamlining of resource management, coupled with Alpha Protocol’s brand of simplified stealth, may result in a game that has removed too much of the challenge for some of its audience.
And this is what will sink the game. If the action is boring and mindless with some super special awesome cinematic immersive bullshit, it really won't be worth playing. The absolutely idiotic dialogue system seems as though it will keep the player completely in the dark, and stumbling around not knowing what sort of role they are trying to play (yay vague blanket "stances") with a bunch of boring twitch combat seems like a no-go for me.
But hey, if it keeps Obsidian from going out of business and allow them to make good games like MOTB on the side, then I can live with it.
Sorry, but I've already been Herve'd once over. That's what they said about Tactics and PoS in regards to Interplay making good games like Fallout 1 and 2. Where's Fallout 3 now?
