Alien: Isolation

Trying so hard not to be excited for this because an Alien survival horror is all I want for Christmas and I don't want to be burned.

Learning there may be people enemies helps.

Apparently this is the biggest alien yet. 3 meters tall. So maybe it will actually turn into a queen. Which explains it being actually smart.

...People enemies does sorta make sense with the films.

Not actually being a marine helps.

EDIT: How Aliens ruined the franchise. No motivation for that.

edited 8th Jan '14 5:13:49 AM by unnoun

RPS article implied there are going to be enemies, crafting and weapons so I think there is really big danger of "Eh, we think that audience can't be entertained with single alien without human mooks" :P

Well, I don't see why one bad AVP game means all the rest will doomed to be awful forever. But yeah, this is pretty promising. Even though I don't like survival horror. :L

->There being no scripted things makes me curious about how they'll handle the plot. Because, I mean, the original Alien movies do have story. There's the alien itself wanting to feed and breed. And the company being dicks trying to take it for their own use as a weapon, to turn a profit.

I am guessing Apocalyptic Logs will be a prominent feature. From the look of it, there will be a lot of "passive storytelling" like Valve is fond of. Empty rooms, but each with their own story told in overturned furniture, battered doors, and patterns of bloodstains.

—>Also, I wonder how they could implement the Nothing Is Scarier thing the first movie went with? I mean, you don't see the thing most of the time, it's in shadow, or near the piping or what have you. I think the design does still hold up mostly, the trouble is making the A.I. learn how to use the shadows and the fact that most of the environment is made of the same piping that made the Alien itself up when it just was a costume.

I think in this case it is the fact that there is only one xenomorph for most of the game which is where that horror will come from. A station is a big place for just two life forms to wander about with one trying to avoid the other. They can get the Nothing Is Scarier effect by effective use of tension. I expect long stretches in which you do not encounter the alien, but that does not mean you are unaware of it. A shadow passing the corridor in front of you... a clang of something dropping down the corridor distantly behind you, the knowledge that there is no where you could hide that it could not find you. That will all combine to make sure that when you do meet the alien face to face, the experience will be sudden and full of panic.

—>That's just not fair. I hate when games try to include smell mechanics. It's universally arbitrary, given that we don't have the capacity to smell the gameworld.

I can see that being workable. Imagine if the player leaves an invisible trail of scent behind them as they go that slowly fades after they pass. Not something they can see, but something that is there none the less. Now imagine that they encounter the alien, and have to hide. The alien is rummaging about, but has not spotted the player yet. It passes the room then... suddenly, it stops. It raises its head, and slowly extends its inner jaw with a low hiss... right over the place the player just walked. It starts to track, to slowly follow the path the player took, retracing their steps. It is going to find them, and they will have to move out of hiding, risking the possibility of being seen now for the inevitability of being sniffed out moments from now.

One thing that definitely keeps me excited is that they seem to bring back the original motif of the Alien as a sadistic stalker that emotionally abuses its prey rather than just being a loud, aggressive carnivorous animal like in the sequels. The psychosexual element was sort of present in all films - even the fourth - but the creature itself just lost too much of its original demonic presence.

edited 9th Jan '14 1:39:08 AM by TAPETRVE

edited 12th Jan '14 3:06:56 PM by unnoun

I really want this now. And I agree with them; there better be a cat in the game!

Stop worrying and stuff.

Gameplay commentary.

Edge Magazine or whatever.

edited 18th Jan '14 6:47:19 PM by unnoun

Seeing all this footage on the game and a lot of the stuff behind it, all I can say is that Creative Assembly is absolutely nailing it so far.

Am I the only one that thinks it'd be neat if there was a multiplayer mode where one player played as the alien? I think that'd be fun potentially.

EDIT: Actually, I've been thinking of past Aliens/AVP games.

I mean, Alien Versus Predator 2 for the PC in 2001 was pretty good. So was the Primal Hunt expansion.

Alien Trilogy was fun.

EDIT: As for this game, I'd be curious about a section or a game mode where you're being hunted by a lone Facehugger. Facehuggers normally don't hunt, but whatever. It could work and have a lot of the same A.I. as the adult Alien/Drone/Warrior/Praetorian from the rest of the story, except it's smaller, faster and stuff.

Well, that and it'd be easier to kill if you have a weapon, but you probably won't.

Actually, a section where things get a little more equal, where there's a newborn chestburster roaming around, trying to grow into an adult and you want to stop it could be neat. There it's trying to figure out where you are so it can avoid you, but it just might get you when your back is turned so it can feed on you to grow.

Yay evoking fear!

Yay learning things!

edited 20th Feb '14 12:30:17 PM by unnoun

So it's been over a month since the last post in this thread, so I think it's safe to double-post now to bump it?

Anyway. They had a teaser week thingy. Some of it was neat. Like the music.

Sorry unnoun, I guess everyone is still too butthurt over colonial marines to begin to hope again.

Oh gearbox, frist duke nukem and now this, how we use to thrust you ;_:'

I posted some links above in edits, but the thread didn't bump so I'll collect them in this one

In this they talk about staying true to the film and evoking fear.

This is 18 things we learned about the game a month ago.

The teaser week again.

I can't say I trusted Gearbox much to begin with to be honest. They did pretty good Half-Life expansions, but. Well, originality was never their forte, and the expansions weren't quite as good as the original for the most part.

...I'm not sure Duke Nukem was their fault per se. The game had gone through so many revisions and changes and rebuilds already. The only real way for them to fix it at that point was to start from scratch again, because the whole thing was rather misconceived from the beginning.

Can't say I was much of a fan of Duke Nukem to begin with, but whatever.

Anyway. Yeah, but this is a completely different developer from Colonial Marines and even a completely different premise. A different style entirely.

edited 5th Mar '14 5:20:26 AM by unnoun

It would be good to see the space survival horror game being taken seriously for a change. Especially after dead space 3 strayed from its core concept into a co-op shooter the same way F.E.A.R. 3 did.

Creating the ultimate hunter. Start of a series of trailer behind-the-scenes thingies. This thursday.

Damn, no mention of a Wii U or Mac release.

New event thingy in San Francisco, on March 18th.

Creating the Alien.

So since this is alien and not aliens does that mean that they is only going to be one alien in the whole game?

From the looks of it, yeah. I'm interested to see what the total playtime will be. Reminds me of that upcoming game Evolve with one player vs multiple players.

Since they seem to be going for a hardcore single-player experience, it'll be interesting to see how advanced the AI is. A pox on silly things like enemy types and waves and reload speed and stat upgrades. This game is all about you and that alien playing cat and mouse.

How many different situations, hold-ups, snags, or chases can you get into with the Alien? Will the primary objective be collecting a bunch of damaged ship parts and fixing the ship piece by piece? How are they going to play it?

RPG elements like stat upgrades wouldn't be that out of place if handled subtly. Maybe something like in Call Of Cthulhu where characters steadily go from awful to half descent with weapons and items by using at them

Apparently there's just going to be the one alien. They confirmed that from the start.

And, based on the way that supposedly every journalist that played the demo thing had a different sort of experience and encounter, and ran into the thing in a different place each time, seems like there'd be some degree of replayability.

...And I heard that they're incorporating the acidic blood in some capacity. So shooting it is increasingly looking like a shitty idea.

If this is meant to be a full length game I'm worried how the story, tension and gameplay will be stretched out meaningfully with only a single alien out there to threaten you.

It would interesting to see how the acid blood works out, I don't think any other games have tried to depicted that before in gameplay. i'm really excited for this.

It's not often I'm anticipating a game that will make me crap my pants, but this is a very big exception. I hope they pull this off and achieve what they're aiming for. I like this isn't another avp shooter game, but one that pays homage to the original film.