Joseph Bulock

The fun thing about both the recruit and veteran modes is that that's where we got to put a lot of what you could think of as our "director's cut" content for the cinematic sequences. The lines or the animation that was a little too over the top or came too close to the 4th wall only has a chance of showing up for veteran players, and recruits have some very solidly funny lines that reference their total lack of experience.

That talk was a great time to give. Glad you guys finally get to see it.

I really enjoyed the first one, but the horror aspects were high on my list of stuff that I really liked about it. Doesn't sound like I'll enjoy the sequel nearly as much, but I'm a horror junky, and very few games really cater to that anymore.

Let's be clear. You can't change the name of the character, or his gender. You can however change his abilities, and to a large extent, his appearance. Saying we don't have character customization is not accurate, nor is it fair to all of the team that worked hard to make sure players can enjoy making their own Mike Thorton.

The only counter point I can offer you guys is that watching and interacting with gamers who played our game for almost two hours, they clearly enjoyed the RPG experience that AP had to offer. I'm not going to comment on this particular commentary, but I can say as a general trend, people who play one level don't see the RPG experience. They see the action side of our game, without the deep character choices and reactive story.

I don't think that's a fair breakdown for Mass Effect by any means, but Alpha Protocol definitely doesn't have any good guy/bad guy points going on. The player choices influence how individual characters think of Mike Thorton, and the story reacts to the situations that result.

I think thats a typo as it directly contrdicts what Matthew Rorie said a few posts before it. Sorry, that was in fact a typo. You can pause any time during the DSS except for when the timer is running. Those sections force the player to make a decision quickly, and you can't circumvent that by pausing the game.

Points: Our game is not a first person shooter. It's a third person shooter/rpg. If you're looking a straight Doom/Half-life/Quake experience, you're going to getting a much more detailed and involved story (no disrespect to the stories in any of the mentioned games). The stance timer cannot be fully disabled. You can pause while it's running, but all of the stances are very short. The feeling of putting pressure on the player in tense situations is a core principle to the DSS system. Depending on your playthrough, you can miss whole characters, whole plot points, and we do have many large decisions to be made in the game, which does mean that you won't see the content that reacts to the choice you didn't make. Our game has definitely been built around the idea that it should have awesome replay value, and I'm really proud with how much incentive there is to play our game many times and get a very different experience each time. If you're just looking for a great stealth/action shooter, AP definitely can be that game, but keep in mind that it also has a great story that is just as important to the experience as is the gameplay, and in fact, is so integrated into the gameplay that even players who get really into the action will end up enjoying the world and the characters that we have crafted. (Long talky part done)

There is sex in the game, I will be the first to be proud of this. My point is that it is inexcusable to write anything that is expected to be taken seriously about any form of media without actually experiencing the media. AP's sex isn't juvenile, it's not just a reward for playing the game. The scenes are important milestones in the player's relationship with the characters. As to the game's sex being normative, yes, our game features a heterosexual male character and a number of heterosexual females. It is also a game in the same narrative style as the bond movies or any of the big Hollywood espionage action films. Bond never gets bi-curious, and I don't remember any lesbians in the Bourne series. To be the most faithful to our source material, Mike's possible sexual encounters are all between a man and a woman. I personally can't wait to see more LGBT centered relationships in games, and hopefully ones that are done well. AP simply wasn't the game to explore these, and I'm not sure if games are really in a place where a AAA title can explore these themes honestly.

I enjoy that the article bases the entire argument on the naming of one of our perks, and a few comments by a game developer. No movie critic worth his salt would write commentary based on a trailer, and no book critic would write commentary based on reading the outside jacket promotional text, but somehow this person thinks it's acceptable to form a critique based on the name of a perk. If he has the same opinion after he plays through the game, that's his business, but this sort of laziness is exactly what is ridiculous about game journalism and critique currently. I think one of the greatest signs that our industry is still young and hasn't reached the depth that other mediums have reached is that the critics still pass off writing such as this as serious commentary.

Last year's PAX was pretty light on booth babes. Seattle is really awesome place to have a con though.

I'll be there!

I will say that our Achievements have much better names

I will say that I have done some of the scripting for some pretty hard to get DSS achievements. There are some that are gated by story choices, so that you'll need to replay the game multiple times to get them all. We do also have a few that are "you beat this hub," but those are the minority I would say.

Developers do not control the advertising for a game. We may make suggestions and whatnot, but it's pretty much out of our hands.

I wasn't saying I have a degree to establish my authority on the matter, only as a counter point to the idea that the people that create movies are somehow more qualified or more talented. My point is that the people that are in our cinematic team are getting the same training as the film industry, but came into the game industry because that is what we love most of all. The implication that the people who make game cinematic sequences are somehow a step below people working in feature films is simply not true.

I actually take a bit of offense here. I went to film school, have a degree and worked on a lot of shorts of both my own and many other students. The animators on the cinematics crew typically study animation to work on animated features as well as game play animations and they all do some amazing work. Personally, I enjoy Avellone's writing as much or more than that found in any feature. Blanket statements like this simply aren't accurate with current video game production teams.

The Hutt is and he likes it. *raises hand as well* No problems here yet. Certainly haven't noticed any issues with it yet. I've currently installed and tested Simcity 4, Baldur's Gate 1+2 and a couple newer games like Overlord 2 and Left 4 Dead. All work just fine and I'm not sure whether it's just different default settings but it seems to like my front audio ports a little better than Vista did. It switches between them and my speakers more accurately now. Tons of gaming on it here as well. Demigod, TF2, League of Legends have all been tested and enjoyed. I've been mostly on my 360 lately, so the testing has been a little limited. I've found one audio levels issue with TF2, but that's likely to me not having all the drivers set up right, and being a bit lazy.

This thread totally made my morning...

I'm going to agree with the bok on this one as well. I've been running the beta and now the rc1 build, and have loved what it does. If nothing else, being able to go up to 8 gigs of ram and fully utilizing my 64 bit processor has been tons of fun. The OS has also been incredibly stable. Not a single crash yet, and the new UI features are really awesome. I haven't loaded up my XP partition for more than 10 minutes since I got Windows 7.

Mini-games do not pause the world. Disable that alarm with enemies present at your own risk. Also, failing most of our mini-games causes alarms to sound. Alarms bring in reinforcements.

Facial animations are one of the largest things that we're focusing on in on polish work currently. Lots of the footage that has been shown was taken from scenes which had only had a single animation pass, and many scenes are much improved what was captured, even from as recently as a few weeks ago. Not to be a broken record, but take what you see being shown with a grain of salt, as we are still a work in progress.

I've listened to the VO as much as anybody, and I will say that I'm very impressed with the cast. Thorton's VO is very consistent, and his delivery is pretty awesome in my book. I could also say this of nearly every main character in our game. I wouldn't write anybody off until you see the scenes in context.

Nope! I had one of my class assistants come in for that.

Which reasons are these? Well, the moves are all mocapped, so with the amount of time spent in the studio it seems unlikely that they would have a plethora of different strikes and only one takedown for each situation (armed/unarmed front/back). Martial Artists also tend to know a variety of takedowns, and many like to show them off. Add to that that the CQC is it's own skill and level progression is supposed to grant new combos etc., and it seems like too significant a portion of the game to skimp on visually. Ao2 and K&L didn't even have much in the way of mechanics governing CQC, it was just something you used when you ended up too close. In the case of AP it's a "weapon" skill with its own progression like pistols and assault rifles. That's just my edumacated guesswork though, Sawyer might step in at any moment to tell us (hint hint). The game currently features multiple takedowns. I even did the mocap for one of them. Nice. Do we win anything if we can figure out which one when the game releases? I'd like to, but it's pretty easy to guess which one was not done by a kempo guy.