Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Primary Protocols!

One of the reasons I was upset with Starcraft 2 last week which I may not have mentioned was that it kept me from writing about other games. I mean, it’s Starcraft 2. It seems so silly to write about other shit when Starcraft 2 is there, taunting me with its grace and poise.

So I had to knuckle down and write some essays about it, get it out of the way. There was quite a bit to say, and there will be more in a few weeks. Once I get deeper into the multiplayer I’ll probably harp up on that again, instead of just waxing poetic on the theoretical grace it taunts me with. But there were other games that I experienced for the first time around the release period of Starcraft 2. Games that were amazing and, for the most part, overlooked by the critical community at large, because those games tend to go on sale and people like me tend to buy weird little games on sale and play them whereas publications have to dedicate most of their print to large titles in order to keep their sites open.

So I was left with Alpha Protocol in the days leading up to Starcraft 2’s release, and I have to admit that, even after SC2 had reared its hideous head, covered in gleaming carapace, Alpha Protocol occupied my attention. It did so because it was everything that Starcraft 2 is not.

A brief history lesson. Obsidian, the developer of Alpha Protocol, began its life as Black Isle, developer of many of the early Infinity Engine games such as Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast and, more notably, Torment. Aside from Torment, however, Obsidian never really had any unequivocal critical successes, or commercially successes at all, really. Their games are possessed of a marked sort of hurriedness mixed with a dramatically uneven polish and plentiful technical difficulties. Players who know little to nothing about the business might call them lazy, but more perceptive enthusiasts will note that this pattern is actually the result of a lack of funding and control over their own release dates.

A project has to be finished by a certain date, and more resources are required to finish it. But the publisher doesn’t think the product will actually make back the cost of those resources, so a compromise is struck. And the result? Ambitious, well crafted games with lots of problems and hurried endings that don’t sell well because, traditionally, gamers pay less attention to ambition and innovation than they do to polish. Obsidian has been victimized by this pattern time and time again, more so than any other studio I can think of, and it’s a damn shame considering how great their titles usually are in one way or another. Until the very end, for example, Knights of the Old Republic II was one of the best games I’d ever played (and I still rate it higher than the first title, though I know I’m alone in doing so) and despite the occasional bug the scope and scale off what they did with it, the ambition underpinning it and the amazing characters and mechanics that they brought to life in a medium perfectly suited to their realization were all incredible, and well worth my money. But the seams of the game showed. It was hastily assembled with a rushed ending and lots of removed content which could still be referenced in game code, resources and even some menus. In the end these issues, which clearly spoke of circumstances beyond Obsidian’s control, ruined it for many players. For me it showed them to be artists try to do their best under uneven circumstances, a situation I find myself deeply sympathetic to.

Alpha Protocol doesn’t really suffer from that sort of problem. In my playthrough I noticed bugs aplenty, but the entire story seemed to weave together elements very handily, and I didn’t notice any design choices that had been made to expedite game play or compromises that had been put in place for the sake of meeting a deadline. It was a well constructed, complete story, relevant and intelligently told with a villain who was less a moustache twirling fool and more a greedy, sycophantic fool, someone we see reflected constantly in today’s news. It wasn’t subtle, sure nor was it particularly elegant in its final postulations, but it was well constructed and smart. It was a story that could only be told in game format.

It was a story littered with choices, choices that made a difference. Major characters could be killed off with a casual decision, clearly established, which would change the entire flow of the story. Favors could be called in, based on these choices. The missions were always the same, the same objectives in the same places, but if you played your cards right, made the right friends? The story would unfold in a completely different way. Sure, some of the choices you make made no difference – Marburg, for example, will more or less do just what he pleases. But Steven Heck? Scarlet Lake? Madison St. Clair? Even Sis could, in a way, become an ally, based on the choices you make. Unlike most games, where choices are at best cosmetic, Alpha Protocol is built to accommodate some big ones.

Much of it is owed to the hostile, ambiguous world it crafts. In Alpha Protocol’s world everyone is both a potential ally and enemy, and unexpected visitors are attacked with good reason. It’s a game about secrets, secrets kept from both enemies and allies. Because of this it’s ideal, the same way that Far Cry 2 and Bioshock were, for eliminating the sort of human interaction that makes games so difficult. If you’re always around people what’s to stop you from shooting them? Especially if they’re untrustworthy. Games that want to be movies simply make their characters invulnerable to avoid this problem, but smart games, like the aforementioned titles, simply make everyone in the world fair game.

See games, at their heart, telling a story and allowing a player to establish their own story in that context as well as a set of pre-determined limits which, ideally, are as light as possible. Some of them are kind of necessary. You need to black out when you wander into the desert in Far Cry 2. Rendering a giant fucking desert, providing map resources for it and creating an entire African continent for you to play on? Untenable. So some of Alpha Protocol’s doors don’t open. Some areas can’t be infiltrated, even if they look like they’d be easier routes. Every item isn’t physics interactable. You can’t pick up enemy guns. These woeful choices, made for the sake of balance, don’t really compromise the game. They limit it to the scope the developers chose, a scope they execute on exceptionally well.

See Alpha Protocol is like a book, told in chapters. It has little self-contained levels and each of those levels has some cool experiences. When you go to Hong Kong you’ll fight triads and secret police. In Russia you’ll fight the Russian mob and shadowy government employees in suits. In Italy you’ll fight...CIA agents? I suppose Italians haven’t had any decent villains since 1944, but I digress. The set pieces are animated, and the choices you make in each of them branch out and impact the other set pieces. These vary from the grounded to the absurd (like the Russian mafioso who supercharges himself by doing cocaine out of his bare hands – an inspired, comedic nod to the fact that you’re in a fucking video game, not a spy movie), but the tone always lands more or less as intended. Steven Heck alone warrants an entire forum’s worth of investigation as a self-aware game character who excels in the absurd environment that he is created for.

Alpha Protocol grasps what it is, what it can be and what the culture surrounding it expects. It allows characters to actually generate a story, an almost completely unparalleled feat in video games. It forces players to make big choices, from start to finish, and accommodates them whenever possible. It accounts for nearly any sort of play style, and offers constant and increasing reward for experimenting and challenging yourself.

But it’s far from perfect. It has balance issues. Boy does it ever. There’s really no reason to pick a set of skills other than pistol and stealth, and most of the gadgets are almost impossible to use in a heated fire fight and provide very little incentive to do so. Even the heavy weapons, supposedly better in a stand up fight, are all so powered down that they’re basically useless. A carefully aimed pistol can undo an enemy in one shot, and a “time frozen” set of pistol shots will undo most bosses in two passes, at most. Stealth takedowns can make the game pathetically easy, certain items never need be used and sometimes the game will just break for no reason and lose all of your hard earned money and experience. Enemies will notice you on a whim. It’s nothing short of infuriating.

But despite all these things it’s one of the most worthwhile games I’ve played in a while. Not because, as with Mirror’s Edge, it’s an exceptionally ambitious product attempting to reinvent the wheel. Not because, like Borderlands, it’s offering something that no other game has and doing so very well. Not because it’s the best game you’ll play this year, not by a long shot. Instead because an engrossing, original game that tells a story, does it well, and does so in a way no other game could. Because it has original mechanics that forward the telling of that story. And, finally, because it lets you be any number of movie spies injected into a self-aware world where their shenanigans actually has lasting consequence. Please, support Obsidian and their latest flawed masterpiece. At least look at Alpha Protocol before dismissing it as a hanger on to Bioware’s lesser shooter titles.