Alpha Protocol Interviews
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IGN AU: This is an enormous and broad game; what kind of percentage of the game do you think the typical gamer will experience on the first run through?
Matt Hickman: It's hard to say what a typical gamer might experience on the first play through. All of us probably know a variety of different gamers, from the hard-core completionists, who simply must do everything the game has to offer, to players who simply want to run through the main story as fast as possible.
That being said, gamers won't be able to see everything that Alpha Protocol has to offer on the first run through. Due to the nature of cause and effect that permeates every facet of the game there are situations, characters, and outcomes that simply can't be accessed all on one play through. A player may not have the option to play certain missions, because of certain choices, and in some cases may not even meet significant characters within the game. That being said I don't want imply you'll have a feeling of missing out on something, the reaction we usually see is more of an eagerness to see how the story could have unfolded differently.
And then Rock, Paper, Shotgun shares their own Q&A with Mr. Hickman:
RPS: There appears to be a movement away the binary (good or bad) nature of RPG choices in the last couple of years. Both you and BioWare are looking to create more nuanced, more ambiguous morality. What has driven this change, and what do you think is both gained and lost by moving in this direction?
MH: We looked at the story we wanted to tell and frankly it makes the character and the plot easier to identify with and his world easier to recognize if his decisions and the consequences of those decisions aren't all yes or no, good or bad. Especially considering the setting of Alpha Protocol, it just doesn't make sense to have rigid choices, or meters that gauge Thorton's alignment between good and evil. Sure, Alpha Protocol is based in the spy genre, and has certain trappings because of that, but because the game is based basically in the modern day, we wanted to reflect the ambiguity real world decisions. There are very rarely clear-cut good and bad decisions in real life, and as a modern day RPG, we wanted to reflect that.
