We never really wanted anyone to feel 100 per cent safe, instead having players scared of what was around the corner.” Although it’s quite effective to start with, that effectiveness diminishes over time, and so you’re going to have to really think about when to use it. You have this really amazing tool which could become this Game Over button for the Alien where every time you use it, it just goes away. “We use that logic with the flamethrower. “Every action has to have a risk or a cost associated with it,” says Hope. This is spectacularly unpleasant, and if a player had already started to rely on the flamethrower, it’s a rude reminder that the Alien is smarter than you think. Run out of fuel and come in for the kill. Players that rely too much on the flamethrower, the Alien will learn that it isn’t as scary as initially thought and, rather than fleeing, it will wait until you “Not necessarily realistic, but it was about believability, because if you believed it then you’d fear it and that would be really powerful.”Ī horrifyingly memorable moment occurred when the Alien slowly learnt about how you played and countered that. “The one word we used more than any on the project was ‘believable’,” says Hope. A short range sensor that will catch out anyone who tries to be smart by walking around behind the Alien. One more thing: it also has eyes in the back of its head. The director also tells the xenomorph how menacing it should be, establishing a rhythm so that the player isn’t constantly terrified. No matter what, the xenomorph is never given the player’s exact location – preserving the terror of the Alien hunting for you without any sort of cheating. It then makes a decision on where the xenomorph should go, and passes the information on to the ‘controller’ AI, which moves the Alien around and interacts with the world. The AI has two separate levels: an AI ‘director’ that knows the location of the player and models the stress level of the player. The xenomorph has a systematic AI that has free rein to track down and slaughter the player, with a macro/micro AI system that tries to ensure they have a chance. It wasn’t binary, but if it saw you it would instantly attack and kill you.” It was listening for the player, it was looking for the player, and responding accordingly, based on what its sense were receiving, so sometimes it would become curious about a sound or a glimpse. “The Alien was kind of driving its own decisions based on what it knew about the world around it. “We used to talk about predators in the office, and we were imagining if we were in the studio and someone had unleashed a tiger, what would we do?” Once they had the core ideals nailed down, things started to fall into place. “You need to survive on your wits and your cunning, and you need to really think about what your next move should be.” “I think that’s kind of what Alien is,” says Hope. There isn’t a lot in the way of firepower in Alien Isolation either, and the team instead tried to create an Alien that felt a little like the team’s metaphorical tiger in the office. “No one said: ‘Well I’d just get a big gun and shoot it down!’. Then we got serious: ‘Okay well you need to get to the fire escape at the far end of the studio, how are you going to do that?’, which would sometimes involve people talking about picking things up and throwing them to distract it, or crawling from desk to desk.” “We used to talk about predators in the office, and we were imagining if we were in the studio and someone had unleashed a tiger into the studio, what would we do? We found it was fascinating to talk about how we’d do it: ‘We’ll get behind the desk and try and look for an escape, and try and peek, and try to see where this tiger was’. “It would need to be something that you respect, and that demands your respect because if you’re not careful it will soon punish you. The best way to make a single Alien terrifying is to empower it, he continues. “I think games in the universe and in that IP had really focused on the Aliens experience, which is about using firepower to deal with the Alien.” “We wanted to create a game that really gave you a feeling of what it would be like to take on and survive that original Alien,” says Hope.
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