For those of you who are already hankering for another heaping helping of run-up-and-punch AI, I’m about to snatch your swirly lollipop.
In a recent interview with CVG, SEGA West President Mike Hayes announced SEGA will not be publishing a sequel to Obsidian Entertainment’s RPG, Alpha Protocol, despite the game’s “brilliant” concept. West sites mediocre sales as the impetus for this decision, something he believes is a result of the game’s underwhelming metacritic score:
Let’s speak very commercially; the game hasn’t sold what we’ve expected, therefore we won’t be doing a sequel.
The concept was brilliant, though. You know this whole thing with Metacritic where you have to be in the high 70s to mid-80s minimum [to have any success] – well, with RPGs you have got to be in the late 80s.
Whilst we had a good game, I don’t think we had a game that had enough to get us to that upper echelon and I think that was the issue. Again, the amount you need to invest to get there is so large because RPGs are naturally big projects. We’ve decided we won’t do a sequel.
Is anybody surprised? Or bummed out? Everyone I’ve talked to doesn’t have a whole lot of nice to say. I love poking fun at awful games as much as the next guy, but after our own Alex Riggen reluctantly gave it a C+ for its unfinished and underdeveloped gameplay, any vitriolic poetry I try to muster is just replaced with empathetic disappointment. It’s incredibly frustrating when a decent concept gets derailed in development, especially when bits and pieces of quality gameplay poke through an otherwise hideous experience. No jokes here.
Ok, just one: What, no Alpha Protocol 2: Mass Effect? I’m sorry. That was awful. I’m awful. I love you, Sega.
