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You are going too far. There's still stuff to like about Alpha Protocol. The somewhat branching storyline, the fact that dialogue mechanics are more developed more than simply "[speech 100] I win your dialogue" and dialogue is an actually fairly well developed gameplay mechanic.
Obsidian's worst game is Neverwinter Nights 2. What was there to like about that garbage? The combat was terrible, shitty mechanics coupled with a shitty camera and lazy encounter design. A cliched storyline that frequently railroaded your choices on one path with minimal exploration and sidequests. I guess it was occasionally kind of funny but it's hard to laugh when you have to stomach hours upon hours of banality.
AP is nowhere near that bad.
Now I'm probably apologising too much for this game because as much as I like it I do admit it is really flawed and those flaws can be a dealbreaker for a lot of people but it just bugs me to see NWN2's OC compared favourably to AP.
You are going too far. There's still stuff to like about Alpha Protocol. The somewhat branching storyline, the fact that dialogue mechanics are more developed more than simply "[speech 100] I win your dialogue" and dialogue is an actually fairly well developed gameplay mechanic.
Obsidian's worst game is Neverwinter Nights 2. What was there to like about that garbage? The combat was terrible, shitty mechanics coupled with a shitty camera and lazy encounter design. A cliched storyline that frequently railroaded your choices on one path with minimal exploration and sidequests. I guess it was occasionally kind of funny but it's hard to laugh when you have to stomach hours upon hours of banality.
AP is nowhere near that bad.
Now I'm probably apologising too much for this game because as much as I like it I do admit it is really flawed and those flaws can be a dealbreaker for a lot of people but it just bugs me to see NWN2's OC compared favourably to AP.
First of all, NWN2 is automatically better because D&D
But even without that it would be better. AP is a third person shooter with boring-ass, uninteresting levels. That alone makes it a poor game, even without its other flaws.
By the way, how much branching is there really in AP? I only played it once, and while I liked the way they did dialogue and could bear the mini games, I got fed up by the action parts rather fast.
Personally I found NWN2 OC's cliche fantasy stuff very nostalgic and even refreshing, after many years away from the Forgotten Realms. Yes, the beginning was derpy but it got better once the story started dumping tons of factions into the game.
Criminal guilds! Githyanki and their planar minions! Bizarre Shadow cultists! Power-hungry Luskan mages! A demonic army led by a mysterious warlock! Each with their own agenda, sometimes fighting you, sometimes fighting each other. It's good stuff.
The problem with all the branching and C&C in AP is, that the actual process of playing the game was so un-fun that the mere thought to replay the game to experience said branching seems absurd to me.
Fuck that. D&D doesn't mean shit. There is plenty of garbage within D&D. Yes the average D&D game is better than the average popamole but NWN2 is fucking horrible.
But even without that it would be better. AP is a third person shooter with boring-ass, uninteresting levels. That alone makes it a poor game, even without its other flaws.
What the fuck was NWN2? A good campaign with interesting levels? Again, its combat consisted of the same wave based encounter design you find in DA2. The dungeons were boring. The mechanics were terrible, rest spamming completely destroyed the whole attrition aspect of dungeon crawling and the issue of single use Wizard dailies. Next you're going to say DA2 is better than AP for not being a cover shooter.
NWN2's combat mechanics were terrible, same as AP. But AP had great dialogue and branching which NWN2 didn't have. NWN2 actively routed your choices towards a linear path like the more obnoxious of Bioware titles.
And NWN2 was vastly better than NWN1.
Also, MotB.
By the way, how much branching is there really in AP? I only played it once, and while I liked the way they did dialogue and could bear the mini games, I got fed up by the action parts rather fast.
I'm considering MotB as a separate entity. And just because it's better than NWN1 doesn't mean shit. NWN1 was horrid.
Regarding branching, I don't really know how to explain that.
The story changes a lot and like Deus Ex there's lots of different secrets that I'm still finding in my 3rd playthrough (for example walking into an Embassy guarded by Marines while dressed in heavy armour and armed to the teeth automatically has them acknowledge you as one of them instead of having to bluff your way through).
There's 4 main endings and a major binary choice in each of the 3 hubs. Along with that there are a lot of other things like reputation and other minor choices that can accumulate and factor in all sorts of other elements. Your ability to access two of the 4 endings for example requires you to have built up a reputation with a character over the course of the whole game. Unfortunately since barely anyone likes the game there's not much of a wiki so I don't know the full extent of the branching, needless to say I've gotten a lot out of each of my two subsequent playthroughs.
The gameplay doesn't change too much in the sense that you are often having pretty much the same objectives in a map except working for different people, except in Moscow. In Moscow you have some really good stuff like questlines only opening up if you've gathered enough intel or solved a quest in a certain way. And some setpieces change based on your choices and who you are allied with.
Makes me almost want to replay it. But similar to what VoD said, the actual gameplay just didn't catch me enough for that.
If the shooter parts were cut in half, maybe.
Agreed, my point was just that NWN2 doesn't have fun mechanics- it might be based on a well thought out ruleset but the execution is shoddily designed and leads to pretty terrible combat and crappy dungeon crawling but YMMV I suppose.
The way I see it both game screwed up the combat to the point where it was just frustrating to play. AP at least had good C&C and a series of interesting storylines that got more interesting the more you uncovered all the hidden agendas and dossiers. Also at least AP was a quick 10 hours rather than a frustratingly padded and tedious dragged out 45+ hours.
Gord, that's why I tend to recommend playing on easy to breeze through the tedious gunplay.
It's purely a storyfan game, which flies in the face of what a good game is and certainly how I define what a good game is but...I dunno in spite of it all I can't help but like AP amidst all its rough edges and shitty combat mechanics and stupid texture popping and linear level design etc.
AP has basically three archetypal play styles, you can combine them as you want. Agent, mercenary, and person with stealth and explosives. The trouble is it doesn't have enough content for five playtroughs, but you can save with your character after these first few missions, and start again try them with each archetype.
BTW I started with a rookie, and it gives you a real sense of progression, and you are quite limited (especially if you skipped a training by accident, thus you are learning everything in the field on ironman).
Rookie is nice because you are harshly limited and you need to be careful, think in advance, and occassionally do a some harsh choices. On Veteran, you can show you are overpowered, choice what choice I'd do both, and try to do both. Either rookie had rookie luck, or they spiked difficulty for Veteran.
Final note about Alpha Protocol - don't play a melee-only ninja character. There are late-game bosses that will utterly fuck you up if you go that route.
Well when someone plays one trick pony, it's obvious he would get into situation when that one trick will not work, or would work badly doesn't matter how well executed. Winning that encounter with
Marburg
using melee is great.
But of course, AP isn't that stupid to let you get away with anything, and at the begining when you are using hand to hand, you should expect you'd get an encounter with shotgun when you are fighting more than one opponent, or when your opponent manages to aim and fire. It works relatively well in the middle, but at the end you will encounter situation when hand to hand alone will do less than using another opinion.
Until you'd get swarmed and find a funny fact that shotguns have low rate of fire. On the other hand AP shotguns work at long distances as well.
Weapon modifications in AP are done better than in ME3. You can get choice of a high accuracy riffle with low recoil, or high powered riffle that is quite hard to handle, and requires proper skills with assault rifles to be used in burst mode.
The great place to piss Mina is in China. You can go from full love to total hatred in 30 seconds, or so.
Or piss off D.: "you created yet another body bags, do you know how hard is to cover the whole stuff? You bastard you should be more careful next time." Then piss off D. Then piss off D. What can he do?
Aside from these cruise missiles that were launched on a personal request of his father.
It might be fun to find message like that in some dossier.
Oriebam, you can buy as many EMPs as you want from the store, the shooting range course gives you more points for criticals so you pass if you take your time and wait for criticals each time instead of rushing through it, and for the stealth course you're supposed to wait until the guy's just about underneath the lowest part so you end up kicking him down when you land.
Criminal guilds! Githyanki and their planar minions! Bizarre Shadow cultists! Power-hungry Luskan mages! A demonic army led by a mysterious warlock! Each with their own agenda, sometimes fighting you, sometimes fighting each other. It's good stuff.
Oh, too bad I threw it away in disgust before the fun stuff showed up. Not going to give it a second chance, though.
Also, how the fuck could they make a D&D game with no fog of war. Not that NWN2 dungeons were big, but having them all uncovered from the start is a fucking deal breaker. They could make tha game play itself while they were at it.
Criminal guilds! Githyanki and their planar minions! Bizarre Shadow cultists! Power-hungry Luskan mages! A demonic army led by a mysterious warlock! Each with their own agenda, sometimes fighting you, sometimes fighting each other. It's good stuff.
Oh, too bad I threw it away in disgust before the fun stuff showed up. Not going to give it a second chance, though.
Also, how the fuck could they make a D&D game with no fog of war. Not that NWN2 dungeons were big, but having them all uncovered from the start is a fucking deal breaker. They could make tha game play itself while they were at it.
Also, how the fuck could they make a D&D game with no fog of war. Not that NWN2 dungeons were big, but having them all uncovered from the start is a fucking deal breaker. They could make tha game play itself while they were at it.
Yeah, you have a point here. Still, NWN 2 had both uncovered maps and shitty encounters. I remember expecting a game of BG quality when trying it out. So, basically, my rant should be like: "how could you screw dungeon crawling so much in comparison to BG series".
Eh, BG1 had dungeons that were marginally worse than SotSB. Which quite possibly makes them the worst dungeons to grace a CRPG. BG2's improved the encounters tremendously, and while I don't think NWN2 OC's are as good as BG2's, they're definitely better than BG1. And than NWN1's for that matter.
TBH I'm not going to defend the OC, because while I didn't find it as shit as others do, it's still overwhelmingly mediocre. Though, not as bad as NWN1.
BG1 dungeons were bad? There weren't even that many as I recall, unless your idea of dungeon differs from mine.
Amn mine or something. Really narrow so the shitty interface really made it unfun.
Something far northeast of it, opposite the spiderwood thing, some ruins. Actually not sure there was a dungeon there.
Spiderwood spider cave or something. Wasn't very big I think.
The farm bug caves. Again, not big.
Sewers, well not a dungeon.
Dungeons under Candlekeep, not that bad.
Did you not ever play Dragon Age? Worst dungans evar.
I wouldn't call its C&C revolutionary. There's an extremely large amount of narrative reactivity, yes, (so much so that in that But Thou Must thing from PAX Avellone said they'd never make another game like this again unless technology finds a way to make it easier) and I don't think any other RPG structures dialogue the way it does (i.e., no recursive branching or binary win/loss outcomes), but revolutionary? Nah.
