Not sure on the History of Alpha Protocol or what engine they use, but Fallout 3 was a complete game. While it had some flaws, most critcisms are aimed at how a game feature was implemented, not that it was broken overall. So, Obsidian has a stable product to develop a game from, and that bodes well for the New Vegas. Most flaws in Fallout 3 can be fixed within the Engine, as in not having to overhaul the platform.

If they were using a whole new engine/graphics/animations/scripting language than I would have less optimism. It could very well be that AP was developed on an Engine that is just not able to handle the game mechanics as specified. So, they have to come up with all these work arounds to get by the scripting limitations, this causes a buggy game. At least we know the Fallout world works on the engine that Bethesda used and that Obsidian is using for New Vegas.

Fallout n:v is most likely being made by a completely different team of people than Alpha P. Just as in all companies ,,,different teams work on different projects. It's also a Sega/Obsidian game.. not a Bethesda/Obsidian game.
different companies overseeing the production of the game.

Personally I think that AP is an enjoyable game which requires at least a modicum of patience.

With regards to the previous comment about shooting someone four times with a shotgun, it may be that the opponent was wearing body armour, also with aiming you need to take the time to settle into a better/critical hit as while AP's has 'shooting' elements it isn't an all out shooter.

I've not encountered any major bugs other than one freeze which could have been due to a combination of external factors.


Basically what I'm at least trying to say is what the so called proffessional ? magazine reviewers thought of AP, I'm personally finding it to be quite enjoyable and thus am not too worried about how New Vegas will turn out as a consequence.

oh man, i just read review from gamespot and destructroid, and i gotta say im worried.

Beth should have done it by themselves...this obsidian folks dont seem to be reliable at all.

I'm worried a bit but I think NV will turn out great for these reasons

1 it's using Fallout 3 as a base
2 the NV vegas team probably isn't the same who worked on alpha protocol
3 fallout is a well loved franchise as well as the baby of some of the people at obsidian, they wouldn't want to screw it up

also a good chunk of reviews are positive but it's mostly average reviews which isn't bad.

Eh...neither is Bethesda if you're talking about bugs and content consistency. Oblivion was an exercise in tedium (IMHO) and many people complained about game-breaking bugs in Fallout 3.

To be honest, I probably wouldn't be terribly excited about NV if Bethesda was doing it. They did a good job, but between their annoyingly contrived RPG mechanics and overall milquetoast content design style (with some notable exceptions in Fallout 3 that were actually quite good), I'm ready to see someone else take a stab at creating the content. If that means a couple of extra bugs come along for the ride (which I doubt since the only bugs I encountered in Fallout 3 were content/scripting bugs) I'm willing to take them in trade.

Besides, the more I look around the more positive reviews of Alpha Protocol I find. I'll reserve judgment until I play it...I don't always agree with reviewers...even the ones from high-profile sites like Gamespot.

Poor production values, sloppy construction, unfinished parts, horrible AI, and tons of glitches sounds nothing like Fallout 3, right?

Oh, wait.

A lot of the things that AP was panned for apply just as much to Fallout 3. Example - lack of polish. Yesterday in FO3, I was standing on a hill with a minigun, shooting at a deathclaw. My foot clipped into the ground. While aiming a rifle, the stock clipped into my power armor's shoulder plate. The characters had magic X-Ray vision and could see through my power armor to know who I am, especially frustrating in Trouble on the Homefront.

There's also other polish issues that rear their ugly head, like the zeta "Chase's Overcoat/Winterized CA" bug. Or how about how the 1.1 patch outright broke quadcore support for PCs, causing quadcore users to experience numerous crashes unless they manually tell the game to stick to two cores via .ini edit?

The "shooting mechanics svck" criticism applies to FO3 too. Seriously, having played Crysis and Call of Duty 4 recently, going back to FO3 was very painful in terms of lost mechanics. I kept fumbling for a grenade hotkey, or the ability to go to iron sights which actually increase effective accuracy, like most other games. Fortunately, mods can give me these things, albeit in a less than polished way themselves. It was also massively irritating how nearly unclothed raiders could take repeated headshots. And how the best I could get out of them in terms of response is to stagger occasionally. My bullets don't feel like they have much impact.

Heck, even the "minigames are terrible" can be applied to FO3; I for one found the hacking minigame to be particularly onerous, with the lockpick minigame only inching into the "acceptable" range.

Really, the difference between FO3 and AP is that FO3 had a massive PR blitz and AP didn't. In most other respects, they suffer from very similar problems. And, everyone who's actually played the game has commented on how the story is very interesting and incredibly reactive to the player's actions. You don't have "lawl, I'll be the head of the fighter's guild, and the dark brotherhood even though the two groups are opposed to one another!"

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed FO3, particularly with mods, but a statement like "Beth should have done New Vegas themselves, Obsidian don't seem reliable" is really amusing to me, because Beth has many of the same issues that Obsidian does, without the benefit of highly competent and witty writers. Granted they're very good at making simple and addictive gameplay and crafting a big world that appears fascinating at first glance, but the gameplay mechanics are mostly already done for Obsidian, and the creating a big world can draw on Van Buren... And will likely end up being far more distinct and dynamic than FO3. Compare slaver groups. FO3's slavers were totally generic. There's absolutely nothing that separates them from any other random combat armor using group in terms of style or flair. Caesar's Legion, meanwhile, has the whole Roman motif going on. You can claim it's cliche, but at least it isn't generic.



Wow. You summed up my entire post in three lines.

Seriously every Rpg has at least one of those problems. Torment had tons of glitches, and quite a few obvious unfinished parts. Even after the devs and more so the moders went to work on it. It is still my favourite game one I dearly hope where the setting gets resurected.
So yes this game is bound to be glitchy to some extent but as long as it feels right to me I can put up with crashes and so on.

I think they reason reviewers didn't bring up the shooting svcks issue in fallout 3 was because of V.A.T.S.

V.A.T.S. is such an entertaining game mechanic that distracts from the normal shooting.

Destructoid be trollin'. That's just their m.o. They pretty much have no credibility, so I'd just ignore that 2/10 score.

I don't know about how Obsidian makes their own games, but in the past when they've been brought in to work a sequel for an already good game, they haven't disappointed. The only game I remember clearly them being brought in was for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2. I think they did a pretty good job with it. The only standout was the lack of a romance for any male character. Other than that the characters were pretty good. And since FO:3 had no character development to speak of in terms of companions, Obsidian can only do better. I'm not too worried.

I dunno, it was only entertaining for me in the beginning. Once the novelty wore off, I realized it was basically an "I win" button for most fights.

I still enjoyed it even after months of using it.

Anyway since New Vegas is being shown at E3 we'll be able to see some gameplay footage and judge if the game looks good or not.

The reason, imo, that Fallout 3's bugs were not mentioned in reviews was not that it was so hyped up, or that reviewers were paid, it's because unlike Alpha Protocol, Fallout 3 was open world. Alpha Protocol had a lot of bugs, according to the reviewers, and the whole reason they saw and reported on these bugs was because as a relatively linear shooter/rpg (the environment was linear, not the game itself), it's much, much easier to notice those bugs. Alpha Protocol essentially handed reviewer's it's bugs on a silver platter, because unlike Fallout 3, it's bugs aren't spread out across a huge game world. Often I hear people complain about Fallout 3, and then admit that they only played the main quest. Well of course you didn't like the game if you only played the relatively short main quest, the whole point of the game is to explore this humongous world Bethesda made and do side quests. Fallout 3, even though it has bugs, made up for them with the amazing world you could go anywhere and do anything in. Alpha Protocol, while having lots of different choices and ways to change the story, still had a smaller, linear world to explore, and if you're confined to smaller levels, you'll notice the bugs more.

I'm not sure I agree. Many of FO3's bugs will impact you whether you play twenty minutes or twenty hours, like the quad core support bug, or the clipping with most weapons and armors.

The clipping issue really doesn't seem like a major bug, a lot of games have clipping issues and it's only a visual glitch.

Fallout 3 really isn't as unstable as people seem to think. It only ever crashes for me on the PC if I alt-tab out of it at a bad time. If never freezes for me either. On the 360, I only got freezing issues if I had too many saves, with increased load times way too much and caused freezing. I've often had clipping issues with weapons or armor but not one has ever stopped me from playing the game. The AI can be really bad sometimes but again, that didn't stop me from playing it. Shooting may be bad but I got used to it. I've never, ever run into a bug that stopped me from playing, and if it crashed, all I needed to do was to start it up again. :shrug:

And keep in mind I played very often for 8 months straight, with few other games in between. That's how addicted I was to it. Personally I thought it was a masterpiece, albeit buggy, and I can feel the members of a certain website groaning loudly after reading that, but it's how I feel.

Tell that to the people complaining about the texture pop-in in Alpha Protocol. I've only noticed it during a menu so far, but I can't comment about the rest of the game (not very far in, just got it today).

And anyone who says that hype doesn't affect review scores is... entitled to their opinion. You thought I was going to say something bad, didn't you? I'm not worried about NV. Bethesda's got the money to put up ads on gaming sites that make money off of them. Also high/low review sorces != good/bad game

How DARE you not insult me

But I didn't say hype had absolutely no effect, I just don't think it was anywhere near the only reason. Alpha Protocol was a fairly well known game from what I've gathered, and surprisingly that delay Sega did on the very day it was supposed to be released got it even more attention. It's not like this was an unknown game.

And...

Reviews = attention > hype.

Hype + game = sells

I don't want to hurt anyone, I just want to reaffirm their faith in our Lord and Savior Todd Howard Fallout: New Vegas.

So far neither game is truly great, in my opinion. I really think that if they slightly tweak most parts of Fallout 3, and drastically change a few, New Vegas could be a very good game.

When there's a truckload of clipping issues it starts to drag the whole work down by making it seem shoddy and unpolished.



I'm happy for you, truly. I'm one of those people who encountered over nine thousand crashes. Vanilla worked pretty decently out of the box, then I upgraded to 1.1 and it's been a litany of crashes ever since, though it started to quiet down once I manually disallowed my other two cores and installed some mods to optimize scripts and increase performance.

I really don't understand how they justify first breaking 2+ core, and 2gb+ ram support, and then not fixing it. I don't know how complicated the multicore issue is, but from what I hear, the ram issue is as easy as changing one entry in a text file.

I only have a single core cpu, and 2gb, so neither issue applies to me.

http://kotaku.com/5550769/alpha-protocol-review-the-choice-is-yours?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kotaku%2Ffull+%28Kotaku%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

At least it didn't focus on the bugs as much as the other review did. :shrug: