They called it an ”absolutely terrible” execution from Obsidian, with a lot of blame on executive producer Chris Parker for ”sh*tty systems”.
Oh dear, if this is indeed from an actual developer then it’s super bad news for Obsidian Entertainment. They posted this rant over on Joystiq under the alias ‘a tired dev’. They detail apparently what went horribly wrong and why they agree with the criticisms.
”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,” they said.
”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.”
The blame itself doesn’t solely lie with Obsidian though as publisher Sega kept on interfering as well says this ‘tired dev’…
”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,” they explained.
”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.”
The AI of enemies and the general combat itself has been the greatest point of criticism for Alpha Protocol, as some bad guys just face walls or laughably decide to punch you on the nose despite holding an assault rifle in their hands.
”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.” Fallout: New Vegas is due out this year’s end.
”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.” And now to the final nail in the coffin - ”Sega should have canceled AP instead of Aliens…”
Either this is one ticked off Obsidian developer or someone with enough time to orchestrate one heck of a rant piece to troll the Internet with. In any event some fans are likely to be left shaken as to the fate of Fallout: New Vegas.
Have you played Alpha Protocol, videogamer? Is it an ”absolute failure” to you? It released on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC this week in the US, and last week in Europe.