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You seriously think that a million-seller JRPG like Final Fantasy sells only amongst the die-hard fans? That's a bit naive. P.S. : Just to clarify I didn't want to be rude or sarcastic/****-ish and that's what the smile means.. in before an inevitable angry response I'm not saying that's the only people who buy the games, no, but from all that I've seen over the years, JRPGs are a specific market, and that market tends to be self-contained. It's large, but also somewhat walled off- you're not going to be selling Final Fantasy to fans of shooters, for example, and most fans of games in the genre also generally aren't too concerned with mainstream Western titles. Final Fantasy is actually a bit of an exception (as is Dragon Quest). While it sells huge numbers, most JRPGs tend to hover between 200,000 and 600,000 on average - not awful by any means, but definitely falling into niche territory.

Final Fantasy has a massive fan following, but honestly it's still kind of a niche. Most fans of Final Fantasy are fans of Final Fantasy and little else, in my experience, save for other Japanese RPGs. Western RPGs are a whole other market. Neverwinter Nights is a D&D-based RPG. It sold well for the type of game it was (and it came out when PC gaming was still quite strong), but it's hardly a mainstream title. Knights of the Old Republic is Star Wars, and anything Star Wars will sell. Dragon Age had huge amounts of hype and media coverage behind it. Despite releasing on three platforms and having about five years of development, I don't think it sold much more than a million copies. No original IP = hard sell. Mass Effect isn't much of an RPG. Gameplay-wise it's a relatively sloppy shooter, and it features simplified play mechanics. Mass Effect 2 was dumbed down even more to the point where it's basically an action game, and from what I recall it outsold the original Mass Effect almost two to one. So yeah, frankly, RPGs are kind of a niche genre, especially when you compare them to big game franchises like Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, Super Mario, Zelda. The only time RPGs really see success even vaguely comparable to other genres is when they have huge marketing campaigns, are attached to well-known brands, and are accessible and easy to get into. As for Metacritic: Metacritic weights reviews differently depending on the site. Reviews from popular sites like IGN and Gamespot have more effect on an average than smaller sites, the assumption being that they are "more reputable" - and of course, it's always possible that there's business dealings going on that favour those sites as well. In any case, Metacritic is neither an accurate representation of a game's quality, nor is it an accurate representation of average reviews. Sites like GameRankings tend to be more reputable, but even then there are a lot of problems with only cherry-picking opinions based on how popular those opinions are.

This may seem strange, but if you have a firewall, try blocking Alpha Protocol from connecting to the Internet (it's a single-player game so it's not like it'll interfere). I'm not 100% sure, but I think stuttering has decreased a little since I've done that. I noticed a similar issue in Prince of Persia about a year ago, where it'd stutter every few minutes as it attempted to phone home (probably to relay play statistics to Ubisoft). I can't say for certain, but Alpha Protocol might do the same thing at certain points in the game.

I reported the same issue in a thread earlier. It seems like if you modify any of the game's files, and change some of your system settings, the game thinks it's running on another computer and asks you to activate again. The "grunts" are indeed hand-to-hand combat voices, and is obviously an anti-piracy feature (both to identify a pirate, since the "error" is intended behaviour, and to encourage activation).

I think this is intentional. If I remember correctly, the dot points you to a secret room on your map, where a bonus objective is located.

Have you tried increasing the sensitivity in the options menu, assuming you can get that far? If you use any mouse software, like SetPoint, you can experiment with the mouse speed/sensitivity options in there.

While numbers like that sound disappointing, one also has to realise that a title like Alpha Protocol is fairly niche, and doing a million lifetime sales or so is quite a success. I have a feeling it'll be a bit of a slow burn, especially if price starts to drop a few months from now.

I wrote an article the other day regarding the construction of quality by the game reviews industry, using Alpha Protocol as an example. If anyone is curious, you can check it out on my blog here: http://criticalmissive.blogspot.com/2010/0...ruction-of.html

The issue with DLC for me, especially in a game like Alpha Protocol, is that it rarely fits into the main game very well. It'd be a huge undertaking to try to retrofit more missions or another safehouse location into the existing game, and while you can always make a stand-alone add-on, in that case it seems like more sense to just do a full expansion pack. I suppose you could go the microtransaction route and make players pay for new guns, but... frankly that seems pretty pointless to me, considering the wealth of equipment the game already has.

I really hope not, to be honest.

Much better than you'd expect. It's easy to clear a room with a grenade or two provided you don't mind killing people.

I don't have too much of a problem with checkpoint saves, but it gets annoying when certain checkpoints don't save your progress properly and make it impossible to complete objectives or find all the items without restarting a mission from the beginning.

Just in time, too: This was after updating my video drivers. Considering I update said drivers once or twice a month, it seems like I'll be visiting that activation page a lot... sigh. Seriously, great job, guys. And here I thought Uniloc was a DRM system that wasn't a total pain in the ass. Thanks for the link, though. At least there is a way to deactivate properly, unlike some DRM.

Planescape: Torment is also more of a cult game. It took a long time for it to finally make a profit as it wasn't the most well known or popular game. I really wish I could actually buy Planescape: Torment. It's a shame it hasn't shown up on GOG.com or similar, since I don't want to pirate it. I haven't seen a new copy of it anywhere in a very, very long time.

If you aren't a graphics whore, can get past a few rough edges, and understand that the game is an RPG at heart, then I think you'll enjoy it, especially if you also enjoy stealth action games like Metal Gear Solid or Hitman. If you're much more into shooters like Gears of War, then I'd probably pass until you can get it on sale. The main problem with nearly every single review I've seen is that they attempt to evaluate Alpha Protocol as an action game or a shooter, rather than an RPG where your underlying stats are important to determining play-style and outcomes. It's worth noting that nearly every single RPG site I visit has given the game positive reviews. As for the version, it'll run on older systems, so get the PC version unless you have trouble playing games made after 2007 or so.

The site, titled "PlayStation Universe", reviews a game that wasn't developed by a Sony first-party studio and doesn't feature the words "Kill" or "Zone" in the title. What did you expect?

Pretty sure the "random missing dialogues" thing does happen, possibly due to being in combat when it's triggered. I experienced it earlier with a minor dialogue between Thorton and Mina upon replaying a section.

I'm not saying it was the first game of its kind or anything, but next to 99% of games at the time, it was pretty unusual. And, for the record, if you want to rate games purely on the grounds of "does it have a good story or not"... even pulp fiction makes the best games look like absolute garbage.

I haven't played Alpha Protocol, but I can comment on this : Deus Ex didn't only have a pretty bad story, but also pretty bad dialogues, and the hilarious delivery was only part of it. When it comes down to it Deus Ex is basically your usually 'there's always been a conspiracy behind the scene', 'man-made virus' and all that kind of things. The way they created the world was actually quite compelling but the story itself was pretty weak. Deus Ex, for its time, had a pretty impressive story. You have to realise that it came out in about 2001, and also had a lot of inquiries into politics, philosophy, etc. that most games never even bother with, not to mention the entire history and fiction surrounding the world. All the miscellaneous newspapers, books, etc. go a long way to making the world feel legitimate and believable, even if the actual plot isn't all that original or surprising. It's long been observed that where games excel isn't in telling stories, but in creating worlds for the player to explore and be immersed in, and Deus Ex absolutely succeeds in that respect. Of course, it's not perfect when it comes to story and characters. Some of the dialogue does feel a bit arbitrary and random (seems like everyone wants you to know their opinion on government systems), but aside from some bad voice acting in Hong Kong I really don't think there's anything wrong with it. The fact that it holds up so well since its release, despite major improvements in presentation over the last decade, I think is a testament to the quality of it.

Any idea how to deactivate? The activation page listed in the FAQ is... cryptic at best, and there's no tool that I can find to deactivate the game. For the record, I haven't had to reactivate since then, so maybe it was just a glitch or something.

A lot of games have ways of covering up the streaming. If you disable the loading movies in Gears of War, for example, you'll see that the game actually streams in all the textures the same way that it does in any other game, but uses the loading movies to mask it. Meanwhile, a game like Borderlands doesn't have much pop-in, but it does have some. The wide-open levels coupled with a more gradual LOD system likely goes a long way towards hiding the texture popping, but it's still there. It all comes down to clever optimisation methods, like pre-loading characters into memory that you are absolutely sure are going to appear in a scene, using cutscenes and camera angles to hide streaming transitions, etc.

I have actually lost objective progress due to checkpoint saves. When doing the ruins mission in Rome, I had placed an explosive charge on one weapons cache, then died and had to reload. When I went back to place the charge again, there was no way for me to do so. I'm pretty sure this happened on one or two other missions without me noticing, resulting in me failing objectives.

This surprises you? You do realise that developers often have restrictions on what they can and can't say with regards to their games, since it's not their job to handle community relations or Q&A, right? Moreover, when you're faced with thousands of bitching users who are going to yell at and insult you no matter what you say, it can kind of discourage you from responding at all. While I'd like to see better community involvement here from Obsidian, I also understand that it isn't the responsibility of any random developer to respond to things he or she may have no connection to. And, for the record, just because support doesn't respond to queries directly, doesn't mean that bugs aren't being recorded. Frankly, after Alpha Protocol's cool reception, I don't even know if SEGA will want to fund a patch for the game. It sucks, but that's business. A developer of Obsidian's size simply doesn't have the luxury of doing whatever they want, whenever they want.

Frankly, I don't understand all the complaints about Mike's crouch-walking animation. It's not the most stylish ever, but if you were to actually try to walk around hunched over like that... well, that's what it looks like. Hate to say it, kids, but Sam Fisher's "badass" animations are for the most part physically impossible for an actual human being to pull off. As for fixes, to add on to what others have said, there are a few situations where I lost objectives because the auto-save didn't record my progress on them; after dying, I had to restart the mission entirely to actually complete them, which is precisely what an auto-save should protect against.

I agree with this. The conversations in Alpha Protocol are great, but they're also totally scripted. I would have loved having situations where I could walk around an environment and talk to people. It'd go a long way towards Alpha Protocol feeling more like an RPG.