Alpha Protocol dev agrees with bad review scores
Words by: Jeff Barker | Posted on: Tuesday 1st June, 2010 | Filed under: News.
A developer who worked on Alpha Protocol (or someone claiming to be a developer who worked on Alpha Protocol) has delivered a slamming comment about the game and it’s development cycle on another website’s review of the title.
The developer – who only reveals their name as ‘a tired dev‘ – generally agrees with the less than favourable review scores, slags off the Executive Producer and moans about Sega, the game’s publishers.
“I worked on this game (a fact of which I am not proud). I’m not here to defend it; I agree with all these reviews.
There was a ton of work put into this game. The problem is that is 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…“
Keep your eyes peeled for our verdict on Alpha Protocol, coming soon.
About Jeff Barker
Jeff has been with the Xboxer360 team since April 2009. He is well known for his love of sandals and frequently exhibits Rainman-like behaviour, which is even more amazing now he's a Dad. He prefers third person action/adventure titles and RPG's, but will happily turn his hand to pretty much anything.
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