I admire its purity - the ALIEN: ISOLATION thread

I've talked about this on the Whatchu Playing Now thread a couple of times but I think it deserves one of its own.

It's the game of the year for me. I can see it has real flaws - it's basically a series of fetch quests, the alien AI can be unpredictable in annoying and unfair ways - but the sound and visual design are note-perfect, the story is a surprisingly coherent and interesting entry in the Alien canon, and most importantly it's genuinely frightening and oppressive. I've hidden in lockers for minutes at a time trying to gather up the nerve to walk 50 feet down an empty corridor.

Anyone else playing?

Waiting for sale. I love the aesthetics but am gunshy over the amount of content it actually has. The RLM/Pre_Rec guys lambasted it for being a door-opening and locker-hiding simulator stretched out to justify the full cost of a AAA game

Yeah, there's some validity to that criticism. I've been playing it in small chunks of 45 minutes or so at a time, though, and I think that's helped prevent it feeling like a chore. There's also a bit more variety in the flow and pacing of the game than I'd expected - last night's session was relatively relaxed and alien-free after a super-stressful couple of days of being very closely stalked.

Just curious, are the situations where you come in contact with the alien randomized in any way? What I mean is do you have free roam to wander around the ship, all the while not knowing when it will appear? Or is the game mostly scripted in that way.

I think they're randomized but inconsistent enough that either the station is under attack by several xenomorphs, or it's suddenly developed Jason-like movie-monster teleportation abilities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOrphBFlDsg

Waiting for sale. I love the aesthetics but am gunshy over the amount of content it actually has.
― Delbert Gravy (kingfish), Tuesday, October 21, 2014 11:42 AM

^^

haha yep, me too

There are areas where the alien is more likely to appear than others, and sometimes its appearance is scripted but mostly its pretty unpredictable.

When it is in an area with you, no two encounters are the same - I've had it follow me around like a terrifying acid-blooded puppy sometimes and then, after it's killed me and I've reloaded, ignore me entirely in favour of stalking other survivors or just stomping angrily around in the vents.

The RLM/Pre_Rec guys lambasted it for being a door-opening and locker-hiding simulator stretched out to justify the full cost of a AAA game

The spine of the game is pretty basic point-a-to-point-b fetch-quest-plus-resource-management type stuff, but the atmosphere and the way the alien/enemy AI are handled really set it apart.

not sure if door opening and locker hiding are all that less exciting than a trigger-pulling-simulator like most games out there

I'm now over halfway through it and the pacing has been way more varied than I expected, with lots of ebbs and flows.

Last night's session was an amazingly atmospheric alien-free section followed by an insanely tense and harrowing sequence which has been the highlight of the game so far. I wish I could talk more about the first section but it came as such a delightful surprise I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.

I currently have no way of playing this, but I know someone who worked on it which is v. exciting to me, though probably highly uninteresting to everyone else. Sorry.

Tell them I think they did a great job!

'hey, bizarro gazzara from the internet says nice work'

I'll give 'em a thumbs up emoji from you.

Cheers!

As someone who wants to experience this but has no tech powerful enough to run it, can anyone direct me to a video walkthrough without an annoying gamer VoiceOver?

Jeez, I don't think such a thing exists

there's a bunch:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alien+isolation+gameplay+no+commentary

The praise for the atmosphere is selling me, but also putting in my mental "next-gen discount queue" rather than going for 360/PS3 copy. This game should be $20 by the time the new Batman comes out...

this made me want to get it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1AGWXNmLZQ

This game is great though I seem to have mild PTSD now, cheers "Creative Assembly"

As for

being a door-opening and locker-hiding simulator

I seem to have mild PTSD now

this happens to me after every decent scare 'em up, i.e. last of us, resident evil, etc - every little sound in the dark makes me twitch. there's probably some kind of deep paleo basis for this

For several days after finishing this game every time I closed my eyes I saw the Alien, for real, I was fucking living it (minus the being in the future and mortal danger, obv)

Also this seems a suitable place to brag about being one of the 0.92% of Steam players to have clocked this on 'Hard'

there's a bunch:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=alien+isolation+gameplay+no+commentary

Thanks, jordan. I was trying "no voiceover", "no narration", didn't think of "no commentary"

Oh I forgot to mention how fantastic the sound design on this game is. This game is on a whole other level with headphones.

Unrelated fun fact: the character Waits is voiced by Wiliam Hope, who played Lt. Gorman in Aliens!

I currently have no way of playing this, but I know someone who worked on it which is v. exciting to me, though probably highly uninteresting to everyone else. Sorry.

― emil.y, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 10:11 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too emil.y, it was developed down Brighton way I think?

Always wanted to see a new Alien game done in this style, rather than the gun toting marines which we keep seeing. Not sure I'll ever buy it though - gaming is slowly slipping down my priority list.

Speccy Alien game:
http://www.neonbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/alien.png

this is cool but, and i don't usually notice things like this, the framerate is dreadful on a PS3. i usually know when something's about to happen because everything slows down for a second.

there are also little niggles: when i first meet axel he hands me a maintenance jack, like it's something meaningful or symbolic or useful. but... i already have one?

also, my mission was to contact the torrens. suddenly my mission has updated - get through the main doors. but... i never contacted the torrens? oh well!

You're gonna get a lot of obstacles thrown at you

Shame abt the PS3 performance, I'm surprised the last-gen consoles got versions at all

he took the jack off you, or made you drop it, because it is a heavy blunt object

also the voice from the torrens is all 'cannot maintain contact'. that is why your objective is no longer to contact the torrens

that said, this game is kind of boring

I think they're randomized but inconsistent enough that either the station is under attack by several xenomorphs, or it's suddenly developed Jason-like movie-monster teleportation abilities

let me reassure you that creative assembly have thought this through pretty thoroughly...

i sorta stopped playing this :/

how far through did you get?

50% off on steam right now.

buy it buy it buy it

grabbed this on psn sale, stoked to play it but think i'll do wolfenstein first cuz nazis need killing

There's a Minecraft mod version of this, it looks quite clever how it mimicks the mechanics of the original game. The alien is in fact just a re-skinned horse.

i love this game so far. the alien isnt even the creepiest thing in it so far. have to admit, i'm starting to use a walkthrough. maybe its cuz i'm not understanding the stealth mechanics but there were a couple sections where crouching/moving slowly still got me killed multiple times. the save points start to become the priority which kinda sucks.

so far

i hid in a locker thinking it was a game pause type safe zone. left room for 5 min and returned to start over screen

lockers can be effective hiding areas if there's no-one around to see or hear you get into one and/or you haven't used them too often, as the AI will learn your favoured hiding spots and deliberately come and fuck with you. even if you don't get spotted going into a locker, you can still get busted if you fail the breath-holding minigame which comes up when an NPC walks past your locker and decides to investigate.

basically, while there are some chunks of the game where there's no specific threat (you'll know them when you find them), there are really no reliable hiding places anywhere anytime the alien, working joes or other survivors are around.

the save points start to become the priority which kinda sucks.

i eventually started to enjoy this in a perverse stockholm-syndrome kind of way. i was super-conscious of where the nearest save point was at all times and how much risk would be involved in getting there. mostly, they're well spaced-out and if you get into the habit of saving at every opportunity deaths shouldn't set you back too much.

there is one section where it seemed to me like they were deliberately withholding access to save stations during a prolonged cat-and-mouse session with the alien. it was genuinely stressful and unsettling and it's one of my favourite gaming experiences from 2014.

that aspect of the save system is really good. i just meant that in a couple instances i tired of the repeated deaths and just sprinted to get the checkpoint.

which i guess is a viable survival thing too, fuck the stealth i'm running. one of the instances turned into slapstick: where you have to get back to the transport and the alien is bumping around and no matter how quiet i was it always dropped down and found me. so i just ended up running and saving. but after the save i turned the camera around and the alien was right behind me with its back turned... and it starts stepping backwards until it bumps into me and turns around!

Q: Should I really follow the game's suggestion of playing on hard mode the first time around? It seems like a recipe for tears. I tried that very thing with Dead Space (based, I think, on someone's suggestion here) and I did not last very long at all.

i started on hard but ended up bumping down the difficulty after a while. it was a bit too authentic tbh

So gutted to have finished this. Amazing game but the crew dlc isn't doing it for me. My question is what game to follow it? I went back to my half completed save of far cry4 and it just seemed so... dumb.

Itching for something just as claustrophobic, unforgiving, immersive etc, with no corny writing/cutscenes. It's up there with the stalker series for me.

dark souls

i gave that, or its sequel, a go but it didn't really grab me. can't get with the whole ye olde dude fighting monsters in a castle thing, plus seemed rock hard in a way that wasn't enjoyable at all. i know i'm missing out as so many people love it but i dunno, i think i'm more into sneaky-about aspects, like in the last two splinter cells, than one-on-one combat stuff

Have you tried either of the Metro games?

good call on the metro games. the last of us might fit the bill too?

limbo?

Dishonored is a great stealth game, but it has a ye olde feel rather than something dark. maybe that new Metal Gear Solid game?

metroid prime trilogy? lone survivor?

i was actually thinking of going back to the latest metro game too - i played it for a bit and liked it but fired it off for alien. limbo and dishonored both great, exactly what i'm looking for. last of us didn't live up to the hype, felt samey all the way through, plus with clunky uncharted-like controls.

been wondering about the metal gear solids, but the whole thing about endless bloated cutscenes gives me the fear. what would be a good one to start with? i'll look into metroids and lone survivor too, thanks for the replies

Just got this. First serious game I've bought since Skyrim. Can't even remember why I logged into steam but I saw it was on sale and thought eh fuckit.

i should go back and play this again, i fuckin loved it

are they gonna release a physical GOTY collection for this game or what?

Dunno, but it looks like the digital equivalent was just released this week.

one of the best games ever. have they said anything about a sequel yet?

Let's get the minor gripes out of the way: oh goodie another game where you can't jump, or climb over anything higher than your ankle. Or, apparently, run faster than a 300 pound couch potato? Unless I'm pressing the wrong key... haven't actually seen any aliens yet (have just made contact with axel).

yeah i ended up not being a fan of its FPS-ishness

Gah I've just died three times in the same place and I still haven't seen the alien (except for the one that killed axel). maybe i need to switch to medium difficulty, i ain't the gamer that i was.

bit reductive to describe it as a FPS, it's more about the atmosphere. tough learning curve but stick with ledge, worth it

i just started this, trying to play on nightmare but the lack of map is making it really hard. i spend half my time just trying to figure out whether i'm backtracking or in a new corridor and whether i've checked every door or not. and if i'm spotted by a looter = instant death. haven't even gotten to the alien yet and i'm ready to quit and restart on hard.

Ha I just switched from hard to medium! (You don't have to restart to change difficulty fyi, unless you have some kind of purist motivation.) And I'm still struggling! Feels like pot luck trying to avoid the alien with a tiny handful of not very effective distraction tools. Throw in the fact that half the time hiding in lockers is pointless as it makes a beeline for you anyway, and I'm tearing my hair out. Maybe I'm not putting my inventory to best use - I'm hardly using it at all tbh. Maybe it'll get a bit more even handed when I have some offensive weapons. Still, I'm sticking with it, it's certainly atmospheric, sound effects especially, and yep it's pretty scary, although somewhat in proportion to how far you are from a save point.

when you're in a locker, lean back so you hold your breath and the alien can't spot you. i was kinda frustrated with how hard it was for the first few hours of gameplay but it's v satisfying when you finally work out your own ways of getting through

things do get a bit easier once you get the flamethrower, yeah, but it's worth experimenting with noisemakers and the like because they can be really effective. just be careful not to overuse them because the alien will learn to ignore them :(

the other thing is that the pace of the game is a lot more varied than you might expect from the first couple of hours - the first few encounters with the alien are in extremely close quarters and super-tense but there are decent chunks where you'll find yourself in unexpected places doing different things (trying hard not to spoil some super-cool stuff here)

Yeah I've got into it now, done the super cool stuff - it was super cool, except for the er additional element, which was a bit rubbish - got the flamethrower, almost tempted to bump it back up to hard except fuel is low and really i'd rather enjoy ('enjoy') the game than lose my sanity playing sections over and over again. Your first post is otm, it's basically an atmospheric stealth-heavy fetch quest. What an atmosphere though.

the amount of time one spends looking for keys named 'crank', 'butane torch', and 'plasma torch'

Control system is a bit frustrating but I'm just as much to blame, feel like my grandad playing video games now. tab - no i meant space! right mouse button - no i meant left! I'm pressing 'a' - I'M PRESSING 'A'! Oops, no I'm pressing caps lock. Basically spent the first couple of missions not building any equipment because I couldn't figure it out.

They could have put *some* puzzles in instead of fetch quests, irritating mini games and laborious animations of equipment usage. Maybe it's a more 'realistic' depiction but then how come I have pockets of infinite size but can't climb over anything higher than my ankle? (Maybe I can't climb or jump because of the ridiculous amount of heavy shit I'm carrying.)

This game makes itself hard to love. Three or four times last night I had to spend up to thirty seconds walking up to and backing away from vents in order to get it to say 'press E to climb in'. Obviously the alien got me from behind on one of these occasions.

laborious animations of equipment usage

i am struggling with how to use the hydraulic crank thingy. press both trigger buttons while turning the view stick to counterclockwise. WTF!

I actually liked the abstruseness and ugliness of those controls a lot

just got killed by alien for the first time, thing i'm going to hang this up for the night and let my nerves recover

think*

irritating mini games

i really like the first codebreaking one

annoyed that 90% of the containers i open are empty and i'm not getting to craft anything

Still on nightmare difficulty?

yes! how do i tone it down? i couldn't find the option.

I think it's under options > game settings (on PC), can check later.

i'm stuck on mission three in the lorenz systech lobby ... dude who stays up at the top is like impossible to sneak past

That's when I switched difficulty. Do you have a noisemaker?

Great couple of sessions recently, after 'finally' dispatching the pesky xenomorph (still about a third of the game to go, so we'll see). Still plenty of tension and danger, but relief from the ball-busting unpredictability and invulnerability of the alien.

It's over! We had some good times (headshotting androids with the bolt gun in the reactor), some bad times (mission 16 really pissed me off), some lols (walking into a new room and seeing a stack of boxes collapse for no reason, thinking 'lol glitch' then getting jumped by the facehugger that was hiding in them.) The last few missions really dragged and I kind of wanted it to be over, then then when I was done I wanted more! Still got the dlc to take a look at.

Cannot conceive of playing it on nightmare difficulty.

haven't played it since i got stuck. maybe i need to level down and just jump the dude with my crowbar.

i never stuck with the dlc. seemed insanely hard and the lack of save points bugged me too much

quit this awhile back but i'm determined to finish it. bumped the difficulty down to novice to get past the stupid alien randomness. i swear they used a rng to determine whether the alien sees/hears you or not. the dizzying backdrop to the airlock part was really cool

finished. just not my type of game as i was horrible at it. u ppl doing nightmare difficulty are crazy. but awesome game all-around. shd prob win some awards, at least for environment or sound design.

I have wanted to play this since it was announced for consoles initially but now its on Switch, I took the plunge.

Its basically a cowering simulator...

I like it but if it gets any harder than the first alien encounter, I can see myself noping out of this pretty quick.

Spoiler: it will get harder than the first alien encounter.

I stopped playing it on the PS4 after a while, not because it wasn't any good but in a way because it was too good!

My break from this game became a ... well, break from this game. But I just came across this recent exchange with one of the AI developers, which is fascinating:

I was one of the AI Developers for this game, and you’re totally right. The way this worked is Director operated outside the normal save state system, so when you interact with one of the Xenomorphs or Androids, they will have some degree of knowledge about your play style and strategies. This was done to give the AI some degree of equal footing, just like the player, where continual attempts and save scumming could not allow you to find and exploit some minor flaw in pathing. This means they would learn and hold grudges. As a piece of trivia, we all watched and tried to mimic the Stargate SG1 episode Avatar just a ton of times while working on this routine.

edited 11 hours ago
I LOVE YOUR WORK. This game is a masterpiece and a classic. I wish that it made more cash and we got more sequels because you guys absolutely nailed the aesthetic. Really rekindled my love for Aliens. The polish on everything (like the AI!) really shows :) you guys paid attention to the important details. There's a reason they say it's a true part of the canon. Not many Aliens games hold that title. You should be proud of what you guys created!!
What you just said is prime example of you guys taking it to the next level with your design... I hope future games learn from your advancements!

tysonedwards
11 hours ago
I am right there with you. A lot of work went into the biofeedback engine, where player experience between save states - and even data from Optical Heart Rate Scanners and Micro Expression Frameworks (cough, Kinect v2, cough) - would tie into the play experience even making it so if the player appeared to be enjoying certain sections, dial up the difficulty, increase the number of enemies, or extend the length of a hallway by a few meters. If they are getting frustrated, dynamically dial back the difficulty, in advance of the player ever recognizing the change. Same with the AI design itself and letting actors become aware of evolving strategies between iterations. After all… the player gets to learn from each death.
The “grand vision” was that if people really enjoyed it, maybe Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo add galvanic skin response sensors, 1 lead ECG sensors, microphones, and accelerometers to the controllers so you can know how the player is doing physiologically.
But… none of that happened. Critical failure became cult classic.