Alpha Protocol... 10 Years Later

Comments · 2.4K

• KY

  @KyleeKailihiwa · 6 years ago · pinned

  I sent this video to Steve Weatherly (one of the programmers & my uncle) and he replied with "WHOA that brings back some old memories! Hahahaha, I didn’t have time to watch it all but really glad people still care about that game. It really suffered from a lack of vision and honestly ended up changing the way we made games at obsidian. After that every single game had to have a Director like a movie that was responsible for the vision."

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• MA

  @MandaloreGaming · 6 years ago

  That statement about flawed games needing sequels hits me where I live.

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• BA

  @baalernaruto · 6 years ago

  Raycevick... 10 years later

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• SO

  @sonicman52 · 6 years ago

  The whole &quot;flawed gems need sequels&quot; thing is very true.<br>Imagine if The Witcher 1 never had a sequel

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• CH

  @ChampippleD · 6 years ago (edited)

  “The story is as immersive as the gameplay isn’t” is the best description of Alpha Protocol I’ve heard.

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• CR

  @CriticalNobody · 6 years ago (edited)

  I know someone that replayed Alpha Protocol at launch like 7 or 8 times back to back because of the dialogue and branching choices. He looks back on it fondly as bad game that he loves

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• FR

  @Fraterribilis · 6 years ago

  &quot;Disney-commissioned Seven-Dwarfs RPG&quot;<br>Excuse me, what?

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• HA

  @HalidYusein · 6 years ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dyPBkJuFdU&amp;t=1036">17:16</a> &quot;There absolutely have been buggier games released before and since. One of them by an Obisidian employer.&quot; - sickest burn 2020

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• IR

  @IrrationalDelusion · 5 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dyPBkJuFdU&amp;t=1640">27:20</a><br>Game Designer: We&apos;ve got time, let&apos;s add nice details, for example - terrorists buy grenades from cheap suppliers and therefore they&apos;re defective in combat<br>Programmer: Who, enemies or grenades?<br>Game Designer: yes.

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• CA

  @CATEM1NAL · 6 years ago (edited)

  So I actually have a bunch of info to dump onto the development history of this game, because one of the people who worked on it reached out to me after I got the world record speedrun for it (alongside some datamining of the games files I did):<br><br>First of all, Alpha Protocol was effectively THREE different games, and the first two were scrapped. I&apos;m not totally sure about the timeline for this and its been a while since I&apos;ve checked, but from what I remember, it goes like this:<br><br>The first Alpha Protocol was the game with the QTE plane sequence that cost way too much to make just one scene for. They scrapped it pretty early, and the second Alpha Protocol had a completely different plot. There are actually a lot of voice files for this second version of Alpha Protocol still in the game files! I missed some of the development info when I was looking back through the development of the game, but it seems to match up with the linear, non-hub version of the game you mentioned. The story seemed to be structured fairly linearly, split almost into chapters, and had a lot of the same characters but VASTLY different locations and characterisations.<br><br>It was going to be a buddy-cop thing, with Mike being a new hire into the CIA, and his partner was Westridge. From what I can tell the first mission was some kind of situation where (presumably Al-Samad) terrorists had taken a bunch of people hostage, one of them being Parker. There&apos;s some dialogue from this area where Mike kills someone for the first time and has a really disheartened call with Westridge about having to kill someone (granted, it was a terrorist that was about to torture him).<br><br>All of Parker&apos;s dialogue from this scrapped version of the game is great, he seems to have something to do with nuclear weapons being sent to different locations around the world but acts like a complete coward and pretends he had nothing to do with it. There&apos;s even a part where a terrorist is asking him about the nukes and plays an audio recording of Parker talking about nukes, and he still pretends to have no idea what he&apos;s talking about.<br><br>Anyway, Parker gets taken to an airfield and is possibly killed.<br><br>The second &quot;act&quot; (or whatever you want to call it) places Mike in a Halbech office somewhere, posing as a Halbech employee. There&apos;s not much I can piece together from this section, but I think it&apos;s implied that Mina and Mike are in a relationship, and Mina works at the same office? I&apos;m not 100%. Mina was voiced by someone else in this version as well I&apos;m pretty sure, I didn&apos;t recognise it was her from voice alone.<br><br>There&apos;s a bunch of missing files and stuff that isn&apos;t super interesting, so I&apos;ll skip ahead a bit. At some point in Saudi, Westridge is set up and killed, and Mike is somehow implicated. When Mike gets back to the safe house he receives a call from someone from the Pentagon who he informs that Westridge is dead, and the call that follows has some of the most interesting information I heard:<br><br>Because Alpha Protocol as an organisation didn&apos;t exist in this version of the story (Mike and Westridge worked for the CIA instead), Alpha Protocol was the name of a status that CIA operatives were placed under instead. It&apos;s explained that an agent operating under Alpha Protocol is still working for the good of the CIA, but isn&apos;t officially endorsed by the CIA. This is because they weren&apos;t sure what Mike&apos;s role in Westridge&apos;s murder and the overall global conspiracy is, so they were temporarily distancing themselves from him while they did their own investigation. The CIA, to my knowledge, weren&apos;t hunting down Mike like Alpha Protocol do in the final game.<br><br>The plot from that point on would&apos;ve been for Mike to figure out what was really going on, present the CIA with the evidence to clear his name, and end whatever was actually going on.<br><br>As a side note, it&apos;s worth saying that the models for the very first plane scene that was super expensive to make are still in the final game! They&apos;re completely unused but still hidden in the games files, alongside a cut character from an earlier version of the game&apos;s story called &quot;Uli Booli&quot; (which a Euro Gamer article incorrectly spells &quot;Uli Booi&quot;). All I know about this character is that they were supposed to appear in Moscow, and they were modelled after/based on someone connected to one of the developers. I won&apos;t say more than that because it gets incredibly sour and it&apos;s not a happy story. Probably a good thing the character got cut, actually...<br>Edit: Wrote this before watching the full thing. You briefly mentioned Uli Booli at the end, my bad.<br><br>There&apos;s a lot more to it than just this, pretty much every character and the entire story was different from what I&apos;ve been told. The locations were the same, but everything else changed. An example of this is still in the final game, during the Brayko boss fight (the fight itself, not the cutscene) he calls Mike &quot;Mikael&quot;, even though Mike and Brayko are never introduced prior to that boss fight, and Mike never tells Brayko his name. It honestly feels like the final game is a cobbled together mish mash of ideas from earlier in development and whatever ideas they were able to get finished in the &quot;new&quot; draft of the script that eventually became the final game.<br><br>Part of me wonders how the game would&apos;ve been if they&apos;d stuck to the CIA story, because it sounds like it would&apos;ve been more interesting and better polished than the final game&apos;s story.

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• JE

  @JeremyComans · 6 years ago

  &quot;He can be a chauvinist, a misogynist, or a ladies man&quot;. Well they nailed James Bond&apos;s range.

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• AV

  @AveragePixel · 6 years ago

  He&apos;s finally done it

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