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Imagine a glitzy cinematic sequence where you, as a secret agent, fight your way through an aeroplane soaring through the sky. You're pressing button prompts appearing on the screen while your hero whacks, chops, spins and kicks at the baddie in your way. "You fight all the way down until eventually you beat the guy and rip off his parachute and, I don't know, break his neck, and he floats off and you use his parachute to land." Sounds great, like a James Bond or Jack Bauer or Jason Bourne scene, or something from Uncharted 3, which hadn't been made yet. But this is Obsidian Entertainment talking, and the scene in question was from 10 years ago, before Pillars of Eternity, before South Park: The Stick of Truth, before Fallout: New Vegas. The scene was from Alpha Protocol, a spy game, Obsidian's own idea, and secretly one of its best. I'm in a room now, at Obsidian, with pictures of characters from Alpha Protocol framed on the walls around me, talking to Chris Parker, one of Obsidian's owners (and game director of Alpha Protocol) as well as a handful of other people from the Alpha Protocol team.
The scene Chris Parker is describing took a year and a half to make and cost something like $500,000. "This took an unbelievable amount of resources to build," he says. There was no way Obsidian could keep it up across a 20-hour game, or even across three hours, the team jokes. Nor did they want to. The sequence represented everything wrong with Alpha Protocol at the time. "It was kind of cool and it was kind of neat but it was way, way outside what our core gameplay was supposed to be. The fundamental RPG experience had gotten lost underneath a whole bunch of other stuff that seemed neat."
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