Chris Avellone: A Man Of Many Words

“But all credit goes to George Ziets for that,” Avellone admits. “He was the Creative Lead on that project, and he did an excellent job. I did two companions – Kaelyn the Dove and Gann-of-Dreams – but George did pretty much everything else: the story, the characters, the themes. He was just great. Basically, I’m really glad George is here.”

As Obsidian began work on the next expansion, Storm of Zehir, Avellone began testing the waters for an entirely new IP – the first of his entire career. The new game, Alpha Protocol, was revealed in 2008 to be an espionage-themed RPG, inspired by the James Bond films, the Robert Ludlum novels, and the success of 24. “It was so refreshing to be working in a modern setting,” Avellone sighs. “It was a completely different game to any I’ve ever worked on. The big challenges were creating a cinematic-style RPG, and also the whole fact that the dialogue system was such a different structure than any of our previous games. That was both frightening and very, very cool. The dialogue mechanic was developed by Brian Mitsoda, who worked on Vampire: Bloodlines at Troika, and the intention of the system was that it instills that 24-esque sense of emergency. When you’re talking to various characters, your conversation choices are permanent; you can’t go back to a previous branch in the dialogue tree, so you really need to do your homework on people before you talk to them. You need to find out what their psychological profiles are, what their triggers are, and so on. It’s quite dynamic because, say, if you recognise that pissing someone off in certain ways may trigger something you might want, you can exploit that. That was really fun to play around with.”

Alpha Protocol went gold several hours before Avellone picked up the phone for this interview – he warns us of the looming release party with all the apprehension of a trawlerman heading out into the squall – and offers a beguiling new approach to dialogue in RPGs. Part of the game’s innovative approach to character interaction is derived from Obsidian’s work on their short-lived Aliens RPG project, which they covertly developed with SEGA in 2006.

“While working on that game,” he explains, “we realised that if you got into a talking-head dialogue situation, that actually makes you safe for a certain period of time, which is absolutely the last thing you want in an Aliens game. So, we were like, ‘We want to change the dialogue system so that you’re not safe when you’re talking to people, and you shouldn’t be.’ Alpha Protocol was no different: we wanted the player to feel a sense of danger and urgency even when they’re talking to people. They have to be guarded; they have to think about what they’re going to say and do next.”

To determine whether it had achieved this aim, Obsidian contracted a testing body to put sensors on players’ heads and track their engagement in various mechanics during play. Even now, Avellone is audibly excited by the idea. “The result was the amount of enjoyment they had with the dialogue system was the equivalent of the adrenaline push they got during combat situations, and the people who tested that had never seen that happen before in an RPG.”

In a sense, this development completes a circle, looping back into what Avellone achieved in Torment: that is, the transformation of narrative into gameplay. “If you include a narrative structure in a game,” he says, “that should also be a gameplay system of some sort, whether there’s a reputation meter based on your actions, whether you’re choosing various stances and moods, whether you have to do dossier research… I think narrative needs to be gameplay. I don’t think we need passive cut-scenes any more: movies and TV already accomplish that. Games can do much more.”

So can Avellone, apparently. Remember the constant writing we mentioned earlier? That’s right: despite being in the throes of post-release bliss at the moment, Avellone’s already furiously at work on the next chapter in the Fallout series, New Vegas. He’s loath to say too much about it presently, but he’s elated to be working in the Fallout world again. So, Chris, if you do take a break in the next year or so, we’d like to offer a humble recommendation: get working on a sincere thank-you note to those inept former school pals of yours. They made videogame history.

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