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TavernRPG's team of moderators managed to reach out to Annie VanderMeer—currently working at Digimancy Entertainment as a Narrative Lead.
Annie VanderMeer (also credited as Annie VanderMeer Mitsoda, Annie Carlson, Annie VanderMeer Carlson, and Anne VanderMeer) is an American video game designer specializing in RPGs, best known for her narrative work on 2021's Unpacking and her design work on the 2012's Guild Wars 2. VanderMeer joined Obsidian Entertainment in January 2006, beginning work on "Project New Jersey". When it was canceled, VanderMeer joined the Neverwinter Nights 2 team, where she worked on handling the in-game items, then as a writing assistant on Alpha Protocol, working with creative lead Brian Mitsoda, where she was credited with helping create some of the characters. While working on Alpha Protocol, VanderMeer assisted with additional design for the first expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2, Mask of the Betrayer. Alpha Protocol was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 in May 2010. Over time, the game gained a cult following.
Today we're publishing an exclusive interview with Annie. Thanks a lot to everyone involved in this!
Q: What are your feelings toward Alpha Protocol? Some of us consider the story and the way it’s presented as one of the best, but the game suffered from bugs and problems with controls.
A: Ha, I had a feeling Alpha Protocol would come up - it's not the first time I've been asked about it, as you might imagine! I used to be a bit salty on it but time has softened my outlook, and honestly, I know so little about what it ended up becoming that judging it purely on the fact that came out wasn't what I'd worked on is wholly unfair. I think it did suffer a bit from the syndromes of the time of "Make it less real-world serious" and "Make it more BAD-ASS," which is unfortunate but not exactly rare. I'm bummed the characters I wrote were redone so drastically (or cut entirely), but a lot of the skeletal work I did (so to speak) for the dialogue system was still there. And at the end of the day, I can say I learned a huge amount working on the game, and had a ton of fun in my first time working with voice actors! So... ambivalent, now, I suppose?
Q: Do you remember development challenges of Alpha Protocol?
A: Unfortunately, I can only really speak to the first phase of development, previous to the massive tone switch: tone and content-wise, the game I worked on was very different, but even then there were certainly plenty of issues. I wouldn't call development "fraught" or anything, but it definitely had its share of problems. There wasn't much creative cohesion between some departments on tone and mechanics, and the then-lead would bend to whatever whim production had on things. This led to the design department as a whole dreading Mondays for the inevitable moment when a producer came in to announce they played "the greatest game" that past weekend, and why couldn't we put in Feature X from that game, since it was done so well? (That's not an uncommon story, but it was excruciating at the time)
Aside from that gripe, there were a lot of questions about certain elements of the engine architecture: Epic had apparently sold Unreal 3 on having great water simulations, but whoops it couldn't actually do water, so there goes that chunk of the ending! Plus, shaping an FPS-focused engine into an RPG one was at times a difficult process: a lot of tweaks had to be made to get the dialogue system working, and systems weren't easy to implement. And the engine itself was still in development, which led to times when a big update would kind of break everything, and hiccups like that slowed down things considerably. Also, as is a common problem in many projects, we had gobs of documentation, but the team didn't really look at them too much, often because they were cluttered around in Sharepoint, and [it] was hard to know what was relevant. (I became a huge advocate after that for a more active method of documentation, first in wikis and then in something like Confluence!)
Finally, and this is the thing that both caught us by surprise and came rather expected: defining what makes up a "real world RPG" was both a difficult sell to many and confusing to others where the world's lines were drawn. What is the "near future" in this case? Can we have Thorton do X? Why can't we walk around on the street and go into any building we want? There was a lot of push towards a fully "open-world" experience from various sources, despite the fact that mission structures made a lot more sense for the plot and also were kind of the only feasible option for the current team and state of game development at the time. That kind of open design was something grander in scale than we could've accomplished - even Grand Theft Auto 4 wasn't out at the time!
(Also, as I learned in the very first game I worked on, Taxi Driver: if you give people an open world, at least 50% of them will want to be absolute jerks in it - putting people in headlocks and stealing cars and so on. And when more time is spent trying to mitigate damage and chaos the player can cause in an open world, there should be a big question as to why you'd really want to allow for that kind of setup anyway)
Q: Have you ever thought about creating a sequel?
A: While I think a "spiritual sequel" would be cool - I'm absolutely a fan of non-standard and diverse RPG settings (which were much more of a rarity in 2007!) I think I'd pass on a direct one. I don't know what the fate of the IP is currently, so I can't speculate on that, but even if that's in limbo, I think there are many worthwhile themes, mechanics, and styles that could be ferried from the original Alpha Protocol to something new, and that would be exciting to see!
