Voted :)
I missed this game on the 360 and I would like to see it here on GOG. ^_^

Man, I should finish that game at some point. I played a few hours and quite enjoyed it, but got distracted by something else.

Alright, I decided to give the game another shot. Last time I played was years and at least one PC upgrade ago, so maybe this newer machine, which will allow me to play the game with all the settings up to 11, will be a better experience. This time I decide, since it's a console port, let's try it with a gamepad.

It's... not bad.

I think part of my past issues with the game might have been performance related; the machine i had when i bought the game was a pile of crap (I say that now, but I loved it back then). Many of the things i remember as prohibitively frustrating are not so much this time. The hacking minigame still sucks ass, but lock picking is a breeze this time and the "Mass Effect 2 totally didn't steal this" electronic bypasses were never really an issue, so maybe without some of the frustration, the rest of the game will be better. The one thing that was really surprising is how much better the controls felt with a gamepad. Even the hacking (which I cannot stress how much ass it sucks) was somewhat improved by the twin stick w/ triggers input method. Some of that may be due to the gamepad I'm using this time, a Nvidia Shield controller, which is a surprisingly high quality gamepad. I've only made it through the tutorial portion so far, we'll see if I continue to enjoy it as I get into the guts of the story.

We know the feeling : everybody hold a lot of affection for the furry horrors, the buggy messes of games, and the technical abominations of their childhood :)
It probably is tied to what cogadh said : with a sub par setup, the experience had to be way worse. My rig was brand new at the time (I just changed gpu, psu and added some more ram over the years and it still run great)

I wondered that too, the only game i played relatively short after release was Pillars of Eternity but i didn't have major bugs with any of their games. But they said themselves in interviews that their QA was subpar so i guess i was just too late for the party ;)

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On topic: Its a bit of a shame really. I liked Alpha Protocol, it was a nice departure from the usual RPG settings i think. The checkpoint system was annoying though (like... in any game with a checkpoint system). But the boss fight against that russian guy must be one of the most memorable and fun i ever played.

I think its true that Obsidian has a tendency to be a bit too ambitious for their own good at times. With some of their games they should have just drawn a line and go on to refining the game instead. But on the other hand i think its what makes their games interesting, I liked every one i played so far...

Well-spotted. The game sold 700k in just the first 2 months, which isn't bad at all. I wonder... does SteamSpy count all Steam activations or just the sales through the Steam store? Because there may easily be at least as many retail and bundle activations as Steam sales.

I don't remember the game having any particularly glaring bugs, just the normal kind of PC gaming issues (gotta tweak everything to get the best performance). I do remember the motion blur implementation was so bad it could cause control issues (if you weren't gentle with the mouse, it would cause a kind of "snap turn" effect), but that was true for a lot of games with motion blur at the time and easily solved by just turning it off.
Steamspy polls public Steam profiles for games owned and played, so it is really only a loose estimate based on the portion of Steam users who keep their profile public.

They may have sold a few more, had SEGA released it in Japan...

I think it’s a well-earned reputation compounded by the fact that they make RPGs, one of the most difficult genres to test/fix. Fallout: New Vegas was seriously unstable, Alpha Protocol has a multitude of bugs, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 isn't even finished.

And yet… they offer games so engaging that the bugs barely slow me down. Their writing cannot be matched, and their characters have more depth than anything I've seen in gaming. Alpha Protocol is just wonderful, especially when you get out of the first locale and start making your own network of contacts.

Lately Obsidian have been doing very well for themselves. South Park was great, and Pillars of Eternity was remarkably polished for an RPG, let alone an Obsidian game. Their reputation in the industry has never been better!

Thanks for clearing that up. So it underestimates, but probably not as badly as I thought

It counts how many copies it can see listed in people's libraries with public profiles.

That one game I never finished.

I know this thread is about AP but im curious, did anyone end up "investing" anything in what the article was primarily about?


I bought AP via Gamersgate a while back -- the early bits i did play i enjoyed before being distracted by other things.
I am curious, why did the game originally not perform as well as ppl hoped?

I read somewhere that AP's hacking speed is directly tied to the player character's level, which might make sense if maxing out the hacking skill tree would have made the player able to hack any terminal automatically.