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In recent years, I've been playing mostly Eastern games, and not so long ago, I caught myself thinking: what if my aversion to Western, modern games is just a subconsciously developed bias, and in reality, things aren't that bad? Based on this, I decided to replay some old games, and one of them was Alpha Protocol, which, for some reason, was heavily criticized by its contemporaries and gaming journalists. I don't remember exactly when I played it the first time, but it was definitely about ten years ago.
I enjoyed it then, and I still enjoy it now. Firstly, there are normal dialogues instead of good guy/toxic points and a third option in the form of sarcasm; there's no need to fill up a "good/evil" bar, and like a real person, you can behave differently when interacting with different characters, depending on the situation and your (or rather, your character's) attitude towards them. Who would have thought that the protagonist could have a good relationship with some characters and an absolutely opposite relationship with others? Certainly not BioWare and similar companies. Regarding the dialogues, it's also great that the time to choose options is limited – in an RPG where you have only one or two choices for the entire game, this wouldn't make much sense, but here it really adds to the authenticity and dynamism. Secondly, the storylines are bold (by today's standards); it deals with the Middle East, the Taiwan issue, and even the idea that the military-industrial complex might deliberately provoke various crises to profit from them later – judging by the reaction to real-world events, all of this is clearly not something that the Western, soy-consuming audience can handle. Thirdly, there are normal women. They're not as cute as in Japanese games, but they are charismatic in their own way, even if they are visually limited by the age of the technology. And looking at this, where a girl from a 2005 game looks much more attractive than a woman from a 2023 game, despite being the same character, you realize that it's not that games that aim for realism are inherently ugly, but rather that the direction of development has shifted towards degradation, which is noticeable not only in the visuals and storylines but also in terms of gameplay.
I enjoyed it then, and I still enjoy it now. Firstly, there are normal dialogues instead of good guy/toxic points and a third option in the form of sarcasm; there's no need to fill up a "good/evil" bar, and like a real person, you can behave differently when interacting with different characters, depending on the situation and your (or rather, your character's) attitude towards them. Who would have thought that the protagonist could have a good relationship with some characters and an absolutely opposite relationship with others? Certainly not BioWare and similar companies. Regarding the dialogues, it's also great that the time to choose options is limited – in an RPG where you have only one or two choices for the entire game, this wouldn't make much sense, but here it really adds to the authenticity and dynamism. Secondly, the storylines are bold (by today's standards); it deals with the Middle East, the Taiwan issue, and even the idea that the military-industrial complex might deliberately provoke various crises to profit from them later – judging by the reaction to real-world events, all of this is clearly not something that the Western, soy-consuming audience can handle. Thirdly, there are normal women. They're not as cute as in Japanese games, but they are charismatic in their own way, even if they are visually limited by the age of the technology. And looking at this, where a girl from a 2005 game looks much more attractive than a woman from a 2023 game, despite being the same character, you realize that it's not that games that aim for realism are inherently ugly, but rather that the direction of development has shifted towards degradation, which is noticeable not only in the visuals and storylines but also in terms of gameplay.