Please let this be amazing.
2014 is looking like a good year for horror games.
Little bit of a summary.
- Alien: Isolation by The Creative Assembly.
- Q4 2014.
- Play as Amanda Ripley, Ellen's daughter.
- Set 15 years after the first film. Amanda, a Weyland-Yutani employee, learns that the USCSS Nostromo flight recorder has been recovered on a tradition station, and so seeks it out to learn of her mother's fate.
- Only one Xenomorph in the entire game. Focus on making the aliens scary again.
- Hunts you throughout the game. AI programmed to learn your movement and avoidance patterns to adapt and ambush. Want to make the xeno a "living entity".
- Encounters with xeno deliberately kept scarce to keep them scary.
- During a play test one tester stood by a desk for around seven minutes, and the dev team were worried it was due him having trouble working out where to go, or fumbling with a mechanic. They asked him what was wrong, and he said that he knew the xeno was in the area and was watching its patrol routes trying to work out a pattern, realised there wasn't one, and thus was trying to decide what to do.
- "What you do is different every time, so what it does is different every time".
- Xeno's learning rate is organic, not fixed. May find he learns one thing quickly on one playthrough, but slower on another.
- Other NPC occupants on the station. Both them, and the environment, will prove to be threats of their own.
- "Alien" game, not an "Aliens" game.
- "Haunted house in space".
- "When you come across the alien in our game it's about survival, avoidance, and hiding".
- First person. "Lean" function.
- Equipment: Flashlight, motion tracker, welding tool.
- The Creative Assembly have drawn from around 3 terabytes of unreleased material used for the films, including concept art and music.
- Will not contain any tech not seen in the film, described as "Low-fi sci-fi".
- Next-gen controllers used for gameplay feedback, eg: PS4 light bar flashes in time with the motion tracker.
- "No-one had made the game we wanted to play".
