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Alpha Protocol (PS3/360/PC )

Frage mich nur wie die Spielzeit so sein wird bei einem Action-RPG das wie Uncharted sein soll ^^ , will keine 8-10 oder 15 stunden.. ab 20 wäre schon nice...
 
naja es soll ja nicht nur wie uncharted sein, sondern das kampfystem wie bei mass effect und uncharted! :)

also auf gut deutsch einfach fein :D
 
Alpha Protocol - first look
An action-RPG spy-thriller from the makers of games that end in 2

From Bond’s first glowering stare across a baccarat table all the way to Tom Cruise whining like a baby and sticking explosive chewing gum on a fish tank - the international spy thriller has been a cornerstone of popular culture for decades. So why has it never really translated to games? Only one Bond game was ever any good and the rest were a sequence of gaudy car crashes and poorly clipped death animations. Other stabs at the genre were late-’90s shooters with internationally themed levels (“Wow! A Chinese sewer!” “An underground base in Mexico? Awesome!”). In fact, the closest we’ve come to matching a Bourne or a Bond is Deus Ex, with only internationally hubbed adventures like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis treading on its coat-tails.

Well, no more. Not if Obsidian have anything to do with it. The developing house is of outstanding pedigree (formed from the ashes of Black Isle, the creators of RPG touchstones Fallout and Planescape: Torment) yet of late they’ve been known only as the developer who delivered the botched ending to KOTOR II and the guys that made a worthy game that went largely unnoticed (Neverwinter Nights 2). Now though, with their own world to play with and a remarkably fresh take on the genre, they’re on the offensive.

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Betrayed by his superiors. Hunted by his own country. The only man alive who has a hint of a conspiracy that is soon to result in massive loss of life.
A spy who’s a bit rubbish at first, but does have some as-yet unfilled skill slots that could lean on the violent side. Michael Thorton starts off in full-blown Mission: Impossible territory - gone rogue with only a list of names and potential safe houses, and several thousand air miles to help him. From there, Obsidian are taking him and us on a journey they hope will meld the aura of the three JBs - Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer and James Bond.

“Yeah, Alpha Protocol has much of the edginess of the new James Bond movie,” smiles Ryan Rucinski, one of Obsidian’s senior producers. “Although the development of AP actually started before the release of Casino Royale. So when the movie came out and we saw the results, we knew we had made the right decision. There have been a lot of movies that have influenced us during the conceptual creation - Mission: Impossible, the Bourne films, Ronin... However, one of the main contributors in look and tone was Syriana. If James Bond is where the action comes from, Syriana has a big influence on the theme.”

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Yet what Obsidian want to stress more than anything is that Alpha Protocol is a role-playing game. You’ll have multiple missions open in different hubs around the world (locations currently being bandied about include Taipei, Rome, Moscow and Saudi Arabia) and you’ll be able to flit between them at will - each one containing one overarching operation and a cavalcade of minor missions leading up to it - be they stealing sensitive data on a hard drive, tailing suspects or extracting information from grumpy NPCs through bribery, diplomacy or murder most foul.

“The mission structure is designed to present Thorton with an Operation, and then there are several avenues he can explore to tackle it using the skill set or preference of the player,” explains Rucinski. “We don’t want to force you through a linear series of levels, we want to treat every operation in the game like a mini-hub, where you get a number of missions you can tackle in any order, just to give the player more freedom.”

As for developing the skills of young Mr. Thorton, the system being developed is a classless one - with 10 skills in which to level up, each containing 10 slots to spend your valuable Advancement Points (or experience points) in. You won’t be able to max out your character; instead you’ll be molding the game into your chosen form of super spydom - whether its gruff no-nonsense headshots, sneakily hiding in the dark, bloody and silent close combat or gadget-heavy explodifying.

A higher rank opens up different options and perceptions, while almost superhuman secret-agent abilities are on the menu too - working on a ‘use and cool-down’ basis during the action. The example that Obsidian conjure up when prompted is, amazingly enough, heightened reaction times that let you assess situations in slo-mo before letting rip with a six-hit chainshot to decimate a room full of gun-toting terrorists. It’s a mundane example, true, but Alpha Protocol’s over-the-shoulder chase-cam action does seem to be a step up from your average RPG. Combat will have you running and gunning, taking cover or sneaking about the place - but that’s not to say you won’t be able to build your character towards the hand-to-hand fisticuffs recently in vogue.

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“If Thorton can get close enough to enemies or if enemies get the jump on him, we have a variety of martial arts moves you can employ. There’s nothing as satisfying as getting close enough to a guy to have him turn around just in time to plant a jumping knee to his face,” explains Rucinski. “For the very stealthy player, the martial arts can provide the most silent way to dispose of enemies.”

Mixing your own skill with increasing RPG capabilities (weapons, hacking, electronics, traps, stealth or whatever) will gradually move further and further into comic-book heroism - but that isn’t to say the game ignores realism. “Realism is important to Alpha Protocol. We’ve tried to create situations and themes from actual news items and hypothetical scenarios,” says Rucinski. “Our technologies and equipment are also realistic. We made it very clear early in development that we wouldn’t have a near-indestructible bipedal robot running around shooting things. If we used a robot, it would look like what the military or SWAT would use, with wheels and treads instead of legs.” Near-future is the byword, so as to allow for more gadgets and gizmos than ever before - but again, this is a Casino Royal style of spy, not the Die Another Day “OMG invisible car and surfing on melting CG iceberg” exercise in Ian Fleming grave-turning.

In a lot of role-playing games (*cough* Oblivion *cough*), the people you meet retread the same conversations again and again - mostly accompanied by a frown or a smile depending on what armour you chose to put on that day. Not so with AP - where first impressions count. Meet someone and act all gruff with them and they won’t be all that impressed for a fair while - unless they’re a sexy woman who’s been designed to want to play rough and might like that sort of thing.

“Essentially, the player chooses a ‘stance’ for Thorton (suave, professional,
or aggressive - although the actual breakdowns branch a great deal from this) and then Thorton responds appropriately - and amusingly,” explains Rucinski, having selected his own internal suave stance. “The dialogue system is also set up so that you can’t repeatedly have the same conversation with an NPC to try to find the ‘best’ answer or all the information available. This means that if you are a jerk to a person you will get a reaction the next time you talk to them. It reinforces how important that first impression is.”

Conversations will whip along at a realistic pace, with you selecting changes in how Thorton responds to maintain the flow of real-life chatter. Gaming’s former forays into the lives of secret agents, Deus Ex aside, have only ever focused on the guns-blazing elements, and perhaps a pretty lady or two in cutscenes. Alpha Protocol wants you putting in the legwork, doing the reconnaissance, chatting up the receptionists and looking moody in fancy hotels - it knows the excitement isn’t all in the violence, but in the setup, the situation and the supporting cast. In premise and pedigree, it’s a sure-fire license to kill. Let’s hope the execution is as flawless as it needs to be.
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http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/alpha-...080422121024489075/g-20080313162151178085/p-2

für HQ Bilder:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=284599
 
Zuletzt bearbeitet:
Das Game wird ein kleiner Overkill und macht das Warten auf Uncharted 2 erheblich kürzer.
 
Ohoho, Mass Effect lässt grüßen :-P


MTV schrieb:
‘Alpha Protocol’ Will Have Plenty Of Sex Scenes, ‘Ladies’ Man’ Achievement

“Alpha Protocol“’s dialogue system doesn’t just offer a variety of ways for player-character Michael Thorton to get missions.

It can also help him pick up women. That is, if you select your responses wisely.

When I saw “Alpha Protocol” at E3 last week, senior producer Ryan Rucinski told me that there are “a lot of love interests” for Thorton to choose from. There are several factions in the game that you can ally with or fight against, so the women Thorton meets can become collaborators or enemies. As a government operative, the player can acquire missions and assistance from the ladies Thorton’s wooed. But piss them off — by dating other girls, for instance — and there’s hell to pay.

“It all depends on how you treat them,” Rucinski said. If you have a strong relationship with female characters, they may help with missions. However, he told me that some of them are “bats–t insane” and can get you into trouble. “One may ask you to assassinate a high-level person,” he added. “Maybe that’s not something you want to do, but she’s really hot. But there are obvious repercussions.”

Rucinski also hinted at the game having at least one date mission. “It’s the funniest [voice-over] we’ve ever recorded,” he said. The game has “tons of dialogue,” though he said much of the banter between Thorton his ladies was cut from the game. “A lot of the extra female dialogue took away from story,” he explained. Between 400 to 500 lines were cut, and some of the lines that didn’t make it involved the women detailing their day of shopping, for example.

“Chris Avellone doesn’t do ‘goo goo’ stuff,” Rucinski said, referring to the chief creative officer at the development studio. “Sometimes he’d be like, ‘No guy would say that!’” That included a scene of Thornton crying. Rucinski said that people around the office were like, “That sucks, he’s crying, I don’t like this guy anymore.”

So no tears for Thornton; he’s all about machismo. In fact, he can “get” all of the game’s women if he wanted to. Rucinski told me it was possible to have sex with all the females, and that the sex scenes were similar to how “Mass Effect” treated its intimate moments. But he was quick to assure me that, “It’s a mature game, it’s not [adults only].”

And although the women are integral to the story, there’s no need to interact with them beyond missions. Rucinski revealed that the game will have Achievements for being a ladies’ man as well as for being a lone bachelor.

You can try your luck with the ladies when “Alpha Protocol” hits the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in February 2009.
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Alpha Protocol preview (PC/PS3/360 WRPG by Obsidian) - Lead Designer: Chris Avellone


RPGs have done plenty of swords and sorcery. They’ve secured the future of countless dewy-eyed princesses, and they’ve even bristled with lightsabers. But what they haven’t done before is spies. Alpha Protocol wants to make you feel like 008…but first you gotta start all the way down at 001 and work your way up.

As Obsidian executive producer Chris Parker tells the story, the game’s concept was born when “we had just finished Knights of the Old Republic II and were working on Neverwinter Nights 2 — two D20 games with hardcore rules systems. As we were putting together pitches for our next game, [we wanted to make] something more action-y. We started talking ideas, and one was spies. What about letting you be Jason Bourne? You’d start out as not much of an ass-kicker, but would become one over the course of the game…while figuring out what kind of espionage agent you’d make if you had the opportunity.”

Whoever you want to be, your name is Mike Thorton, who Parker describes as a competent, well-trained field agent on his first mission. You customize how he grows as a spy, but ultimately, he’s still Thorton. We need him to be this kind of leading man,” he explains. You spy on behalf of Alpha Protocol, a secret branch of a U.S. government agency that handles deniable operations. When things go tragically wrong on Thorton’s first op, “you’re doubly screwed,” laughs Parker, because not only will the U.S. not acknowledge you as an asset, but your own agency appears to be thrusting knives in your back as well.

Striking out on your own, you have just enough leads to start piecing together the big picture, and while the game is certainly about getting to the bottom of that, it’s also about learning your motivations as the player. Do you want Thorton to operate out of love of country? Or be a purely good guy if the U.S. is up to no good? Or wreak vengeance and retribution on all who harmed him?

Those decisions are a main thread of Alpha’s gameplay. “A big thing we wanted to go for was reactivity and consequences for your choices,” Parker says. Every call you make — a dialogue selection, a life spared or extinguished — will pay off with both equally valuable in-game rewards and changes to future missions and conversations. “We’ve all had a game culminate in a different ending,” offers assistant producer Nathan Davis. “But…we have different middles. Those can be subtle, or they can be big story points.”

Primed with that setup, we grabbed a controller and headed out on the first mission, which finds Thorton awakening in a medical bay, dazed and confused. Immediately, you choose whether to rip out your IV or leave it in. Of course, much weightier matters are often yours to decide, from the fate of major NPCs to whether you want to try to sweet-talk the ladies, you superspy you.

But at first, we blasted through a horde of guards in what turned out to be a cool mini-surprise that we ain’t spoiling. Alpha Protocol felt much more like a third-person shooter than an RPG — and that’s intentional. “Our biggest concern was that when you play a low-level D&D character, you kind of suck,” Parker says. “We spent a lot of time on a rules system that allows for player skill, [while granting] a lot of advantages based on your character’s [level] over the course of the game.”

So while you will see XP earnings pop up in all the usual places, we were also able to deftly connect with headshots right from the start. And in another mission, where Obsidian bestowed a much more advanced character on us, we got to see how those skills pan out. You can level up Thorton in 10 areas — half involve combat, but there’s also stealth, hacking, gadget use, and health. Improving in each earns you special abilities that Parker freely admits “are kind of like spells. They’re well beyond what a normal human can do.”

For instance, if you focus on stealth, there’s an evasion ability that gives you an extra second to retreat back out of an enemy’s line of sight before they notice you. Or, as Davis puts it, “you can just take that time to shoot them!” With a submachine gun, though, it’s hard to not have fun hosing down a room with Bullet Storm, which grants you unlimited ammo for a brief, reckless interlude. Or you can earn a Chain Shot with a pistol, which pauses the action like Fallout 3 does with VATS so you can plan and then unleash three shots.

Thorton can also earn perks, which are little rewards “that we toss at you all the time,” explains Parker. They’re not as powerful as Fallout 3’s and are more like Achievements. If you kill a bunch of enemies with a remotely detonated mine, that slaughter might net you a +5%-damage perk for any future mining you do.

The dialogue system also lets Alpha Protocol’s RPG flag fly. Cinematic in a way that recalls Mass Effect faster than Wrex can drop a grumpy one-liner, conversations present you with three options: professional, threatening, or suave. And there’s a timer running, so you’ve got to act fast. “We felt it was important for the genre of espionage that you need to make split-second decisions,” Parker says. In our game time, the choices affected how NPCs responded to us more than they changed far-reaching story points, but there will of course be some biggies, and the cumulative effect of changing NPC reactions will have a big impact over the course of the game, Parker tells us.

We put down the controller liking the framework that Obsidian has constructed for this game. Alpha Protocol is in early enough form that we salute Sega’s decision to push it back from a March release to the summer. And if Obsidian can use that time to weave together a complex, entertaining spy thriller that doesn’t take itself too seriously, we’ll be eager to earn our license to kill.
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Holy Shit. Chris Avellone = God! Da werde ich wohl meine Most Wanted-Liste um einiges bearbeiten müssen.
 
Schön, schön, schön :D

Mehr West-Rpgs braucht das Land^^
 
sieht Grafisch echt mies aus, aber das Spiel gefällt mir irgendwie...
 
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