YES, FUCK YES. Please make it, the original was an absolute blast, one of the best games I've played in years and that dialogue system must not be left under a rubble of incompetent reviews. I was really devastated to see SEGA announce they won't publish another one, but if the developers are still game for it, another studio would be better for publishing it anyway!
Logan Westbrook said:
Unfortunately for Urquhart, the message from reviewers seems to be pretty clear: Alpha Protocol had broken, buggy gameplay and needed more development time. If Obsidian ever gets the opportunity to make another Alpha Protocol - and hopefully it will, because even with all the bugs, there was a lot to like about the game's RPG side -it's going to need a lot more polish than the first one received.
For the most part, the same fuckwit reviewers said absolutely nothing of Civilization V's bugs, crashes and other shit, a lot of which was non-system specific, happening to everyone, instead giving it a green light and praising every fucking feature in the game based on a hour's playthrough of some 1% of the game's content (and neglecting to mention plenty of things, like the game's utterly incompetent AI that results in 0 military challenge, among other things).
The fucking game holds over a 90 score on Metacritic, while every single user will tell you the game is worse off than most betas and still holds a full price more than 6 months later, despite the numerous patches (that managed to introduce as many bugs as they fixed), which is somewhat reflected in the fact user reviews are at some 6.5 average (with most of those giving high scores not having played the game for any longer period of time to encounter its memory leaks, late game crashes, various victory condition AI fails etc.).
Meanwhile, I played personally through Alpha Protocol 2-3 times and managed to find a grand total of 0 bugs and the game never crashed for me. The boss fights were occasionally stupid and out of place (but never really too difficult, even with me playing on Hard), the minigames difficulty curve went a little crazy near the end of the game (although easily worked around with EMP bombs, one might say that's even acceptable within the game's RPG elements) and the RPG features could have used a bit more balancing.
With everything else done right in the game, story, dialogue, pretty fun combat and stealth, it more than makes up for it's shortcomings, especially considering how utterly brilliant, innovative and fun the dialogue system is. Compared to it's main "competitor", Splinter Cell: Conviction, the game was much more innovative, awesome and fun. Despite that game being a shitty console port with awful controls and a buttload of bugs, issues, awful design choices etc., that piece of crap holds 83 on Metacritic (with the user score once again rating the game 'right', giving it a lowly 3.4).
Bottom line, I hope they don't take too much of the "professional" reviewers bullshit. Yes, the game needed some more polish, yes, it needed some more work, but for what it was, a non-sequel, a first spy RPG and for what it did with the dialogue system alone, it was just fine. Mass Effect was similarly shitty with certain systems (I'd say it was far worse actually) and was hailed one of the greatest games of all time and ME2 rightly fixed a lot of the issues. I've got a feeling Alpha Protocol would've done the same, if it wasn't for the blooody reviewers.
