looking mighty fine so far: i expect that Alpha Protocol will have heart - will have a soul, like someone with great potential but no substance. It is gonna sing the Blues and you ll want to listen, a song about trainwrecked rpgs. This is a game made by people who genuinely love what they are doing, and it's clear that rather than asking themselves "How can we best serve the intellectual needs of RPG fans?", the developers instead asking the Bethesdian question of "Wouldn't it be awesome if . . .?" It has all the lack of polish of an indie game, but the forced shooting sections that only a multi-million dollar budget would require.
It migth have flaws - plenty of them, some that draw you out of the immersion and some that outright break the game - but ultimately it ll be a great game. I ll probably have more fun with Alpha Protocol than with any RPG released in the next few years, because we only really have DA DLC, FO:NV, ME3, and ESV to look forward to. AP wont be "a game that really tries to push the boundaries of creative freedom and expression," as The Witcher and (more recently) Dragon Age have tried to fake. Instead, it is gonna be "ambiguous", something that has been equally rare recently in the RPG genre. Judging from trailers there is a focus on gameplay (as opposed to say a movie), on RPG mechanics (as opposed to non-RPGs), on depth of setting and on immersion (as opposed to Super Mario Bros). It looks like it will be described by a bunch of generic words, and I wholeheartedly recommend pre-ordering it because stores always sell out of video games. If the Codex gave numerical scores, I'd give this an 8.5 out of 10, which means I find the hype simply delightful. Since we don't, pretend you didn't see that, meaning I wrote it for no reason.
