Home Gaming Alpha Protocol Dev Spews Forth Vitriol

Alpha Protocol Dev Spews Forth Vitriol

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AlphaProtocol

When a big game ends up being less than well received, it’s natural for the developers to start blaming all sorts of things. Alpha Protocol, the 3rd person espionage RPG from Obsidian is one of those games; a game with big ideas, hopes and dreams – accompanied by a string of unfavourable review scores.

What you don’t expect is one of the developers to rage, saying the game should have been cancelled long ago.

Somebody claiming to be one of the game’s developers in the comments section of Joystiq’s review had some rather nasty things to say about the game and its development.

“There was a ton of work put into this game. The problem is that it was a ton of undirected work, or work on things that were just stupid. The Executive Producer for the game, Chris Parker (also an owner of the company), seemed to think he was the world’s greatest designer ever, and created all these absolutely shitty systems and wouldn’t listen to any of the real designers or devs about things that just didn’t work. And you can’t exactly argue with one of the owners of the company when he doesn’t want to listen. He basically took over the game and dictated exactly how everything would work (or not work, as the case may be). The other producers realized this early on and just gave up, leaving Parker to micromanage all the designers and programmers directly.

“Sega also was a factor, because they kept changing the design requirements (yes they had heavy influence there), which never gave the producers and designers time to actually decide on one set of features to make and polish. The blame is still mostly Obsidian’s because the execution was absolutely terrible, and it was obvious 2 years ago that this game should have been scrapped. Instead, though, they focused on adding still more features and never fixed the ones they already had. That is a recipe for tons of bugs and no polish… as is obvious.

“This game was just an absolute failure of production, and it’s no wonder that so many of the developers left the company, even after the 40% staff layoffs. I am still happy about some of Obsidian’s other current projects, New Vegas included, because they are going pretty well. Their big unannounced project is looking great and is already much better than AP ever was, and that may end up being the game that everyone was looking for with AP.

“Sega should have canceled AP instead of Aliens.”

Without a bit of dedicated internet matlockery, it’ll be difficult to prove the veracity of the commenter, but it does give a little hope that Fallout New Vegas is shaping up well.

Last Updated: May 31, 2010

One Comment

  1. ShinobiZ

    May 31, 2010 at 13:13

    Alpha Protocol had alot of good ideas, but something definitely went wrong while it was in development. There are lots of bugs, and the clunky interface system makes the game frustrating at times.There are some parts of the game where you feel like asking the question: What were they thinking?

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