Today I woke up, had a cup of coffee and opened Facebook and saw this post about a game called Broke Protocol. Usually I dismiss new games as I'm not that much into gaming as I used to years ago, but the words "sandbox" and "free" drew my attention. Last time I talked about gaming on this blog was when I reviewed State of Decay in 2013 (by the way - a sequel to that is being made) and for some reason I thought of trying the game and documenting my first minutes on it here.
Broke Protocol is an online city life roleplaying game. It's free, low-poly and commonly described as a 'GTA clone'. Players can and are encouraged to host their own servers and the game is currently on Steam Greenlight.
I downloaded the client linked in the official website, extracted it to my Program Files folder, forced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering through NVIDIA Inspector and started it.
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| The game's simple start menu. |
At the time of this post, the game is on version 0.622, released on 7th May 2017. The settings are pretty straight-forward. I changed the resolution to 1920×1080 fullscreen, disabled fog and bloom and left occlusion on.
The server list annoyingly has no filters and loads the furthest servers first for some reason (all of them marked with a ping of 500). After a few seconds letting it load, I joined a French server with a nice ping and about 30 players.
Upon joining, I was met with a login screen and a character creator. As expected, character customisation is still basic, but still a nice feature nonetheless which hopefully will be expanded in the future. Soon after I was on the streets of Broke Protocol.
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| The chaotic streets of Broke Protocol. |
It didn't take me long of walking around to find some chaos. Players killing other players, fighting and robbing NPCs, traffic jams, cops going berserk. Pretty much what you would expect in a Grand Theft Auto game, albeit in a Unturned-like world.
NPCs are distinguished from players because of their calm walking on the sidewalks. Once engaged in a fight, they pull out a random melee weapon and fight back.
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| Yes, that's a baseball bat that I'm wielding while fighting a player. |
When anything on this game dies, it drops a briefcase with all of its item. That also means when you die, you lose everything except your clothes. You will need to get used to being literally stabbed in the back by another player while you are vulnerable picking up stuff from a briefcase.
By default, interactions in the game are done with the middle mouse button pressed down. It's used to open the inventory, pick up briefcases and also...
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| I've got some bad news for you, Conan. |
...intimidate NPCs. I found it amusing that every time I instructed an NPC to put their hands up and be robbed, they obliged, even though I had no weapons on me and in exchange I got pistols from some of them. Why fight and risk dying when you can just force them to praise you like some sort of God?
At this point I noticed the game had a GTA-esque wanted level system, as seen by the stars at the top of the minimap.
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| Murdering low-poly people near the beach. Delightful! |
The stars increased with the crimes and not long after I had the po-po after me. I chose the crime life in the game, but some players preferred paying to be cops at the local police station. Besides weapons and money, the NPC I murdered above had cocaine. This game has drugs, awesome! And no, I'm not being sarcastic. I used to spend many hours on a Multi Theft Auto server (that's a GTA San Andreas multiplayer mod) producing and dealing drugs.
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| Being high on coke on this game gets you an extremely blurry vision and that's about it. |
Obviously I had to try some. There's no animation while consuming drugs, just an immediate effect which resulted in blurry vision for about 20 seconds as I walked around running away on foot from some cop.
I explored the world and visited a fast-food restaurant not-so-creatively named "BURGERS". Not long after, the server initiated what seems the only event the game currently has: Battle Royale.
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| Come on everyone, hit that F1 button. |
Players are asked to vote and once initiated, the objective is to kill everyone as the area you can roam in gets smaller and smaller. Unfortunately my health was not replenished upon entering and I had no more ammo, so I couldn't do much on foot. What to do next? Simple, let's get a vehicle!
It's possible to be a passenger on any NPC car, but where's the fun in that? I stole a car and had my first driving experience in this game. It wasn't too bad - driving is done with ASWD and camera movement with the mouse, just like it's supposed to be. I'm looking at you, Borderlands (who the hell thought driving with the mouse would be a good idea...?).
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| Who needs weapons when you can simply run people over? |
The last minutes of my first Broke Protocol experience were spent driving around running players and NPCs over. Traffic got stuck in an intersection as players gathered there to kill and loot each other. The game has VOIP so I could hear some people talking with their microphones as they engaged in battle. Ah, the joys of PC gaming, when you can hear Russian kids screaming at each other!
On its current state, I doubt any one will actually consider this a game to get addicted to and spend countless hours on. Nonetheless, it can be fun and useful to kill some time. I recommend everyone to give it a try and perhaps consider voting for it to be greenlit. It has lots of potential, so who knows what the future holds for this game?
"I doubt any one will actually consider this a game to get addicted to and spend countless hours on" You don't know this game was built on a good ground and from hearing the developers there going to make a white list server for role play and keep updating the game.
And that's exactly why I said on its current state.