In the comments of Joystiq's review, "a tired dev" says he and his fellow developers worked hard on the game, but that the work lacked focus due to poor leadership. "The Executive Producer for the game, Chris Parker (also an owner of the company), seemed to think he was the world's greatest designer ever, and created all these absolutely shitty systems and wouldn't listen to any of the real designers or devs about things that just didn't work," the post states. "And you can't exactly argue with one of the owners of the company when he doesn't want to listen." He says Parker's micromanagement made other producers step back from the project.
The post also blames Sega, attributing changes to the design requirements and a lack of time to polish new features. "It was obvious 2 years ago that this game should have been scrapped," it states. "Instead, though, they focused on adding still more features and never fixed the ones they already had. That is a recipe for tons of bugs and no polish." The developer goes on to claim that Obsidian's other projects, including Fallout New Vegas and an unannounced project, are looking good. But Alpha Protocol, at least according to his opinion, should have been canceled.