Games I Like, Part 1: Alpha Protocol

From time to time I try to do something different with this blog than just giving you aggregate posts of news stories dumped into my Google Alerts. This is one of those efforts, and I do make it with the flimsiest of excuses to make it fit within the overall theme of this blog: the background that gets the story going is the War on Terror. That's a war, which means I can cover it here, hah!




Alpha Protocol is an espionage-themed action-RPG developed by Obsidian Entertainment for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC released on May 28, 2010 in Europe and June 1 in North America. The story follows Michael Thorton, a field agent for a secret program called Alpha Protocol. When things take a turn for the worse, Thorton decides to take it upon himself to uncover a conspiracy that could have worldwide implications. His journey takes place across a variety of cities, including Moscow, Rome, and Taipei (Taiwan).




The best $5 you've spent in a long time.


 The game upon release received a varied bag of review scores, with most praising the story and damning the unpolished feel of the game, various broken game mechanics like sneaking, and the deficient enemy AI. While the complaints are certainly true, these have been persistent issues with releases by Obsidian Entertainment during the past years and are largely the result of publisher demanding premature releases. As a basic rule games developed by Obsidian feature superb stories and equally superlative bug issues. If their publishers actually gave the studio 6-12 months more time to polish and de-bug their products they would have had guaranteed bestsellers at their hands. 



The way it is, Alpha Protocal quickly landed in the bargain bin. Ironically, the game's bugs are mostly fixed now and you can purchase it for less than $5. And still, the gameplay mechanics aren't anything special. The sneaking and covert actions? The Splinter Cell series does that better. The combat? Even the first Modern Warfare outshines it in every category. The graphics? In 2010 I had alrady seen better.




And yet, I love this game. I'm usually not the type of player who replays this kind of games time and again. After all, it's not like Heart of Iron 2 where you can effectively play every country on the world, which gives you almost infinite variance. But Alpha Protocol I've replayed four times, sinking almost a hundred hours into the murky world of Mike Thornton. The reason for this is simple: the story and the characters are rich, mature, and full of facets that have game-changing consequences.

You are Michael Thornton, recently introduced into the top secret Alpha Protocol, and off the books US agency doing the hard and dirty work on frontline against international terrorist organizations. Or so you think. You can chose from pre-determined backgrounds locking your abilities into certain paths or you can build your own character perks as a "freelancer", which usually is the better choice.






Mike Thornton, or rather: you. You can of course customize

your appearance, though I'd advise against Hawaii shirts

on shooting missions. Those blood stains never wash out...


After familiarizing yourself with the controls and meeting some of the prime characters back in the Alpha Protocol compound - your boss Yancy Westridge, comm specialist Mina Tang, Agent Darcy - you get your first objective: your initial mission is to assassinate the leader of the terror group Al-Samad, Sheik Shaheed,
after an attack on a passenger aircraft in the Middle East. You fight and search your way through Saudi Arabia, gathering intel until you've got enough to track Shaheed down (somehow I doubt Obsidian knew what shaheed means...). But once you've
captured the sheik, the terrorist leader claims that Halbech, a defense
contractor, sold him the missiles and gave him all of the necessary
information to carry out the attack. After relaying the information, your position is attacked by a missile strike, and you are presumed dead. You get contacted by Mina and are told that
the group has been infiltrated by members of Halbech who want you
dead to cover up the fact that Halbech provided the missiles to
Al-Samad.





That's the setup for a the story: you've been forced to go rogue, not only to survive but also to unravel the mystery behind Halbech and Alpha Protocol. The way it's told is the key to Alpha Protocol's strength: the clues you uncover give you the base to progress, to make decisions, to buy intel and equipment. They also open up opportunities within the missions you play through: a weapon's cache placed here, a door opened there. But it's the dialogue and the ingame-decisions that truly excell this game above the sea of average titles. It's unique in the sense that it allows the player to choose from three different attitudes or "stances" when speaking to an NPC, and these stances determine those NPCs reactions and ultimately standing towards the player. Besides the characters in the game naturally being fun to talk to, what
you say and what you do affects the game in ways that are really
refreshing. In the short term, you can see the impact of your choices
immediately felt; in the long term, stuff you might have forgotten about
suddenly become an issue or affect you in a positive way. Losing
influence with factions and characters isn’t inherently a bad thing
either, because that comes with its own set of branching paths that beg
to be explored. You can gain powerful allies - or you can act like the worst psychopath if you want!







The story has twists - good ones, not the sort M. Night Shyamalan would use - and within its framework it allows you character an maximum of freedom. To clarify why this is so great we have to look at what gamers usually do: we play the good guy. The moral crusader who saves kittens, helps old ladies across the street and happily waves the flag in the end. Alpha Protocol lets you do that. As the video above shows it also allows you to play a deranged psychopath. And you can play everything in between. Being good is what we want to do as players. It's almost as if we're programmed to do so. And in a broader social context we probably are, as good behavior is rewarded while bad one is shunned. 




At least, that's the ideal. And very few game developers manage to safely tread the sort of ground where player behavior is not a shining white or deep black. The Mass Effect series with its Paragon and Renegade system tried it and largely failed, in my opinion, by slowly degrading the Renegade option to, in effect, "acting like an ass" whereas it ought to have been an amoral "the end justifies the means" choice.




Only Alpha Protocol manages to give you the options to play in the setting and story and make it feel right. Oh, sure, the game gives you plenty of means to play the virtuous hero type of character, including a very damsel-in-distress type of romance that very obviously was meant to serve as an emotional hook by the developers. And I did. "Good boy Michael Thornton" was my character on my first playthrough. I never made that mistake again, and let me tell you something: the next playthrough was a lot more rewarding!




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It's SteveN Heck, not Steve. Remember that!


Let's face it: the setting and story of the game create a narrative where everybody stabs everybody else in the back, lies, betrays, omits and generally works to his or her own ends. Once you realize that loyalty and trust are the only things that count in Alpha Protocol, once you realize that winning is more important than being "Boyscout Mike Thornton" the game begins to truly shine in all its glory.



Disgraced and disowned by your own country, do you do the moral thing and unearth the whole conspiracy? Do you accept an offer to become Halbech's lead enforcer? Or would you rather like to take over yourself, using the massive influence and vast ressources and connections you've gathered during the game? Do you kill Sheik Shaheed, or do you save him to call in favors later? What do you do if you find out the one you've been trusting all along only used you, even if only with the best intentions? Will you hold back despite being betrayed by a contact because he's worth more alive than dead? How about the mission in Taipeh and the assassination (attempt) of the Taiwanese president which brought the region to the egde of war - will you feel merciful once you find out who worked behind your back there? What about...




I could go on and on and on here. The changes and differing paths the multitude of choices in the game open up are not always directly obvious, their results hitting you often way down the path. That means you need to think about your choices, which isn't easy because the dialogue system is fluent: you can't wait too long with your answer.




In my first playthrough I waltzed into the Madison Saint James romance (the damsel-in-distress; this seems to be the "default" option Obsidian wants to push you in), and it ended with me making the whole Alpha Protocol/Halbech affair public, hooking up with my most trusted contact and forgiving the person who brought about the Taipeh situation. Boyscout Mike Thornton drove off into the sunset on a boat, Mina Tang cuddling up to him.




My second playthough was quite different. Madison Saint James was an asset, nothing more, nothing less. I sent my most trusted contact away after realizing I had been used by her all the time, but not without warning her never to cross me again. The person responsible for Taipeh received a bullet to the head in mid-sentence. And in the end the person on the boat was a joking Steven Heck, and Mike Thornton was the new big player in the world of espionage and covert operations, an independent force much like Black Flag's General Sanderson.




To summarize my love for the game: within the confines of the great story I can do almost whatever I want. And so can you. If you love the espionage genre and stuff written by Ludlum, Flynn or Konkoly and have $5 to spare this game is an investment you won't regrett.