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A friend of mine is playing the game on my recommendation. He summed up his (positive) opinion by saying: "So basically, almost everyone who plays video games is a spoiled whiny little babby who wants every game to play and look exactly the same or they will respond to this violation of their comfort zone by hurling their feces at the outsider like a herd of coprophilic pod people."
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Aug 3, 2011 17:00
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Doc Hawkins posted:A friend of mine is playing the game on my recommendation. He summed up his (positive) opinion by saying: "So basically, almost everyone who plays video games is a spoiled whiny little babby who wants every game to play and look exactly the same or they will respond to this violation of their comfort zone by hurling their feces at the outsider like a herd of coprophilic pod people." Your friend is an astute gentleman and a scholar 
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Aug 3, 2011 19:38
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Right, so I'm in the ruins mission in Rome and I can't seem to make the thing end. I defend the comms array from Al-Samad to the point where goons stop spawning, but nothing happens. Is this a known bug or is my Thorton doomed to wander Roman ruins for the rest of his days?
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Aug 3, 2011 22:22
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Diogenes of Sinope posted:Right, so I'm in the ruins mission in Rome and I can't seem to make the thing end. I defend the comms array from Al-Samad to the point where goons stop spawning, but nothing happens. This happened to me once when I was too effective at killing the intruders. Just reload the most recent autosave and you should get to redo the fight again.
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Aug 3, 2011 22:26
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Diogenes of Sinope posted:Right, so I'm in the ruins mission in Rome and I can't seem to make the thing end. I defend the comms array from Al-Samad to the point where goons stop spawning, but nothing happens. Mike Thornton: Too good at killing? No such thing! 
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Aug 4, 2011 01:01
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Hank Morgan posted:This happened to me once when I was too effective at killing the intruders. Just reload the most recent autosave and you should get to redo the fight again. It's a hell of a lot more fun to just set bombs all over the place and chill in the back while they charge at you, anyways.
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Aug 4, 2011 03:16
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Captain Walker posted:Your friend is an astute gentleman and a scholar ...The fact that he can express contempt for people who dislike a thing you like doesn't make him a good person. AP is a good game but quit pretending it doesn't have huge flaws, as well as a design that drat near guarantees casual players won't see why it's good. Seeing uncritical raving like this makes me think that in a month or three, this forum will be throwing its contempt on those dumb fanboy geeks who loved AP and acted like anyone who didn't was a shambling morlock.
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Aug 4, 2011 03:21
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Huitzil posted:...The fact that he can express contempt for people who dislike a thing you like doesn't make him a good person. AP is a good game but quit pretending it doesn't have huge flaws, as well as a design that drat near guarantees casual players won't see why it's good. Seeing uncritical raving like this makes me think that in a month or three, this forum will be throwing its contempt on those dumb fanboy geeks who loved AP and acted like anyone who didn't was a shambling morlock. In a way, that is what frustrates me the most. There are many perfectly legitmate reasons to sledge AP, but instead you get the pistol is unpowered?
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Aug 4, 2011 04:01
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Chasiubao posted:Mike Thornton: Too good at killing? No such thing! Mike Thorton has a Indiana Jones-like attitude for precious historical sites.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:05
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Huitzil posted:...The fact that he can express contempt for people who dislike a thing you like doesn't make him a good person. AP is a good game but quit pretending it doesn't have huge flaws, as well as a design that drat near guarantees casual players won't see why it's good. Seeing uncritical raving like this makes me think that in a month or three, this forum will be throwing its contempt on those dumb fanboy geeks who loved AP and acted like anyone who didn't was a shambling morlock. Really? You want Kinectimals fans to like AP? I guess not, because a terrible lack of anything resembling publisher support is a "huge flaw" and you would disapprove of their "uncritical raving" anyway. Goons are many things but uncritical is not among them. So let's all criticize your post. Well, no, let's not, I just want to talk about this great, underappreciated game  edit: Cthulhu Dreams posted:In a way, that is what frustrates me the most. There are many perfectly legitmate reasons to sledge AP, but instead you get the pistol is unpowered? This also. More than anything, the state of games journalism is why we feel need to heap occasionally unwarranted praise on a good game that got poo poo all over by the press.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:05
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I gifted this game to three of my friends during the summer sales and they still haven't played it because of its "low Metacritic rating" 
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Aug 4, 2011 04:08
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In Training posted:I gifted this game to three of my friends during the summer sales and they still haven't played it because of its "low Metacritic rating" gently caress Metacritic, gently caress IGN, gently caress your If I ever contract cancer I'm using my Make-A-Wish to make Sega become "893 Games" and get the gently caress out of publishing and just make Yakuza games forever.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:11
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In Training posted:I gifted this game to three of my friends during the summer sales and they still haven't played it because of its "low Metacritic rating" Yeah, I lent the game to my best mate and fellow avid RPG fan and he couldn't stand it, he said he liked the conversation system but the animations and the gameplay were too terrible, he never got past saudi arabia. Sigh.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:15
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Captain Walker posted:Really? You want Kinectimals fans to like AP? Why the gently caress wouldn't I? It is a good game. I would like it if more people enjoyed it. I would like to be able to recommend a game without qualifying it "once you get past the first few levels". Why should I think that someone doesn't "deserve" it because they enjoy some other thing I dislike? Also the lack of publisher support is NOT its only flaw. The game's dialogue and plotting are fantastic but the gameplay is not pulling its loving weight. The difficulty curve is completely broken -- being able to kill every boss except Brayko with a maxed out Chainshot + Brilliance + Chainshot is not a good thing, stealth gameplay is really "use cooldown skills over and over again and then sit and wait for them to recover" gameplay, AI is spotty, the first of the FOUR mission hubs in the game is generic as poo poo, and the PC porting was lazy as hell. You have to get past all these things to see the good game. Just because you can see the good game after getting past these things, doesn't mean you never had to get past them, nor does it mean everyone who didn't is a horrible awful contemptible person. Yeah, some reviewers said the pistol was useless when really it was game-breakingly powerful (this is a bad thing). The beginning of the game was generic and lackluster enough that reviewers didn't feel like it was something they needed to go deeper into. The game has a bad first impression. First impressions count, to everyone, not just horrible people who exist as targets for your contempt.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:19
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I've played a decent chunk of the game, and I'm just not seeing why people would call it bad. Even ignoring the conversation aspect, you still have a pretty fun stealth game with some cool toys to gently caress around with. It might be kind of underwhelming, but I wouldn't call it bad by any means.
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Aug 4, 2011 04:23
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I absolutely started to not have fun with this game once I got to the russian guy doing coke in his mansion. :(
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Aug 4, 2011 06:12
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I'm going to give this game another go.
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Aug 4, 2011 06:13
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Meowbot posted:I absolutely started to not have fun with this game once I got to the russian guy doing coke in his mansion. Run (don't walk) away when he cokes up. Alternately, take a break from Moscow. Visit some other hubs, meet some new people. I hear Taipei is lovely this time of year.
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Aug 4, 2011 06:54
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etalian posted:Mike Thorton has a Indiana Jones-like attitude for precious historical sites. A complete and total lack of respect? 
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Aug 4, 2011 07:40
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Chasiubao posted:A complete and total lack of respect? You're thinking Lara Croft 
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Aug 4, 2011 08:15
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Meowbot posted:I absolutely started to not have fun with this game once I got to the russian guy doing coke in his mansion. Hold A to run, and when he cokes up just run. Also if you don't mind doing the mission over again, you can buy intel from the Clearinghouse that poisons his coke.
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Aug 4, 2011 08:30
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Chinaman7000 posted:
Only if you've done the Taipei missions first, though.
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Aug 4, 2011 08:59
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Insanity Prawn posted:Only if you've done the Taipei missions first, though. You don't even have to do all the missions. Just visit the dry cleaners.
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Aug 4, 2011 09:58
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I bought this on this thread and completed it last weekend on the back of this thread. I enjoyed this game a lot. The voice acting is really good! I would have absolutely hated to play this game without reading this thread in advance, though. People have gone over all the gameplay problems and even knowing about them in advance, I still nearly got screwed a few times. In addition I feel that without this thread I just wouldn't have figured a lot of the situations were reactions to my earlier choices or just scripted - since I knew the game had this element I took my time reading dossiers, thinking carefully about conversations and so on. It would have been very easy just to go through it Mass Effect style though and assume a lot of what I experienced was the default, which would make it far less interesting. The one big thing I wished they'd done is put something in the marketing (highlight it for reviewers!) and at the beginning of the game stressing the effects of decisions down the road, the importance of intel and so on. You've made an adaptive world, let people know!
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Aug 4, 2011 10:24
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Huitzil posted:Why the gently caress wouldn't I? It is a good game. I would like it if more people enjoyed it. Just because more people could like it doesn't mean it would be better game. A lot of great games are fairly dislikable to a lot of people due to the things that make them great or give them huge depth. Imagine releasing BG2 today - compared to modern day games (and versions of D&D) the game is very difficult to get into and the combat system is obtuse but that combat system is a large part of the reason why it is great. Huitzil posted:Also the lack of publisher support is NOT its only flaw. The game's dialogue and plotting are fantastic but the gameplay is not pulling its loving weight. I'd say the biggest problem with the gameplay by far is the issue with weapons being levelled RPG abilities, which was a publisher mandate. The other main issue people tend to have with the game is the animations (eg the crouch walk), and that's nothing to do with Obsidian - that's the orthodoxy being wrong. You say you don't want to recommend games with the proviso "but it gets better later!". Surely that's something common to almost all RPGs - no matter how good the game is at the start, as long as the combat mechanics are based on stats in some way it tends to be unintuitive. Take the first level of Deus Ex as an example. A lot of people hated it, were completely put off the game by it. But in terms of the number of options you have and general flow it's probably one of the best. Demanding that games are all very easy to get into is frustrating because it encourages the simplification of gameplay mechanics and in almost all cases reducing the depth of the combat system. Look at Dragon Age 2 - the game puts you straight into a fight and gives you all your classes advanced abilities right at the start in order, so they said, to give you an idea of how your character will play at higher levels so running around with a single ability will not be frustrating. But, ignoring all the other problems, this requirement necessarily makes the game shallow. By making all the abilities understandable by someone who's only just started the game they have inevitably made the combat system a simple damage in/damage out model. Completely kills the depth. Easier to get into than Baldur's Gate 2 or Deus Ex? Certainly. Better game? Certainly not.
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Aug 4, 2011 11:43
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Alogen posted:The one big thing I wished they'd done is put something in the marketing (highlight it for reviewers!) and at the beginning of the game stressing the effects of decisions down the road, the importance of intel and so on. You've made an adaptive world, let people know! Given that most reviewers appear to have not actually played the game, I'm not sure that would have helped.
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Aug 4, 2011 16:28
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Alogen posted:I bought this on this thread and completed it last weekend on the back of this thread. That your actions feel like the default character path no matter what you do is part of this game's beauty. Seriously, play it a second time doing the exact opposite of what you just did, it'll still feel natural and "right".
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Aug 4, 2011 17:54
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Alogen posted:The one big thing I wished they'd done is put something in the marketing (highlight it for reviewers!) and at the beginning of the game stressing the effects of decisions down the road, the importance of intel and so on. You've made an adaptive world, let people know! They do this though, if you stick around long enough to listen to Westridge without getting too bored and just walking away.
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Aug 4, 2011 18:34
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I just finished my first playthrough (knew I would have to play it several more times as soon as I started) with Stealth and Pistols. This game is everything I have wanted from a videogame, except for the ending, which was pretty anti-climactic.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:38
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Reichstag posted:I just finished my first playthrough (knew I would have to play it several more times as soon as I started) with Stealth and Pistols. This game is everything I have wanted from a videogame, except for the ending, which was pretty anti-climactic. What kind of ending did you get? Because it will probably take two or three playthroughs to get the whole scope of the story.
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Aug 4, 2011 22:57
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Also, don't forget to stick around and listen to the newscasts during the credits. A surprising number of people miss those.
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Aug 4, 2011 23:04
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In Training posted:What kind of ending did you get? Because it will probably take two or three playthroughs to get the whole scope of the story. Not sure what you mean by 'kind,' is there more than one ending sequence? I assume the ending sequence is roughly the same for all playthroughs (same basic mission structure/maps) with contextual changes for player decisions throughout the Alpha Protocol/Halbech facility which you have to escape.
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Aug 4, 2011 23:53
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In Training posted:They do this though, if you stick around long enough to listen to Westridge without getting too bored and just walking away. I just started playing this, but I agree that it is hard to get into and it has nothing to do with the game mechanics....unless you count a literal poo poo ton of (unskippable) dialogue and movies as a game mechanic. The "tutorial" alone (admittedly, somewhat optional) takes at least an hour or two and it is totally separate from the story (unlike Mass Effect, say, where the "tutorial" level is integrated into the game). I will keep playing because I enjoy the dialogue and am into the game and I love RPGs, but, yes, I can see why many, many people had a hard time getting into the game. Incidentally, I also hate it when movies try to explain their imaginary world to you in the opening credits.
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Aug 5, 2011 00:13
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Reichstag posted:Not sure what you mean by 'kind,' is there more than one ending sequence? If by "ending" you mean "the ending of the story", there's quite a lot of variation based not just on your choices during the final level, but throughout the game. If by "ending" you mean "the final level", which is what you seem to be asking, it's the same overall level structure, but who you meet (and how you interact with them) is affected by prior choices.
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Aug 5, 2011 00:16
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ToxicFrog posted:If by "ending" you mean "the ending of the story", there's quite a lot of variation based not just on your choices during the final level, but throughout the game. Yeah this. I was wondering who exactly you met up with in the final level, because there is a bunch of variation there and you may have a different feeling about the conclusion depending on who you met at the end.
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Aug 5, 2011 02:56
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Great game. I don't understand some of the gameplay complaints. I have a blast running around doing it like an arcade style shooter. Also, I found it kind of funny that in my playthrough as a psychopathic shotgun rear end in a top hat who executes everyone no questions asked, the net results at the end of the game seemed to be better for the world than my initial playthrough as a compassionate sneaky dude who didn't really kill anyone
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Aug 9, 2011 18:48
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Game is discounted by 75% on Green Man Gaming http://www.greenmangaming.com/games/rpgs/alpha-protocol/
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Aug 11, 2011 18:38
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Luisfe posted:Game is discounted by 75% on Green Man Gaming Has anyone ever actually paid RRP for this game?
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Aug 12, 2011 18:47
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ChuckDHead posted:Has anyone ever actually paid RRP for this game? I pre-ordered it from Best Buy and paid the full $60. Then I sold it and bought it again. Then I sold it again and bought the Steam version. Worth every penny 
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Aug 12, 2011 18:56
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ChuckDHead posted:Has anyone ever actually paid RRP for this game? 'sup 
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