New Chris Avellone interview
Alpha Protocol is a clear example of a game that you can enjoy even more the second and third time you play because of all the different possibilities offered to the player. Strangely enough, not a lot of people seemed to appreciate that. Do you think the game has been treated fairly in general terms?
For the most part it was fair. Some of the press went for shock reviews, sure. Others I felt had appropriate scores and criticisms, and I dont have any ill will about that and I know a number of people played the game and enjoyed it for as many people disliked it. In fact, if I didnt have Twitter and been able to follow the mentions of the game, I would have thought everybody hated it. In the end, we were trying some new design concepts as a studio, and Im proud of what we did, some of which were carrying into future titles.
As the lead designer for Alpha Protocol, we guess you were heavily involved in the writing as well. Is there any character, dialogue or scene that you are particularly fond of?
During the 2nd half of the project (after we did the overhaul of the games pipelines, direction, and management), I effectively became the Creative Lead, and our Project Director took charge of the systems level design was assigned to a specific lead, and he carried it from there.
I inherited a lot of the characters from the previous iteration of the story, but my favorite scene was a Moscow conversation with Sis, Albatross, and Thorton when theyre discussing how things are going to turn out in the end, and nobodys too optimistic. The scene was based on the skeleton of a previous implementation, but I really liked working on it and fleshing it out.
Also, the scene where Madison hates Thorton and turns on him is also a favorite of mine. While I despise romances, I love hate-mances, and she can really come to hate you.
What was the toughest challenge from a designer point of view during APs development? Was there any time where all the different possibilities that the story can take collided in a way that made you throw up your hands and scream theres no way out of this!?
No, were used to branching storylines in our RPGs, although the cinematic nature of the ones in AP were definitely handcuffs because they relied so much on animation support to pull off (note that this was a conscious decision, not a mandate we had a generic animation system, but our animators would work hard to put in special animations to make scenes shine). If anyone wanted to throw up their hands, it was probably the dialogue engineers and the animators, who had a lot of patience, but they were often the fiercest advocates for custom anims and making cool cinematic moments.
Steven Heck is one of the most memorable characters in Alpha Protocol. Did you kind of expect that, or were you surprised by it? Did you like Nolan Norths work? Did you choose him specifically? Some people think he shows up too often in games, but we think this is one of his best roles yet.
So Heck was a character concept in the first iteration of the story, and Travis Stout (who wrote the Taipei arc and also was a key writer on Old World Blues) did a great job with his lines. Travis simply knows how to write crazy and funny and then wrap it up in somebodys head. In the studio, it did seem like Nolan was enjoying the character a lot, so it seems to have paid off.
Many players have complained about two things: Not being able to move the bodies (ala Splinter Cell) and choosing a dialogue option which doesnt really match what the player was expecting Thorton to say. Was that a design choice to streamline the game, or were there other reasons? Do you think those two aspects could be improved in a sequel?
Sure, we had a lot of items we took from game reviews and feedback and had them in a doc for AP2 and those two elements definitely could be refined and improved on a second iteration of the game.
Did you have plans for any DLC that had to be scrapped after bad reviews and/or sales?
There was a discussion of DLC at one point, but SEGA didnt want to do it (the decision was made many months before the games release, and we did have a chunk of work invested into the DLC as optional missions). I believe it was about 6 months before the games release when they made the call (or delay/postponement might be a better way to put it). Considering the games reception and the other problems with how it was being released and hyped, it was probably a good move, as I dont believe the DLC would have addressed any of the major issues people had with the game, only provided more missions.
Was it easy working with SEGA during APs development? Were they very involved, influencing the project, or did they just foot the bill? Did that experience had anything to do with the cancelation of the Aliens RPG?
They were involved more heavily toward the 2nd half, and towards the end of production, they were calling the shots and the final, indisputable word on the games direction and especially the mechanics (targeting, especially, jumps to mind). They didnt care so much about the story, however, which is pretty standard with most publishers weve worked with. Note that none of this absolves us of any of the choices we as a studio made up to that point, so if anyone had an issue with the game, we shared equal, if not more, responsibility for all the critiques folks had.
As far as I can tell, the Aliens RPG fate wasnt tied to APs fate, that seemed to be a different beast, and to this day, I couldnt comment on why that decision was made except speculations which dont do anyone any good. In the end, however, it financed the development of the Onyx engine and allowed us our own technology to make games, it built a team we could move on to DS3 and Fallout New Vegas, so a lot of good came out of it. I did think the Aliens RPG had a lot of promise, and I did enjoy working on it for the time I did.
