First, let’s talk about what it does right. Still, ask someone who was playing games around this time and isn’t a devoted fan of the developer what their impression of the studio is, and some of that residual reputation is likely to be left over.Įven when it’s running 100% properly, Alpha Protocol has some design problems. Things are much different now Obsidian, recently acquired by Microsoft, has put out a string of quality RPG titles with no more than their fair share of technical hiccups over the past couple years, and also been an unlikely player in the MMO space with the tankfighting game Armored Warfare, which is a story for another time. So up front, the game still has some of the legendary performance issues that, along with Fallout New Vegas ’s instability at release - Alpha Protocol released in May 2010 and New Vegas in October 2010, for context - led to Obsidian developing a reputation as a high-quality but mercurial developer whose games rewarded players willing to push past and work with a bevy of technical problems in their games. Mike Thorton was from a time before cutscene and mission cosmetics were put in different buckets, but his safehouses have some amazing bathrooms. That’s because somehow I suffered a file corruption bug that donked me back to the beginning of the Russia hub multiple times, and at some point, we had to run this piece. You may notice that most of the art for this piece is from Saudi Arabia and Russia. Usually these don’t wipe all your progress! …Usually. Alpha Protocol was the greatest FPS RPG franchise that never was.Įven today it remains a pretty divisive game for those who remember it at the time, the Obsidian Entertainment-developed, SEGA-published title was released in 2010 on PC/PS3/Xbox 360 to stridently mixed reviews - whether you felt like the game was worth the time of day pretty much came down to whether you could tolerate playing it for the 10-15 hours it took to complete a campaign, and whether you could tolerate a good 2-3 of those 10-15 hours being reloads from checkpoints, or, if you’re particularly unlucky…a save-corrupting error that forces you to restart from a previous file.

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