Matthew Rorie

I wouldn't hope too much for the achievement list. They are probably going to be a bit spoilerish, so even if they do leak I would recommend not reading them if you want to have story stuff intact for your first playthrough. But yes, they have pretty awesome names, as Joe mentioned.

Look in Bruce's eye and tell me you're not lying. I know this is Obsidian and all, but this is starting to sound too good. Like once-in-a-lifetime good. You really are making this game, not bringing it back from the future, or forcing alien slaves to program it, right? Trust me, I was as surprised as anyone. But yeah, thanks to the mission structure of the hubs, some characters you simply won't meet if you skip some of the optional missions. I mean, this is a major character who can pop up in multiple missions and is one of the romance targets, but it's entirely possible to never meet her in a playthrough.

You can kill almost anyone in the game, really, including pretty much every major character. There's actually a way to play through the game where you don't ever meet SIE, as well; I was pretty surprised because she's always been a pretty major part of my Moscow playthroughs. But if you don't go to an optional mission, then she's just never featured in the rest of the game because she and Mike never met originally. This game is pretty crazy sometimes.

Yes, I realize there was meant to be unlimited ammo at some point, but how exactly does it work now? Weapon classes (pistol, shotgun etc) share the same ammo types (normal, tranquilizer etc) if I'm not mistaken. There's a generic, cheap ammo for each kind of weapon. So pistols have "pistol ammo", SMGs have "SMG ammo" and so on. Each weapon also has two special ammo types that are fairly rare to find in-game, and cost quite a bit in the store (and can only be purchased in limited quantities). So, for instance, the pistol can use tranq rounds, which knock people out, while the shotgun can pick up phosphorus rounds, which will set someone on fire if more than half the pellets hit. (Which is awesome.)

You can loot ammo, cash, gadgets, and sometimes weapon mods, although that happens pretty rarely.

Alpha Protocol will feature a fascinating storyline full of mystery and intrigue that all will enjoy, from the mountains to the sea. This topic is veering off into Way Off-Topic territory, though, and hey, we have a board called precisely that.

Cool! Best of luck!

If you select a "tech specialist" background, you will be given a certain amount of advancement points allocated to certain skills in the character creation menu. If you want to, say, remove all of your points and throw them into Assault Rifles, then start the game, NPCs will still refer to you as if you had the tech specialist background, because that's what you initially chose. That might sound confusing, but in the end it lets people who choose to replay the game the ability to go through with a different background and see some of the different conversations that ensue without necessarily having to play through with skills they don't want to play with.

I'm sorry, but what? You end the game then either click on New Game or Exit Game, and it's presumptious if they give you a reason to choose the former? No. He's basically saying that developers should put all the content in from the get-go, because it is presumptious of them to expect players to enjoy the game so much that they would want to play through it all again. His opinion is fair enough. In AP's case, that really wouldn't work too well. Some explanations are probably in order. When you start up a game, you pick an "agent history", which pre-selects some of the skills for you. You can choose between Soldier (guns), Field Agent (stealth), or Tech Specialist (tech skills). These give you some basic recommended skills that will suit your playstyle if you don't want to allocate your skills yourself. (You can also choose Freelancer if you want to allocate your skills yourself.) However, the history you choose will also change the way some characters will react to you; some characters (especially early on) know that you came from the armed forces if you chose the Soldier background, and will comment on that, etc. Recruit and Veteran are similar. If you start as a Recruit, you are assumed to be a really green recruit, and your other agents are going to give you a hard time about it (which in itself can be pretty amusing); likewise with Veteran, where other characters will treat you with a bit more respect because they know you've been around the block once or twice. So it's essentially impossible to have all this content exist in one play-through, unless we populate the world with a bunch of schizos who think Mike is both a recruit, a somewhat capable but unproven field agent, and a veteran all at once.

Recruit and Veteran are selected separately from difficulty. You still have difficulty settings that you select apart from them. I don't know that we've necessarily finalized the difficulties, but you should be able to play Recruit on Easy mode, or on Hard mode, depending on whether you want to have an easy time with it or want to be punished a bit.

I think there's an error in this preview. Recruit is currently available as soon as you start up the game, and I don't think there are any plans to change that. Veteran will require you to play through Recruit before you can unlock it, though.

Nope, Israel is not a location in Alpha Protocol. Sorry.

I don't think many developers or publishers would actually accept a game pitch at this point in time; there's some messy legal stuff involved (what if your pitch is similar to a game already in development and they get sued?), and, generally speaking, there is no shortage of talented game developers with shipped games in their belt already pitching good game ideas. So coming in from outside the industry, without professional experience, and even having your game idea heard is pretty difficult, not to mention attempting to have it break out of the crowd of other submissions. Sorry for the downer; just trying to be honest. If you really want to develop a game, you're generally going to need to be employed in the game industry before people will listen to pitches. So, if it's something that drives you, start working on mods, learn to work with a 3D editor, learn some basic programming, try to get a QA job somewhere where you have a chance of upward mobility, go to game conferences, etc., etc. If you want to have your game idea stand out from the rest of the bunch, though, you should focus on the gameplay elements that make it unique. A lot of people have awesome ideas for a game story, but it's more rare for people to have unique gameplay hooks. In the end, I don't think many independent developers will listen to outside game pitches, just because of the complexities involved. If you want to pursue this, you'll probably want to start with publishers. Perfect your elevator pitch, where you sum up the game in 15 seconds (some people recommend getting it down to 3 seconds) and sell precisely what's awesome about it in that space of time. Try to get someone to listen to you at GDC. Promote yourself a lot. Get business cards and follow up with people. But, in the end, getting someone to develop a game when you don't already work in the industry is redonkulously hard.

Saw this on Slashdot. Some dudes were making thermal paste out of diamond dust and seeing how effective it was compared to Arctic Silver. In the end, they managed to home-make a paste that wound up saving them 15-20 degrees of temperature on their CPU - centigrade! Pretty astonishing benefit, assuming it holds up when other people try it out.

Sorry, although Michael Ironside is awesome, he's not a voice in our game.

They didn't have clips for a while, but they do now. They even pop out when you reload and everything.

Thanks, we try to answer what we can. Sorry if questions go unanswered sometimes. Everyone is pretty busy trying to get the game done!

http://gallery.me.com/joshuadickens#100450

That's the spirit son, we need more men in the fold like yourself. Yes, ****y, arrogant self centered spies more concerned with how they look then with a global nuclear threat. Thats how im gonna play my MT. I wonder if its possible to get every single persons reputation down to zero. Thats what im gonna strive for. Why stop at zero? You can get negative reputations, after all.

I don't know if this ever got posted somewhere, but damn, this looks slick. I played so much of COD4's multiplayer. Hell of a game. I'm sure this will be awesome, but I hope they make the AC-130 a bit hard to get in terms of killstreaks. If you're constantly facing off against AC-130s in deathmatch, I can see how that might get a little annoying. Now I just have to make a new computer before it comes out.

Cool, I'm glad. Yeah, the code switch in the manual was an error on the printer's part. Sorry for the confusion!

Is it not installing on your computer, or is it installing and then not running?

Also, are you using NWN2 Gold? If so, in some of the manuals, the codes for Mask of the Betrayer and the Original Campaign got switched around. You might need to use the MOTB code for the Original Campaign, and vice versa.

Let me ask around and see if I can get an answer for you. It shouldn't give you a permanent error if you put the code in wrong. Just make sure that you're not mistaking Os for 0s or something like that, too. Were you ever able to install the game, or is this happening before you complete the install?

Tranq darts are purchasable in the regular game.