Alpha Protocol Roundtable Discussion Part 2!

Happy Thursday gamers! We've got part 2 of the Alpha Protocol Roundtable discussion featuring several members of the Obsidian team for your reading pleasure. In part one (available at the SEGA America Blog) Obsidian answered questions related to dialogue and character building. Here, we present the final half of the roundtable transcript featuring a discussion of game structure, combat, weapons, and more!

Obsidian Entertainment
Executive Producer: Chris Parker
Marketing and PR Director: Matt Rorie
Senior Producer: Ryan Rucinski
Art Producer: Abia Roberts
Design Production: Nathan Davis

Questions and Answers

Game Structure

What kinds of mission objectives can we expect? Will there be multiple ways to complete them based on how you raise your character?

Nathan: Every mission has a major objective and generally has a number of smaller objectives for Michael Thorton to accomplish. In most of the larger missions, even smaller missions, there are many different ways to approach or to solve the mission. It mostly depends on how you develop your character and how he can overcome the obstacles in your way. So basically it’s up to the player to decide how he wants to get through it.

Do the actions by the player in previous missions affect the world through news or mission set up in the next mission?

Nathan: We wanted to keep all of the missions available regardless of what the player is doing. The actions of the player will affect the news but it will also affect all the different missions across the world. In particular, you’ll end up seeing a lot of the little things you did show up in the end game. It will show up depending on who you allied with, which factions are friendly with you. They may come in and hinder or help your ability to complete the end mission.

Is there some sort of central hub that allows you to roam around freely, before actually going into a mission?

Chris: We don’t actually have a central hub. We considered that but we ultimately decided to limit most of the free roam aspects of the game down to the safe houses because they’re really quick to use, you can get all the stuff you need to take care of and get right back into the action. So out in these safe houses you’re able to do prep, you are able to contact people, have conversations or whatever else you want to do. So we kept all of the free roam aspects limited to the safe houses and took the more exploration aspects that you apply to a big hub and placed those into the actual missions you are going on rather than using the hub.

How twitch-based is the gunplay combat? Is it similar to, say, Splinter Cell where it’s almost FPS, or is it going to be more similar to how Star Wars Galaxies does it, where you click on the target and your stats or skills take over?

Ryan: It is NOT like Star Wars Galaxies. It is very much twitch-based. We wanted to make sure that the player felt like they were involved with the combat as opposed to just their abilities. The abilities in the game basically enhance your shooting ability. Meaning if you have a level ten skill in pistols, you will do more damage with your pistol. So it doesn’t help you with your aim necessarily. You just maybe will get critical shots more often. But if you were level zero and you got a critical shot on a guy you could still kill him. We’re not changing it so that it won’t be fun anymore, but if you can’t aim you’re not going to hit the side of a barn anyway so we don’t have it going for or against you; we just have it enhance your skills. So basically it’s twitch-based.

Was there an attempt to use the d20 style with this game?

Nathan: We never actually considered using any kind of d20 system. We wanted to preserve the player skill that you would get with a shooter and have the computer actually help you with what Ryan said earlier, determining things like damage and criticals and your skill will actually help how your gun recoils and your reload time and that sort of thing. We really didn’t want to penalize the FPS player. If he’s really good at taking guys down with very little, let’s just let him do that and just help him do it even better.

Combat & Skills

How does Alpha Protocol handle the typical RPG skill system? Can players tweak stats to build out their spy, or is this process streamlined for an FPS audience?

Chris: We created a system that we hope is both simple to understand but at the same time allows a lot of depth in your character building and customization. So there are ten skills that you use to level up your character that we’ve sort of touched on here and there. These are like gun skills, hacking abilities, how resistant you are to damage, how good you are at picking locks and such. So the average FPS player who might not be familiar with RPG’s or might not be into the idea of building out their character can really just pick almost like a class, we call it a background, and that will sort of give them a number of stats and they can auto level up during the game and that will be very straightforward and transparent. However if you are more hardcore, you can go ahead and decide exactly which skills you want to level up and where you want to spend those points and how you really want to build your own character. We’re hoping that that balance of not having too many different things to pick between, having them being straight forward, but having a lot of depth to how they work hopefully satisfies all audiences. So far internally people are really excited about it.

Will the combat be in real time or will there be number crunching under the hood?

Nathan: It’s definitely in real time. There’s a little bit of number crunching, like we said, in terms of like damage inflicted and resisted and so forth. But the RPG genre is all about tactically using your skill. So we definitely employ that in the game but the combat is real time.

Could you give us some insight on the stealth mechanics?

Ryan: The stealth is stuff like obviously staying out of sight of the enemies, cameras and turrets. There is some equipment that you could use to basically lower your audio profile so you can sneak up on guys using stuff like that. Obviously if you start firing off a gun that doesn’t have some kind of suppressor you’re kind of throwing that stealth element out but you can recover that at one point. Plus you can use some of your other skills like hacking to disable cameras so you can ninja around levels some more. There are no real big tricks to it. You have these abilities that you can use but it is up to the player when and how to use them.

Weapons & Gadgets

Are the weapons fictional or based on real weapons? Does the main character have any special abilities to enhance these weapons, or that can be used outside of these weapons?

Chris: Obviously the weapons in Alpha Protocol are really important to us and they play a big role in the RPG system and they play a big role in combat. You don’t have to use them but I think that most people will defer to the shooting portion of the game. They're loosly based on real-world counterparts. I mean we certainly got visual reference and tried to understand what modern day weapons are and how they work, but we aren’t basing them off of anything specifically. And that all ties into the role playing system; Mike has a skill for each of the four types of shooting weapons. He also has close quarter, hand-to-hand skills that he can use if he wants to, and of course he also has gadgets which can be lethal as well. But as you level up with any of these you get better in terms of damage, and you’ll get special abilities which we touched on earlier. Whatever you skill up in and whichever you’re using, the better you get at it and the easier it is going to be to defeat opponents with those things. The example of “chain-shot” that Nathan brought up earlier which is just a simple special ability that you can use that’s on a cool down that is used by the pistol so it’s pretty stealthy and you can have a suppressor on your pistol and use it silently and take down a bunch of guys really quickly is just an example of how the player can enhance their weapons over the course of the game.

In typical RPG’s, weapons are given stats to increase effectiveness and rarity in the world. Will Alpha Protocol have a stat based system for weapons, or will the player hold the stats that make them more effective?

Ryan: It’s kind of both. Basically over the course of the game the player can set some skills for the weapons, as well as they can find equipment that will actually increase the damage of the weapon, including modifications, ammunition, different parts of the gun, silencers and that sort of stuff. So it’s not really one or the other, it’s just really a mix of both. You could really suck at one and pick up enough modifications to make up for your lack of skill.

Gadgets. Will they be mostly things that are reasonable for the real world, or will they be more fantastic?

Abia: I’d say that we’re definitely making things more realistic. We found that with the James Bond, fantastic type of gadgets, we really love the movies, but most of the time those are used only once. And for us to come up with situations just for a one off, we didn’t think that would be that rewarding for the players. Instead, we focused on making more realistic gadgets that have more universal work throughout the game. Typically people who are using gadgets are more trap setters and they’ll be taking advantage of whatever the enemies are doing in the environment so we wanted to make sure that with these weapons that was the focus.

Enders

This is a much more multiplatform game than you’ve made before; KOTOR II was released on Xbox and few months later on PC, but Alpha Protocol is in development for three systems. What impact has this had on design and production?

Chris: As mentioned we are using Unreal Engine 3 and that’s a multiplatform engine out of the box. It doesn’t make developing a game simple but it does help a lot and does do a lot of the heavy lifting for us on the platform specific stuff. On the design side of things, at least currently, we’re planning for all three platforms to have the same feature set and to have the same content. And while we do have to tailor that content in cases of like texture resolutions and things like that, for the most part we can develop as if we were developing for one platform and then bring it to life on all of the other ones. The other thing that we’ve had to do some of is definitely go through and rewrite shaders and optimize for the different platforms and of course the PC is going to require a lot of work on the interface to make sure that it can support both point and click and using the controller. But for the most part it really just comes down to understanding the different needs of each console and planning for them; and then utilizing the technology that we have to make it as easy as possible for us.

Is there any possibility of downloadable content in the future?

Ryan: I hate that question. We’re still working it out with SEGA. We’ll have more information in the future it’s just that nothing has been decided actually. Sorry.

What is the most obscure Achievement (360)/Trophy (PS3) that is planned for Alpha Protocol at this time?

Chris: I will say that I am a die hard believer that if you finish a single player game on the 360 with normal settings you should get something like 600 achievement points because it irritates me to death when I get like 120 after finishing a 20 hour game on normal because I didn’t headshot 250 people through the eye. So that is the goal.

Are you looking forward to a PlayStation 3 Alpha Protocol release opening up a new audience for Obsidian’s very well received RPG’s for competing platforms?

Chris: I can say that I’m personally really excited about working with the PS3. I didn’t actually get to make a game on PS2. My last Sony game was on the PlayStation 1. And you know I’m a huge fan. I love the PlayStation and pretty much everybody here does and we’re really excited about getting a game out on that platform. It’s an awesome system and so putting an awesome game onto it is exciting for us.

Your previous games are sequels of BioWare’s original work. They generally received good formal and informal critical evaluation – truly stellar marks factoring in they’re sequels to games originally developed by another studio. Do you think your celebrated work on KOTOR II and Neverwinter Nights 2 will drive interest in Alpha Protocol, or do you think the former titles remain too associated with BioWare to give alpha Protocol a leg up in anticipation and sales?

Chris: We go way back with BioWare. The owners of Obsidian all come from Black Isle Studios. Feargus Urquhart who is our CEO was actually the producer on BioWare’s first title, Shattered Steel. I personally produced the entire Baldur’s Gate series for BioWare at Black Isle Studios. And then strangely enough we leave Black Isle Studios and they were able to help us get hooked up with our first title, which kind of turned the tables around, and then we ended up making sequels to their games. So we’ve got a ton of history and it made sense for us to do those sequels when we started because they trusted us and we understood their tech and we understood the kind of game they were making. So it really has to be out in the court of public opinion as to whether or not people can really separate us from them or think that we are too attached to them. But I think that at this point we’re starting to work on our own titles that are really REALLY our own. We made Neverwinter 2 and we made KOTOR II our own and I think we did a really great job with those games. And Alpha Protocol is us really stepping away from that; getting back to our roots and making a really cool different RPG, and in this case a really actiony role playing game.

If you hit with Alpha Protocol, do you think it will stand alone as a unique title in the genre, or open up RPG’s to a wider range of themes and plot concepts?

Chris: It’s hard to say. When we’re making a game we’re just trying to make something that’s really cool. That’s what we’re trying to do with Alpha Protocol. I think that there’s a lot to be said for the idea that making something different doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re making something good. So we’re not just trying to make something different. We’re trying to evolve our genre and trying to make a new, different type of role playing game and we think it’s going to be awesome. And so far the stuff that we’ve put together, the people internally are super super psyched about it. And I think the plot and story are going to be something different for the FPS players that we do pull, like the ability to make decisions and feel really involved in what’s going on and have the game play that back as far as reactivity goes. I think it’s going to be great and I think this kind of game really is going to be something that people get excited about.