T w e n t y S i d e d

This week’s column should please the Obsidian apologists who have protested my comments on the game so far. Let’s go over a few:

You keep saying the game is buggy, but *I* never had any problems with it.

Tragically, it is not possible for you to share your flawless experience with me. And I have to review the game as I experience it, not as other people tell me they experienced it.

The game would have been fine if Obsidian had more time to finish it properly.

True, I suppose. But alas we are obliged to play the game they released, not the game they had written on their drawing board.

And in any case, isn’t this always so? Just about any game could be improved by giving it more time. I don’t know why Obsidian keeps getting this free pass. Just how much lenience can we give them based on their good intentions? At some point shouldn’t they resolve to implement a good idea they can do as opposed to a great one they can’t?

I realize that dedicated RPG developers – by which I mean roleplaying game developers and not these impostors – are few and far between. Our genre has been whittled down to a handful to titles, and maybe my demands come off like a man beating one of the last pandas in the world because it crapped on his shoes. There is probably some truth to that, but damn if I’m not sick of all this panda crap on my shoes.

If the PC version sucks, why did you get it? Play it on a console!

I played it on the PC because… they released it on the PC? I think insisting that the game work is a reasonable position for a consumer to take. I will hold this course until developers start debugging their software or they abandon the platform.

(If you do have it on the PC, this user-made fix will correct the most annoying problem with the game. My enjoyment of the game increased greatly once I followed those instructions.)

It’s not fair for you to pick on all these little flaws when the game is so great!

My comic is many things, but fairness has never been part of my comedic mandate. My usual defense is: I’ve said worse about better games. Which is true. I’ve made fun of games that I loved. I’m not trying to inform a purchasing decision. In fact, my comics are usually aimed at people who already own the game in question. Sometimes the jokes stand on their own, but in most cases you’ll get more out of them if you are already familiar with the truth I’m using as the fulcrum of the joke.

Well okay. But I still like the game.

Me too. Having said all this, I think Alpha Protocol is the best Obsidian game to date. (Excepting the NWN2 expansions, which I have not played.) This isn’t a broken, unfinished mess like KOTOR 2. This is a good game with a couple of unfortunate flaws. The boss fights are lame and unsatisfying battles against repetitive one-note bullet sponges, and they’re either murderously hard or piss easy depending on the character build you’re using. There are lots of little bugs and several balance issues. But beyond that the game is solid. Not just solid, but innovative. Like I said in my column, this “consequences” business is dynamite and you really have to try it to appreciate how different the game feels when you have to worry about the future. It’s a stern rebuke to a lot of the shenanigans that Bethesda and BioWare have been using in recent years.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The plot of Alpha Protocol is hard to understand.

I finished the game last night. I haven’t figured out if the ending worked or not. The plot might be a Mass Effect 2 pile of holes and unexplained actions, but I can’t nail it down because I couldn’t follow it. I suppose that’s one way to avoid having to write an airtight story. There were several people that I wanted to confront, only to have them vanish from the gameworld. But were these plot threads left hanging KOTOR 2 – style, or could I have met up with them if I’d made a few different choices?

I guess I’ll find out. I started a new game. Now that I know the secret of stealth characters (use the magic pistol power) I’m going to try and play as a proper spy instead of shotgunning my way through the game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Amdir was stabbed by a morgul blade and is being tormented by the Dark Lord himself, having his mind torn apart by the Lord of the Ring. That sounds bad, but I still think he’s probably better off than Lulzy.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I forgot to link this on Tuesday.

I’m picking apart all the little flaws of Alpha Protocol, but there’s really only one that’s really daunting me: Instead of having long loading screens, the game loads levels a few rooms at a time and brings in more as you progress. You’ll hit a trigger in the middle of hallway and the game will cache the room you’re about to enter and unload the room you were just in.

The problem is that this mini-load takes about a quarter second, and the input logic doesn’t account for it. If you’re moving the camera slightly (which is very likely if you’re using the mouse) then it will take that movement and repeat it over the entire quarter-second lurch. The upshot is that you’ll end up spun around in a single frame. If you’re still holding down the forward key, then you’re likely to blunder into the trigger again going the other way, which will cause it to dump the room it just loaded and load the room it just dumped, and also toss you through another quarter-second lurch where your camera ends up aimed someplace random.

This can happen in the middle of combat. I can’t properly express how much rage I feel when I line up my shot on some dude’s noggin and suddenly I’m facing the other way and staring at the floor and desperately looking for cover so I can get my bearings again before I get shot to death.

This bug is infuriating because it’s so pervasive and so easily fixed. Assuming I’m right about the cause, then this is a simple input bug that is 100% reproducible on the PC. (I know I’ve seen other people complaining about it as well.)

A more esoteric bug is the one I ran into last night, which I suspect is related to the same room-caching system. I ran into a huge ballroom but then decided to double-back and check some other corridors before proceeding through. I hit another lurch in the process, and then returned to the ballroom to find it was gone:

All of the room geometry was missing. There were dudes and furniture floating in thin air. I figured I’d try to just dash through the room to the next and hope the problem would sort itself out at the next lurch. Even though I couldn’t see it any more, the staircase was solid enough and I remembered where it was. And I could see the door on the far side.

But while the staircase was solid, the floor was not. I got to the bottom of the steps and fell out of the level entirely, skydiving (in a standing position) out of the level and into the abyss. Had to re-load the game.

Contrary to previous Obsidian games, the plot keeps getting better as I go. And there are a lot less bugs than in either KOTOR 2 or NWN 2. But there are bugs, and they are an annoying killjoy.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.