Okay, so this mission has a pretty simple premise. In order to prepare ourselves to stop the assassination of Ronald Sung, we enlisted the help of Steven Heck and Scarlet Lake to get the skivvy on what's going down by hacking into the NSB's (think Taiwanese KGB or CIA) servers, because if anyone knows about threats to a Taiwanese national's life, it would be the NSB. (I should note that you don't actually have to have done Hong Shi's mission to unlock this, and could therefore have no idea who Omen Deng is. Even if you do know about him, you have no reason to suspect that he has it out for Ronald Sung given the knowledge you have about him. Another interesting fact is that anaphysik assures me that the Grand Hotel is a real life place.)
The scene with Scarlet irritates me, to be perfectly honest. I know she's probably pretending not to know Mike or something like that, but since we literally JUST e-mailed her, it seems totally disingenuous. And in the event that Scarlet says she remembers Mike from the plane, Mike acts surprised, even though he JUST e-mailed her! This is even more stupid if you were like me in my first playthrough and gave Scarlet all the Halbech data. You can literally be at "Friendship", yet still have Mike be surprised that Scarlet remembers him. It's a minor gripe, but it's a gripe nonetheless.
I really like the conversation at the start of the mission. It's so reminiscent of Ocean's 11 and I'm a total sucker for those kinds of Hollywood heists. This really is one of the great things about Alpha Protocol. It's basically an homage to those kinds of movies in all sorts of ways, while staying true to it's core as an RPG. If the game was more polished, I'd be tempted to call it both "cinematic" and "choice-driven" which is something that most games don't even think about combining.
With the exception of one, VERY annoying encounter in Moscow, all of the allies you side with in the game are invulnerable when in the field with you. That eliminates the hassle of protecting them while completing objectives. Since companions don't get hurt, there's no reason to concern themselves with their well-being. They're like children in Fallout 3, but significantly less irritating. Thank the lord for that!
I'm very disappointed that we couldn't frame the Halbech agent for pedophilia. That leads to a hilarious scene where he's escorted out of his room, arrested, and taken off the premise. This removes a few guards and leaves his hotel room open to take everything from. If I had known about this, I would have told the group to be nicer to Scarlet.
This is where the plot to Taipei starts to fall apart, and it get's worse from here. From the files given to us by Hong Shi and stolen from the NSB, we know that Omen Deng is involved in the proceedings in Taipei. If not for the contents of the dossiers, this might be enough to suspect Deng of being the assassin, since he is Chinese Secret Police. However, the dossier data shows that Deng was raised by Sung. This should raise suspicions for more critically-minded players.
Mumbles talks about punishing players for pissing people off, and while I respect her opinion, I disagree. I think part of why Alpha Protocol is good is that they never punish you for anything. The entire game is an choice between trade-offs and alliances. While some consequences are better, and may be better for you, than others, none of them are downright bad. That allows players to just role-play instead of panicking over which choice isn't going to screw them over in the end.
Lastly, anaphysik has left you guys with this link detailing the "One-China Policy", since some of you are undoubtedly interested in the world-building of Alpha Protocol. I, for one, thinks it's cool that Obsidian wrote such a detailed history for the game's world. In stretches so far back it's ridiculous. Most of it is stuff that you'd never find in the game. For example, did you know that in Alpha Protocol's world, George Washington was the first president of a country called the United States?
21 comments:
More seriously, I think it was pretty ace of Obsidian to include such a hot-button topic as Taiwanese independence and cross-strait tensions, not as a side-note, but as one of the /main fucking setups/ in the game. Spot on them for choosing something really appropriate for the 'crafting a new Cold War' situation.
I'd like to point something interesting regarding hacking/bypassing/picking, in that the difficultly level you choose affects them.
On hard you reguarly get 10/11/12's on bypasses even with maximum Sabotage on alarms, and ~8 on most other things.
It's fairly well known that Omen Deng was raised by Sung, but Deng killed his own brother to betray Sung and the chinese secret police believed the motivation behind that enough to employ him despite all he's done, so whilst its weird from a player perspective, it's not weird in universe that Thornton doesn't suspect something until he actually confronts Deng with it.
The fact that it's actual Chinese Secret Police agents working for him (I believe?) means that presumably even they think that Deng is out to assassinate Sung
"Agent Thomas posted this comment to explain why I didn't suspect Deng was a double agent. He misspelled my name, 'Thornton'..."
...Sorry, had to do that.
I am not on a roll with the names at the moment =D
"With the exception of one, VERY annoying encounter in Moscow, all of the allies you side with in the game are invulnerable when in the field with you."
Ohohohohoo if that is waht I think it is, then that is the part that I ultimately could never complete.
You know EXACTLY which one I'm thinking about. We'll get to that in due time.
Who is it though? I've played through 5-6 times and i can't place you you mean...
SPOILERS:
We are referring to Surkov at the fucking Embassy.
Ha, yea....totally slipped my mind since the game does not continue after he dies. Yea i died a good 4-5 times in my first play-through before i discovered chain shot.
Since Aldowyn is pretty good with Shotguns and we're on Easy, I'm hoping we do that in one try.
It was really disappointing that the game doesn't continue if Surkov dies there. A game like this really shouldn't have failure states that don't involve Thorton dying.
There are a couple more of these failure states in the game; the most jarring of them is the sniper mission in Rome, which you can fail if you shoot someone in front of witnesses and don't kill the witnesses immediately afterwards. I thought this was weird because the game could easily have you fail that mission and yet still have the plot continue as normal.
If you ordered the sniper rifle for that mission you can just mow everyone down with that anyway, so it's not too bad.
I'm good at replying.
Do you have a schedule for updating your playlist on YouTube?
I'm enjoying this, BTW, having wandered in here from "Spoiler Warning": keep up the good work!
I'm pretty sure anaphysik just forgot to add episode 13. Honestly they SHOULD be put onto the playlist as soon as they go live.
And thanks, appreciate the compliment ;)
Youtube should have a means of doing this shit automatically. Playlists are a pain in the butt.
But yeah, I simply forgot to add it like I usually do ("Honestly they SHOULD be put onto the playlist as soon as they go live" which is what I usually do).
In relation to what you said about Scarlet remembering Mike:
SPOILERS
I remember the first time I played, going all straight-laced professional, and had Marburg's rep turn to +10 "friendship" while I was shouting him down at the museum. I understand it from a systemic standpoint, but it really felt wrong.
Indeed. The reputation system can cause some dissonance with the story at times.
So.. Darkcloud, what exactly happened to Disclosure Alert? It's been a while since any update..
I'll explain it in the next update, I promise.
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