Obsidian's Chris Avellone
Alpha top dog.
That is correct.
Well, there are advantages. You can give the character a voice. And - how do I put this? - when we choose a specific character like Mike Thorton for Alpha Protocol, we can give him a specific voice in the game, and that was the intent of Alpha Protocol: to provide a cinematic role-playing experience. And, to that extent, Michael Thorton has to interact with people cinematically in the game.
That was one of the visions that was set up for the game when our tech director and our CEO came up with the idea. They wanted a cinematic game, and that was something I was interested in doing as well. But we recognised that in order to pull that off - well, to have a silent protagonist who can have hundreds of different variations in look and size or whatever, in a game like this, that would be beyond our resource budget.
Well, there's two things we're doing. One, because of how the dialogue system was designed, because there's only one path through the conversation and no leaping back and forth, it's very easy to tell what the antecedent line is, and therefore govern the NPC's responses accordingly.
Also, there's a tracker in Alpha Protocol - as much as you can do research on the various NPCs in the game, they'll also do a lot of research on you. They do their homework. So when they meet you, they're already going to know about the choices you've made and the attitude you've taken when making those choices. So if you've been an aggressive American asshole, when you're in the international arena, that does not go over well.
We're able to predict that stuff - it's easier to do that in this game than one where you can double-back in the conversation.
I can't say much - you should ask SEGA about it - but I will say this: I think it ended up being a good thing, overall. And I will take that opinion with me to my grave.
I can't say.
I can't say!
I could not even speculate on that. I would be shot in the head.
I probably can't speak about that either.
Dude, you know what, if you could be a fly on the wall for some of these conversations...
It's definitely made me want to go back to... Well, actually, I really enjoy writing and designing real-world quests, honestly. They have more of a punch to them. I certainly enjoy working on a fantasy game - like, for example, I would love to go back to the Planescape universe. But I did love working on Fallout, and the chance to work on it again is fantastic. And I enjoy working on Alpha Protocol, because it's been so long since I've been able to write a character and design quests and interactions for a real-world environment. It was such a huge relief.
I'm not sure. I don't know who holds the rights to it now, or even if they're licensing it out. Those are some questions I'd have to answer first. But I certainly enjoyed working with it. It was brilliant.
Alpha Protocol, from Chris Avellone's Obsidian Entertainment, is due out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on 28th May.