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If it means you get to play awesome classic-style CRPGs with party-based gameplay and (maybe) turn-based combat, plus great world design and stories, what does it matter if it sells millions or not? As soon as big money becomes involved, ambition, creativity and complexity in gameplay tend to disappear as the required sales to turn a profit skyrocket. A huge budget doesn't necessarily mean Obsidian will make any more money, and more realistically they would actually make less on it or even lose money.

I'm still holding out hope for a fantasy setting combined with high technology, i.e. fundamentalist religious order keeping the world in a dark age while rebels use scientific developments to advance their goals. But that's just me - generic fantasy is just too boring for my tastes, I'd much rather see a twist on it.

If you pledge $150,000, does Herve shave his mustache off and mail it to you?

I think brief time limits for specific challenges are the way to go, and there should never be an absolute failure state attached. An easy example is a mini-game inside a mini-game collection like Mario Party - the timer creates tension, yes, but even if you fail, there's plenty more chances to make it up because that challenge was one of many you'll be taking on. When you do eventually lose the game, it feels fair because your failure is a result of repeat losses, not one. In an RPG context, the same approach works fine - give the player a limited time to accomplish an objective, perhaps with negative ramifications for failure, but allow the game to continue. Fallout would have actually worked with this; its open-world nature meant that the player could still win without ever saving Vault 13, so why not simply give the player a different ending if the Water Chip is never recovered? There's a story consequence (your friends all die), and a gameplay consequence (less direction/info on taking out the Master), and none of it would feel especially unfair either. Perhaps saving Vault 13 could have been a more multi-part objective with a mix of different limitations, hard and soft. Multiple outcomes with a sort of granularity in success would have also been just as fair. For example, perhaps you side with the rebels and convince them to open up to the Wasteland, saving the Vault but ruining its safety and lifestyle. The details of course require tweaking to make everything interact and operate smoothly (which endings trump which?) but you get the idea. As you brought up, System Shock 2 had time limits attached to inventory items (upgrades), and I think this is also a much more fair sort of limit to include in a game. While charging stations were fairly plentiful (at least one per deck of the ship) it still provided benefits while also encouraging the player to make ideal use of time. It's a timer, yes, but it's disguised both in gameplay and narrative. In that sense, a game like Fallout also has a timer - ammunition - but you can also use others like food supplies to accomplish the same. Instead of an annoyance, it becomes a game mechanic for the player to consider. The only real issue here is development time and priorities. I can appreciate the want to tell a specific story and limiting the player's choices because of it, just as I can also appreciate that implementing so many different outcomes may not be feasible for most games. Ultimately the question isn't just how to implement time limits in a fair and effective way, but whether it's feasible. Doing it mechanically is probably the best bet when budget is a concern - building unique situations and outcomes for different possibilities is tough, but expressing that same thing as a game system is comparatively much less work.

You know, considering that this game has probably sold a million by now, it's fairly clear that the issue doesn't so much lie with any incredible faults with the game, so much as it does with SEGA pouring massive amounts of money into a game that would never sell that much to begin with. It's very obvious that a lot of mismanagement went on even if you ignore a lot of the stories from people who worked on the game, simply because you should be able to at least break even on something that hits a million or so, unless you're going for a blockbuster release. I think SEGA might have set their sites way too high and now naturally take it out on the developers - pretty much a story told a thousand times in the game industry.

I agree, it's pretty strange. Why this wasn't officially announced anywhere is suspect - you'd think that a patch to fix up some of the game's issues would increase interest in the game and, if enough effort was put in, could even spur a few more sales. This sounds to me like some sort of weird unofficial effort done by one of the QA guys in his spare time.

Worked fine for me. Running US version I believe (or North American, or whatever), so it seems the problems may be limited to non-North American users.

I think it's a combination of ineptitude on the action side, as well as just general contrivance that came out of the push towards action-oriented gameplay. In my mind, a game, even a role-playing game, set in a more or less realistic universe, simply wouldn't have a "press button to turn invisible" without any sort of decent in-universe justification. Hell, I would have swallowed a cloaking device or something, it's not like that sort of technology is that far away. It strikes me more as the kind of thing you'd pull out of your ass in desperation rather than a carefully-considered gameplay element. Also, I'm not sure if you've played Splinter Cell, but it's actually totally possible to play through it as a shooter, except in places where you're forced to be stealthy by the plot, and it generally handles as well as or better than Alpha Protocol. The open-ended level design doesn't get in the way of the shooting, but the linear level design does get in the way of the stealth. Again, it's really hard to figure out why this happened - chicken versus egg problem - but like most things it's probably a combination of less-than-ideal factors in all aspects of the game's development.

I think the chances of Obsidian actually addressing anything related to Alpha Protocol are pretty damn low.

It probably has something to do with the fact that they won't be making a sequel... in five months they won't even have the game listed on their web site anymore. Oh joyous, digital future, how I love your conflation with economics and the way it ruins my ability to play games!

Mostly, better environment design, and to some degree better design in enemies the player faces. One of the problems Alpha Protocol has is that it chooses settings which fit into its plot, but not necessary into good gameplay. If you have to tool a game for both stealth and action gameplay, that's fine, and it can work out great, but only if you build things with consideration for that. Alpha Protocol gets it half right, because you can use cover for stealth and for action, but the small levels also mean that the player has few alternate means of handling situations. Disabling security cameras is all well and good, but why can't Mike pull some Sam Fisher moves and climb up pipes and that sort of thing? What about even a few ventilation shafts? Hanging from ledges? Small linear levels mean that there simply aren't the options to accommodate a stealth character; nobody expects it to work as well as Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell, but the fact that it's not there in most instances (due to the locations chosen, as I stated) means that stealthy players are left to go through the game in the same direction as soldier types. There are other problems that complicate matters. The biggest issue is that, since it's an action game with a realistic theme, the only way you can really challenge the player in combat is by throwing increasing numbers enemies at him or her, since their modes of attack (shooting bullets) will never fundamentally change. Unfortunately, when compounded with the relatively small levels, with few options for alternate navigation (not many ventilation shafts to crawl through, etc.), it means that stealth players are stuck with having to get past dozens of soldiers, which is pretty much impossible without (wait for it) a contrivance like magic invisibility. This can be mitigated to some degree by having the game scale the challenge (or types of challenges) based on what skills the player has available, but this doesn't necessarily make sense, both in terms of story and in terms of balancing (it's a lot more work to make both stealth/action-based enemy placements in every mission, as well as for every possible character level the player may be). My biggest guess for the reasons why it didn't turn out better? Obsidian were pressured into designing the game more around the action elements by SEGA, and as a result, the stealth, which should have been more the game's focus, ended up being something that was never truly capitalised on, despite the developer's intentions. I can't say for sure, of course, but given the game's espionage theme, I'd expect there was a conflict of interest in what the game ended up becoming, versus what it was intended to be.

Alpha Protocol is a game which died based on its review scores, and I think that's all there is to it. I know it was on a lot of gamers' radars, and most of the people who were interested in it, at least who I knew, lost interest when it started to get mediocre scores. We can debate how justified those scores are (I think that Mass Effect 2 simply set the bar for presentation too high), but in the end it's not a lack of advertising among the right crowds of gamers, but the fact that popular journalistic opinion of the game was generally poor, and to the target audience, popular journalistic opinion matters. Some of the blame can fall on SEGA for this (they chose a poor time to release the game, and denied a lot of needed budget), and some of the blame falls on Obsidian for the management problems. Of course, since SEGA is the one controlling the money, they get to exonerate themselves of all blame - to them, Alpha Protocol was a failure, both commercially and critically, even if in actuality the game itself is just fine. It's sales that matter, and usually the people who pull the strings have little care for games as games - why do you think we see so many generic sequels to bland mass market successes? I remember reading recently that the indie game Joe Danger was turned down by dozens of publishers for reasons as baffling as "it focuses too much on fun" or "we don't think the target demographic is into motorcycles", which had very little to do with the quality of the game. As long as people like this are the ones making decisions, we will continue to see games live and die on sales and sales alone, since aesthetics are more important to those sales than the quality or depth of gameplay. I'm actually far more concerned about Obsidian getting a patch for this game out. I really, really like a lot of aspects of Alpha Protocol, and some tweaks to balance as well as some fixes for technical issues would make it much more enjoyable for me. However, I get the feeling that the team who were responsible for making the game may not even exist anymore, and SEGA has no intent on spending money it doesn't have to. It'd rather forget the game was ever made, and that makes me sad.

I suggest not nerfing assault rifles at range, since that is entirely their purpose in the game. Sure, they work up close too, but short of adding sniper rifles as a weapon you can take with you, there's not much of a solution.

Sadly, stopping to aim a gun is a lost art. Call of Duty has trained gamers to think that shooting a gun is a matter of vaguely pointing it in the direction of a target and spraying wildly. This may surprise some of you, but accounting for the weight, recoil, sway, and sights of a gun (yes, sights aren't usually 100% perfect, believe it or not) is not something that comes easily, even for experienced marksmen. One of the biggest complaints I saw about Alpha Protocol is that Michael doesn't seem to shoot very well right from the start of the game. Since most of the classes make it clear that he is not experienced at firing guns in their descriptions, that anyone would assume differently is baffling. It feels like Alpha Protocol was almost wholly reviewed based on how it failed to live up to people's expectations, rather than what it actually is.

Most likely, Obsidian will detail Fallout: New Vegas and maybe Dungeon Siege III. I don't think we'll hear anything related to Alpha Protocol, except for DLC if they plan to do that.

The game's visuals aren't bad at all. Character animation can be stiff, the motion blur filter really is kind of odd, and there's texture popping on the console versions, but it's by no means an ugly game. In some senses it's actually quite good - lots of environment detail, nice colours (what, no grey and brown?!), and most of the characters are modeled and textured well. It's not up to the standards of an action game like Gears of War, but Alpha Protocol has a clean and consistent look. "Functional" is the word that's coming to mind. I don't need it to try to wow me to have fun with it.

Frankly, I'm not holding my breath for a patch, especially as we've had almost no word from anyone at Obsidian since the game's release. I highly doubt that SEGA's expectations for the game were met, and if their recent games are anything to go by, they couldn't care less for the satisfaction of their customers.

It's not so much the sensitivity as it is the added mouse acceleration/smoothing/sway. It's all there to make it "harder" to snipe, but frankly it feels like an artificial challenge - the same as DICE making different weapons and vehicles have different mouse sensitivity in Bad Company 2. It might make some things feel "heavier" than others, but it also imposes a very artificial limit on the player's own ability. Less of an issue in an RPG, except that Alpha Protocol doesn't have a "sniping" skill tree, so there's no way to improve your aim. Really, it comes down to them optimising the controls for a gamepad and then directly mapping analogue stick controls to mouse movements, just like the hacking mini-game. Welcome to the world of medicore PC ports. At least we can remap keys and aren't stuck with Xbox buttons in the menus...

The only use ALchemy has is in restoring EAX and surround to games that use DirectSound3D, by converting the calls to OpenAL. Thus, ALchemy shouldn't have an effect in Alpha Protocol... unless the game somehow defaults to DirectSound3D if it doesn't think you have an OpenAL-compatible sound card, but I don't think I've seen a single Unreal Engine game do that. In fact, very few newer games use DirectSound3D at all - XAudio, OpenAL, Miles 3D, and FMOD are all far more common, and ALchemy isn't needed for any of those.

I'm really quite excited about this. Between Alpha Protocol, New Vegas and Dungeon Siege III, it feels like each of my three distinct RPG needs (story, exploration and character development) is going to be scratched by a single developer. I really enjoyed Dungeon Siege II despite a few rough edges, and I think Obsidian will be able to take the series in a new, and better, direction.

Not sure what hardware you have, but if it's anywhere around the minimum requirements, or below them, then glitches like this are probably to be expected. Setting graphics options to defaults might help, as well. If your hardware is up to the task, then you can try to reinstall the game or verify the integrity of the game files, since it's possible something didn't copy properly.

This works fine for me - full 3D sound, audio effects, etc. I have an X-Fi, though, so for those using on-board solutions it might be an issue.

Sure, just saying that it's more evidence the DRM seems horribly aggressive about determining what constitutes a "unique" system. It's possible even IP address changes will cause it to ask for reactivation. All we can do at this point is deactivate and reactivate the game as needed, to avoid the five activation limit. Of course, there's also cracks available, though it's obviously best not to talk about that here.

Okay, this may seem silly, but what mouse do you have? Do you have the driver software installed for it, if there is any? And have you tried playing with the acceleration and sensitivity options in Windows?

That was a typo, I meant a million or so on the PC, which is probably pretty accurate. I think around two and a half million is accurate for all platforms (assuming about a million on Xbox 360, and maybe half that on PS3), which is still good, but not great, especially considering how long it took to make the game (and also when you consider how hard EA has been pushing for post-release DLC). It's also worth pointing out that VGChartz isn't a reputable source when it comes to game sales figures, since for the most part they are estimated guesses based on NDP figures and market trends. They have been wrong in the past to the point of overestimating sales by 100%.