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Alpha Protocol was supposed to be this great title, and in many respects it was. It did fail in many areas though, and just before the game was released, one of the developers came clean, telling all gamers to steer away from the half-baked game.

Obsidian now wants another chance, but before you say yes or no to the studio’s plea, listen to what happened last year.

“There was a ton of work put into this game.” said a person who’s they worked on the game. “The problem is that it 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.”

He closed by saying, “Sega should have canceled AP instead of Aliens.” This happened back in May of last year.

Here’s Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart saying he’d happily make Alpha Protocol 2:

“I think there were things in the game we could have done better,” he told Play Magazine (via NowGamer). “We’ve talked about how the cover system wasn’t the best. Would it have been better with no cover system, so we could focus on other things instead? There were certain things we did really well – the whole story, the characters, the branching.”

Perhaps it was not necessarily the job we did but there was something beyond the game – how it was represented or how it was sold or what people felt we promised them. Something went off-kilter there. So there’s another lesson to learn about communication.

We’re not making Alpha Protocol 2 but I would make Alpha Protocol 2. To do a job like this, sometimes you have to be optimistic, you have to look to the future and say ‘We can do better.’ And I always believe that.”

The developer is now working on Dungeon Siege III, and has recently released the “Honest Hearts” DLC for Fallout: New Vegas.