Alpha Protocol

RPGs have done plenty of swords and sorcery. They’ve secured the future of countless dewy-eyed princesses, and they’ve even bristled with lightsabers. But what they haven’t done before is spies. Alpha Protocol wants to make you feel like 008…but first you gotta start all the way down at 001 and work your way up.

As Obsidian executive producer Chris Parker tells the story, the game’s concept was born when “we had just finished Knights of the Old Republic II and were working on Neverwinter Nights 2 — two D20 games with hardcore rules systems. As we were putting together pitches for our next game, [we wanted to make] something more action-y. We started talking ideas, and one was spies. What about letting you be Jason Bourne? You’d start out as not much of an ass-kicker, but would become one over the course of the game…while figuring out what kind of espionage agent you’d make if you had the opportunity.”

Whoever you want to be, your name is Mike Thorton, who Parker describes as a competent, well-trained field agent on his first mission. You customize how he grows as a spy, but ultimately, he’s still Thorton. We need him to be this kind of leading man,” he explains. You spy on behalf of Alpha Protocol, a secret branch of a U.S. government agency that handles deniable operations. When things go tragically wrong on Thorton’s first op, “you’re doubly screwed,” laughs Parker, because not only will the U.S. not acknowledge you as an asset, but your own agency appears to be thrusting knives in your back as well.

Striking out on your own, you have just enough leads to start piecing together the big picture, and while the game is certainly about getting to the bottom of that, it’s also about learning your motivations as the player. Do you want Thorton to operate out of love of country? Or be a purely good guy if the U.S. is up to no good? Or wreak vengeance and retribution on all who harmed him?

Those decisions are a main thread of Alpha’s gameplay. “A big thing we wanted to go for was reactivity and consequences for your choices,” Parker says. Every call you make — a dialogue selection, a life spared or extinguished — will pay off with both equally valuable in-game rewards and changes to future missions and conversations. “We’ve all had a game culminate in a different ending,” offers assistant producer Nathan Davis. “But…we have different middles. Those can be subtle, or they can be big story points.”

Primed with that setup, we grabbed a controller and headed out on the first mission, which finds Thorton awakening in a medical bay, dazed and confused. Immediately, you choose whether to rip out your IV or leave it in. Of course, much weightier matters are often yours to decide, from the fate of major NPCs to whether you want to try to sweet-talk the ladies, you superspy you.

But at first, we blasted through a horde of guards in what turned out to be a cool mini-surprise that we ain’t spoiling. Alpha Protocol felt much more like a third-person shooter than an RPG — and that’s intentional. “Our biggest concern was that when you play a low-level D&D character, you kind of suck,” Parker says. “We spent a lot of time on a rules system that allows for player skill, [while granting] a lot of advantages based on your character’s [level] over the course of the game.”

So while you will see XP earnings pop up in all the usual places, we were also able to deftly connect with headshots right from the start. And in another mission, where Obsidian bestowed a much more advanced character on us, we got to see how those skills pan out. You can level up Thorton in 10 areas — half involve combat, but there’s also stealth, hacking, gadget use, and health. Improving in each earns you special abilities that Parker freely admits “are kind of like spells. They’re well beyond what a normal human can do.”

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