Alpha Protocol

Obsidian Entertainment is through the few studios in which I have trust. For many games you can go on the idea that “I assume from the start that it’s going to be ugly”, but when you talk about a product designed by Obsidian (or some few other companies), the geek from me can’t help from jumping around screaming “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!”.


And from some points of view, Alpha Protocol is a way important RPG (Role Playing Game) for Obsidian then it was Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2 or Mask of the Betrayer at their time. On those games they only had to continue with the quality, but at the base it was working with something already set. This time, Chris Avellone and the company are 100% on their own – their own story, own chats and characters, game play decisions and so on. If something is not right, they can’t give as a reason “well you know, Wizard of the Coast did not allow us to do it that way because we would have”. This time they had full freedom to create a RPG after their appearance and personalities.

Even if some will sustain the contrary, I consider that the RPGs will remain (maybe forever) some niche games. I’m talking here about worthy RPGs, not any title which has experience points and some skills and after that they call it a RPG. If we would be serious for a second, since Dungeons & Dragons we, the gamers have that classical appearance of geeks with dices in hands. On one side this was a marginalization of the gaming passionate, on the other side, the fairies, elves, orcs and wizards with magical sticks which split the mountain in two have become rules. That is why, when the first information about Alpha Protocol have appeared I could not be surprised because I was dealing with a modern and well anchored in reality universe.

It seems that in our days, a terrorist attack destroys a passenger place, the main suspects are the Al Samad members, a group of people with anti American politics. The situation won’t be this alarming if in this mess would not be involved some rockets manufactured by the Halbech corporation, the main provider of weapons for the United States and not only. Here you come in, Michael Thorton, recently recruited by the Alpha Protocol organization in order to hunt the responsible for the attack and to discover how some top generation American rockets have landed in the hands of some Islamic extremis.

But before you become the coolest secret agent since Jason Bourne, you will have to choose the difficulty level and the protagonist history. The history determines the way in which the skill points will be placed on the nine branches available, the Freelancer option is the “free one”, where you can spread them as you wish.