Lord Azlan is angry about Alpha Protocol

[Jools]

I even enjoyed Oblivion better than the Gothics?

Ban Bumvelcrow.

 

[Gozma]

Why does alpha protocol feel so wretched? No matter how much I mess with mouse sensitivity and so on it feels like shit

Thanks to SA I know you should make the following ini changes:

Backup your APEngine.ini (Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config), try changing the following settings

code:
MinSmoothedFrameRate=20
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=30
OneFrameThreadLag=false
UseBackgroundLevelStreaming=false
OnlyStreamInTextures=true

Fixing walking/crouching animations
In APGame.ini (Documents\Alpha Protocol\APGame\Config), try changing the following settings

code:
InteractDistance=250
CoverWalkSpeed=75.f
CoverRunSpeed=125.f
PlayerRotationSpeed=800000.0f
MoveSpeedNormal=240
MoveSpeedScoped=80
SprintSpeed=320

And after you do that you should probably make it read only (of course this means you can't make any other changes in the option menu).

Now it feels like shit and it's 30fps

The main menu music is so obnoxious that I thought it must have been some kind of sound bug, so googled for a bit and couldn't find anything then finally checked the soundtrack on Youtube

Obs gonna make me work for this one

 

[Metro]

That, and Gothic is one of those few true zeroes-to-bad ass motherfuckers games. As in, the combat being clunky is largely a result of your character being a loser. It gets better once your character gets proficient at his weapon of choice.

I might give it another go, then, and learn to accept I can be sliced in two by a blind chicken early in the game.

Man up, Hero of Kvatch.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Jokes aside, the first two Gothic games have an absolutely amazing melee combat system when you consider RPG action combat standards, but it takes a little time to understand and get used to, especially since there is no tutorial or anything, if I remember correctly.

The key is to go the melee route. You can try archery as a back-up skill for hunting or what not, but archery and magic aren't very good in Gothic games, although not necessarily worse than most other shitty RPG combat systems. Then, as already mentioned, you have to have patience, and level up your weapon skills a bit. This does 2 major things, it significantly increases your damage and also makes your weapon movements much more fluid and less awkward.

Then you also have to understand how to use the combat system. There are combination attacks you can use, which look beautiful, but they are mostly only useful against non-humanoids, because any humanoid will just parry it and hit you, interrupting the combination. Even against animals, it's pretty difficult to pull off an entire combo.

So the primary method of combat against humanoids (humans, orcs, skeletons, etc) is to parry their attacks with your weapon and then quickly counter-attack them right after that. By chaining these (parry-attack, parry-attack, etc) you can take down pretty much anyone without taking much or any damage yourself, and also this just feels great and very close to movie sword scenes. The hard part is you have to time the parry very precisely because it must match the attack to the split second in order to be successful, and also different enemies have different attack patterns, so if they attack twice in a row, you have to parry twice before counter-attacking yourself. Once you master these things, there is a great sense of satisfaction in taking down a powerful enemy.

 

[J1M]

Alpha Protocol is a 5/10
It's an EXCELLENT RPG
But a SHITTY action game
It's bearable if you don't pick Assault Rifles and try to play it stealthy (by abusing the shit out of the cloak skill), or being a kung fu badass
I replayed it 4 times just to be full Aggressive, Professional, Suave, and mixed in each seperate walkthrough. To me the characterization and writing was good enough to replay this crap 4 times, but I can't say the same for anyone else.

This is a fair assessment. The combat/action part is truly dire most of the time.

Play it without using weapons. That is how I did things when I played it. Coming up with ways to defeat bosses with fisticuffs was an interesting challenge. It is possible to completely possible avoid gun combat in alpha protocol. (Using a rocket launcher to trigger a cutscene doesn't count.)

Additionally, some of the abilities in the game work together to create a stealth game with far less save scumming than other games in the stealth genre.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Alpha Protocol is a 5/10
It's an EXCELLENT RPG
But a SHITTY action game
It's bearable if you don't pick Assault Rifles and try to play it stealthy (by abusing the shit out of the cloak skill), or being a kung fu badass
I replayed it 4 times just to be full Aggressive, Professional, Suave, and mixed in each seperate walkthrough. To me the characterization and writing was good enough to replay this crap 4 times, but I can't say the same for anyone else.

This is a fair assessment. The combat/action part is truly dire most of the time.

Play it without using weapons. That is how I did things when I played it. Coming up with ways to defeat bosses with fisticuffs was an interesting challenge. It is possible to completely possible avoid gun combat in alpha protocol. (Using a rocket launcher to trigger a cutscene doesn't count.)

Additionally, some of the abilities in the game work together to create a stealth game with far less save scumming than other games in the stealth genre.

Fisticuffs is actually a very easy way to beat the game.

 

[Infinitron]

Fun fact: Unarmed combat in Alpha Protocol was designed by Josh Sawyer.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Funner fact: It's OP as fuck.

 

[Roguey]

Funner fact: It's OP as fuck.

I disagree, it's the power level I'd expect it to be and I've seen many complaints about how you have to have it near maxed-out to successfully win against bosses (meaning you have to skip around and leave hubs unfinished before coming back to them). Stealth and pistols are the the things that get absurd.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Lol I beat marburg in melee. All it took was having a shotgun interrupt skill, which is not very high up in that tier.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I always find it amusing when people bring up Wizardry 1 as "that unplayable old game," when in fact it's actually one of the most playable 80s games, gameplay-, balance- and interface-wise (unless you mind wireframe dungeons that much, in which case you can play the SNES version). Hence also the proliferation of Wizardry clones in Japan, which have pretty much exactly the same gameplay as Wizardry 1, tho' sometimes with a few additional bells and whistles..

Any idea of this is legit? http://www.oldgames.sk/en/game/wizardry-i-ii-iii-story-of-llylgamyn/download/5708/

Yes, it's legit, and the SNES versions of Wiz 1-3 are pretty good; there's even some quality ambient music, and the sprites are great. Recommended.

 

[Roguey]

Lol I beat marburg in melee. All it took was having a shotgun interrupt skill

So you're saying you needed to use a gun to beat him.

I never used those two in conjunction but I do remember that using the shotgun knockdown against bosses results in an immediate Looney Tunes-esque spring up since they didn't make any getting-up animations for them and any extended stay on the ground would make things too easy (though that didn't stop chainshot and the like).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Lol I beat marburg in melee. All it took was having a shotgun interrupt skill

So you're saying you needed to use a gun to beat him.

I never used those two in conjunction but I do remember that using the shotgun knockdown against bosses results in an immediate Looney Tunes-esque spring up since they didn't make any getting-up animations for them and any extended stay on the ground would make things too easy (though that didn't stop chainshot and the like).

No, I'm saying I took a shotgun to his face because I wanted to.

 

[J1M]

Funner fact: It's OP as fuck.

I disagree, it's the power level I'd expect it to be and I've seen many complaints about how you have to have it near maxed-out to successfully win against bosses (meaning you have to skip around and leave hubs unfinished before coming back to them). Stealth and pistols are the the things that get absurd.

That was definitely not required. I did the whole game as stealth + melee and I never had to abandon a mission/hub.

What I like about stealth in Alpha Protocol are the systems/skills that allow a player to make a small mistake and recover without reloading.

 

[Cadmus]

Funner fact: It's OP as fuck.

I disagree, it's the power level I'd expect it to be and I've seen many complaints about how you have to have it near maxed-out to successfully win against bosses (meaning you have to skip around and leave hubs unfinished before coming back to them). Stealth and pistols are the the things that get absurd.

That was definitely not required. I did the whole game as stealth + melee and I never had to abandon a mission/hub.

What I like about stealth in Alpha Protocol are the systems/skills that allow a player to make a small mistake and recover without reloading.

There's no stealth in AP, you get an invisibility spell and an auto-invisibility skill, it's fucking shit.
Those system that allow you to make a small mistake are totally amazing, like hacking a NSA-level lock on a wooden crate and triggering a level-wide alarm on failure. Great stuff.

 

[Rahdulan]

The key is to go the melee route. You can try archery as a back-up skill for hunting or what not, but archery and magic aren't very good in Gothic games, although not necessarily worse than most other shitty RPG combat systems. Then, as already mentioned, you have to have patience, and level up your weapon skills a bit. This does 2 major things, it significantly increases your damage and also makes your weapon movements much more fluid and less awkward.

I honestly wouldn't say archery and magic are bad, but they're clearly not designed to be primary modes of combat compared to melee which is your bread and butter. Magic is probably a more worthwhile pursuit considering you'll be wrecking everything left and right with later more powerful spells, it's just a matter of surviving until then. Really, trick to Gothic combat is to force a 1v1 situation where you can outmaneuver the AI.

I really need to replay Gothic games to freshen up a bit.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Wasn't archery pretty overpowered and later-game easy mode in Gothics?

 

[Jools]

Wasn't archery pretty overpowered and later-game easy mode in Gothics?

I never really went for archery, but everything is OP and "easy mode", in late-game Gothics (and in late-game most games, as a matter of fact).

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Melee is still a struggle on Gothics, if only because hordes of enemies. One-on-one it's still easy.

 

[Gozma]

Why does AP feel so annoying at the start of the game? I feel like that's actually most of why it failed commercially, because it just feels like a blank wall of annoyance for the first part of the game

Several things:

1) It's a stealthish game with no quicksave. This is good in a lot of ways, but it's super fucking annoying in the beginning where all your assumptions about stealth gameplay (e.g. like there is some non-obvious reason not to trigger alarms) are still there, plus you can't do stuff like quicksave to mess with a minigame until you get it, combined with...

2) ...the fact that the minigames start off as hard as they will ever get in the tutorial/first part of the game (since you will shortly get much better at them and can cheaply unlock a perk to make them easier) when you have no idea what's going on with them yet. On PC this is especially bad because the controls are a complete hack that has zero connection to mouse and keyboard conventions. I think the minigames are actually fairly good as those things go, even on PC, considered on a whole-game basis.

3) Typical RPG declining difficulty curve, where the first part of the game is as hard as it will ever be because of your power uppah.

Once it gets rolling my problems with it shifted to the story and setting more than the gameplay.

 

[Roguey]

That was definitely not required. I did the whole game as stealth + melee and I never had to abandon a mission/hub.

Hm, did you go Taiwan->Russia->Rome? IME that would be the path of least resistance. Deng is the easiest to beat in melee, and Marburg would be the hardest.

That just doesn't apply to melee, that feels like the intended path in general, considering how you meet redhaired reporter on a plane in the cutscene prior to making your hub choice (and you meet her in Taiwan) and the final level of Rome definitely feels like the climax of the story.

 

[Gozma]

Rome -> Taipei -> Moscow is the "escalating levels of silliness" path. You start off with Marburg and a PMC and end up with Sam Fishers with nerd voices running around with SIE and Brayko. Ending should be in a space station with Richard Kiel.

 

[J1M]

That was definitely not required. I did the whole game as stealth + melee and I never had to abandon a mission/hub.

Hm, did you go Taiwan->Russia->Rome? IME that would be the path of least resistance. Deng is the easiest to beat in melee, and Marburg would be the hardest.

That just doesn't apply to melee, that feels like the intended path in general, considering how you meet redhaired reporter on a plane in the cutscene prior to making your hub choice (and you meet her in Taiwan) and the final level of Rome definitely feels like the climax of the story.

Sorry, I only played it once and my hub order was determined by whichever blurb sounded the most interesting. I'm not a weeaboo, so based on those cities I probably did Rome->Russia->Taiwan.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

For those who need help with Alpha Protocol, I have found this helpful guide a Codex poster named 1eyedking created years ago:

Spoiler

===========================v1.337=============================
= 1eyedking's Fantastic ALPHA POPA- PROTOCOLS Strategy Guide =
===========================v1.337=============================

"Trustus Obsidianus"

IN OBISIDIAN
WE TRUST

==============================================================

Release Date: 14/06/2010
Version: Last.

Contents:
[001] 1. Introduction
[002] 2. Strategy: How to pop moles like a bro
[003] 3. Walkthrough
[004] 4. Credits & thanks
[005] 5. Legal stuff

Note: Use your search function in your browser/notepad to eas-
ily find the chapters in this guide without the need for endl-
ess scrolling.

==============================================================
[001] 1. Introduction


Welcome to my first guide! English is my first language so ex-
pect a lot of "could of been", "it's bether then this", "its
great!". If you have zero tolerance for that kind of ortograp-
hy, I urge you to stop reading and go to some of the other gu-
ides.

So, without further ado, the guide!

==============================================================
[002] 2. Strategy: How to pop moles like a bro

Pick Recruit. Pick all recruit lines to cancel 1/3 of the "pe-
nalties" of that clas- background: you'll get 10 AP points for
free! If you pick any other flavor, even better so you'll have
plus 20 AP for further mole-popping goodness. You won't be ab-
le to unlock Veteran, however: thats not very broish of you.

* Spend your points as following:

Pistols [15]
Tech Aptitude [15]
Toughness [15]
Sabotage [2] (only if you're new into the whole poppin' busin-
ess)

The rest wherever you want, it doesn't matter. Remember to pi-
ck Operative as you specialize and pick those three skills.

* Strategy:

Chain Shot > Brilliance > Chain Shot

When waiting for the appropiate cooldowns, hide behind cover
and either wait for cooldowns to end or pop the moles from co-
ver with your pistol without exposing yourself: you can still
aim while invulnerable in cover if you move the center of the
screen towards an enemy. The crosshair will pop up and all you
need to do is fire since Michael Thorton has an overdeveloped
sense of popamoling (probably the drugs that they put in you
during the beginning of the game).

==============================================================
[003] 3. Walkthrough

Follow these steps to complete the game:

1. Follow compass.
2. Kill everyone in your path as you go.
3. Tap Use key furiously when near objective.

If a dialogue screen pops up, don't worry: pick any option or
alternatively tap all keys furiously and you're good to go.

==============================================================
[004] 4. Credits & thanks

Me for writing it.
Obsidian for making my work on a guide easier.
You for reading it.

==============================================================
[005] 5. Legal stuff

(C) Copyright 2010 1eyedking Enterprises, RPG Kodex

Sega, Obsidian & Alpha Protocol are trademarks of their respe-
ctive corporation/studio.

All rights reserved.

And don't forget to do all the mini-games, if they only had included more of them, one every 20 steps wasn't enough.

 

[Gozma]

Is there a way to set up SMGs so they're decent? If you go all out on recoil will the spread cone max out at something useable or does it just make it so you can hold a burst for an extra picosecond before bullets start flying from your gun at a 90 degree angle (SMGs are bad)

OTOH shotguns are very viable and fun for "fuck alarms, kill everyone" play, and they make boss fights easy but not chain shot easy. You still have to sometimes actually use other elements of the game like grenades. Is there some explanation from Obsidian that can explain pistols being forty miles better than anything else in the game and capable of instablicking all bosses? Is it a bug or something?