However the Total War creator sees this as a validation of their own vision and approach, which is taking everything back to the original film. No more gun runs.
The corridor shooter formula is banished as Creative want us feeling the survival horror breathing down our necks as we deal with just one, terrifying xenomorph.
”It did completely reaffirm to us that there was a massive Alien fanbase out there and they’re all after something very specific, and everyone has their own idea of what the alien should be,” said lead designer Gary Napper, referring to the troubled Aliens: Colonial Marines and the bitter disappointment fans vented.
”That original movie was all about that one alien, and that’s what we decided we wanted to deliver,” added senior producer, Jonathan Court. ”We thought the alien had been done effectively a disservice in a lot of games, it had been boiled down to fodder and we wanted to make a really meaningful experience with our alien and make it such an important part of the game.”
This ‘faithful recreation’ of the 70’s Alien film and its atmosphere had a problem though… the alien itself.
”When we built this alien, when we first set out we said ‘we’re going to build the exact alien from the first film,’ but if you look at the alien from the first film the alien doesn’t really move much,” laughed Napper. ”It stands around, and they generally walk into him rather than him hunting and attacking them. So we found ourselves building people’s perception of what the alien was, rather than an exact copy from the first film.”
Creative Assembly are getting their nerd on with Alien: Isolation with around ”3 terabytes of data from Fox’s archives and that is invaluable stuff,” said Court. ”I mean we used the metrics for the original sets, we fed all that into our environment build. We took this stuff really seriously and it was good to get hold of, it really informed what we were making.”
One area of focus is making sure to capture that aesthetic of late 70’s sci-fi when it comes to gadgets and machinery.
”Our UI guys have done some incredible stuff where they’ve been doing things like making a UI prompt screen or a bit of video, playing it back through an old VHS recorder whilst stamping on it and twiddling the cables and getting some actual VHS distortion on it and recording that and playing it back and capturing that digitally.”
It appears that, while fans were left in tears over Aliens: Colonial Marines, it at least helped bolster Creative Assembly’s team in that they were approaching Isolation in the right way. Check out the full talk between Creative and GamesIndustry.biz. Alien: Isolation releases on PC, Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One, PS4 in Q4 2014.
”It was great having people from the press come in and play it because we had them all with headphones on in a dark room playing the game. All we could hear when we were watching them was their breathing - slowly it got faster and faster and then you’d hear the odd gasp in the room and one guy nearly fell of his chair.”
”And I saw some guy nearly kick his TV over,” adds Court. ”We got some good reactions, we wished we’d videoed it now.”