Alpha Protocol
Ever watched a James Bond flick and wanted to be a spy? Well Alpha Protocol allowed you to do just that. You could set yourself up exactly as you wanted and take on missions with your own personally crafted spy guy. This was done through the use of Advancement Points (awful naming) which were put into any of the main character Thornton’s ten skills. These would improve things like weapon damage, even opening up the opportunity to use special skills like the Chain Shot which allowed Thornton to pick up a bunch of enemies and automatically shoot them quicker than usual.
Where Alpha Protocol really made itself shine, and as a result is one of the tragic flops you’ll find here, was in its dialogue system. Now we all know that having three different options for speech is nothing new. Games like Mass Effect have offered up a gaggle of options for use in conversation since their inception. The same can also be said for the different attitudes used within them. Where Alpha Protocol differed itself from contemporaries was in the way it had inter-character conversations running in real time.
This did also occur in other titles, but the idea of it was used much more often in Alpha Protocol. It gave every conversation a sense of urgency and ensured that the player was constantly engaged in the dialogue rather than just speedily reading what went on. If you didn’t reply to an NPC in the allotted time, you were penalized in some way or lost the chance to get something out of the conversation entirely. It made Alpha Protocol something special. A unique selling point that really should have helped the game sell achieve success.
And yet it didn’t. Whether the reason was a low advertisement budget from SEGA or the fact it came out at the end of May among a bunch of other games that didn’t sell well (including one further down this list), Alpha Protocol simply didn’t sell well enough for SEGA to keep the franchise going. They ditched a game that was different from almost everything else out there. Admittedly Alpha Protocol didn’t exactly take the critics by storm, but it did garner some higher ratings than other success stories. The game does still sell, with developers Obsidian Entertainment stating that they’d consider doing a sequel for the game.
