204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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matt
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204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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I'm about half way through Alien: Isolation, so I thought I'd share more impressions about the game.



Is anyone else playing? What do you think?
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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I'm only a couple hours in (I ended up buying the game after all) and I love the setup so far. They really nailed the 70's sci fi look of the Alien movie, I spent 20-30 minutes in the first sections of the game just wandering around looking at everything.

I'm not a big fan of stealth though either, and that's my least favorite part so far is hiding from other humans. They're almost all dicks to me so far!

At this stage the alien has been utterly terrifying because I haven't seen it much yet and I don't have the motion tracker, and the game is keeping me super tense. I'll be interested to see how long that continues.

It makes me wonder though if a little bit of the tension is lessened because we know so much about the alien from the movies and other games. I mean it still seems really effective, but I couldn't help but think how it would be if the game was about something completely unknown and truly alien stalking you through a spaceship. Although then of course it wouldn't have the big name appeal, which is a big reason why it interested me in the first place.
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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I think part of the appeal of the original Alien is that you never really get a good look at the alien. While I'm sure that was to keep the effects budget down, I think it really makes it scarier - you don't have a good idea of what it is that is stalking poor Ripley and her crew. Now, the alien has been seen a million times (as well as killed), so I think it definitely takes some of the horror out of it.

Personally, I think the less you see of the alien, the better the game is. It is really creepy when it pops up on you for a kill (although also frustrating), but when you see the tail pull out of a room you just entered, it is a neat feeling. However, if you hide and just watch it walk around from under a table where the entire thing is in plain sight, it doesn't really look that scary. The walk animation seems a bit strange, and I don't know. It just doesn't really scare me.

What difficulty did you play it on? Even Joe decided to play on Casual, and he's more hardcore than I. He was saying that he wasn't really hooked on it and has been playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Evil Within instead. My wife and I just finished Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, but I suspect she'll want to keep playing. hahah I did manage to squeeze in a little Alien: Isolation time today when my wife was shopping and doing laundry.
-Matt Gilgenbach
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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I stared out on my default Normal, but I haven't gotten far enough to really see what difference it makes yet, I've been distracted by playing through Dreamfall again now that the first chapter of the Kickstarted game is out. I'll probably dive back into it this week, it's a great Halloween horror contender.

I'm kinda bad at stealth games so I'm wondering how the normal difficulty is going to go!
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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Even on causal, I feel pretty frustrated, so I suspect you'll definitely be challenged. The difficulty is a bit strange as well. It seems like there are some spikes at points where the alien just won't leave you alone, and then robot sections, which can really drain your resources (health, EMP mines). The crafting system is a bit irritating as well because I want to stockpile resources, but they have weird arbitrary limits on each piece, and I often find myself throwing away sensors (since the limit is only 3) and never having enough compound B or SCI injectors or whatever...
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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matt wrote:Even on causal, I feel pretty frustrated, so I suspect you'll definitely be challenged. The difficulty is a bit strange as well. It seems like there are some spikes at points where the alien just won't leave you alone, and then robot sections, which can really drain your resources (health, EMP mines). The crafting system is a bit irritating as well because I want to stockpile resources, but they have weird arbitrary limits on each piece, and I often find myself throwing away sensors (since the limit is only 3) and never having enough compound B or SCI injectors or whatever...
One thing I just found out about crafting, because it popped up as a help screen while a level was loading, is that you can pull up the crafting menu and commit resources like sensors to building something, then they'll be taken out of your inventory. I'm glad I caught that early because I've been scouring everywhere and hitting the limits pretty quickly.

I'm really getting into the game now, although I've died a few times. The first stealth part where you have to get past the trigger happy survivors in the big lobby was really frustrating, and I ended up just killing them all with my wrench/hammer thing because I could not figure out how to sneak past. I don't think that was the optimal way to do it but hey it worked, I got shot a couple times but I managed to take them out one at a time and then didn't have to worry about it again.

It's gotten a lot more fun since then, I don't like stealth games so you'd think this wouldn't be a good game for me, but being hunted by the alien is a lot more interesting than just having to sneak past androids or humans.
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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Wow you were right, this game ended up being super hard for me on Normal. I died over and over at the part where you have to find the doctor's keycard, because the alien just would not give me a break. It was all over me until I finally gave up and dropped it down to Casual.

The death scenes are really intense, but seeing them so much has started to take the edge away. There are times when I just start to get annoyed instead of scared. Now that I have the motion tracker the game's fallen into a bit of a pattern now too, listen for sounds and watch for movement, move to next area, repeat. I agree with you on the objectives also, I'm pulling up the map constantly because there are all these goals I forget about right away, due to the fact that there's always the more pressing matter of the alien lurking around waiting to drop down and kill me.
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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Firstly, I finished the game! Whoo hooo! I'll probably do another video at some point, but I have a bit of a backlog of pre-recorded ones at the moment. hehehe
One thing I just found out about crafting, because it popped up as a help screen while a level was loading, is that you can pull up the crafting menu and commit resources like sensors to building something, then they'll be taken out of your inventory. I'm glad I caught that early because I've been scouring everywhere and hitting the limits pretty quickly.
I did notice that, but I quickly hit the limits of how many items you can carry. :-/ However, right at the end of the game, I noticed that you can still press L1 when not prompted, commit the resources to one that it won't let you construct. That way, you can pick up even more components. It doesn't help with the low limit of scrap... :-/

Yeah, I didn't really like the trigger happy survivors. I wanted to not kill survivors, but I'm not sure I found a good way around some of the either...

It's weird. Now that you've gotten that far, there are very few changes to the formula. They introduce one new enemy type that I found SUPER annoying and mix up combinations of the various enemy types, but basically you have at least 10 more hours of the same. haha Well, I guess there are the space suit missions interspersed in there, but those aren't that great.

All in all, I enjoyed the game, but I didn't love it. It really felt like a missed opportunity. I would have liked a shorter version of the game with the alien not constantly nagging you and no robots. The robots are super annoying.
-Matt Gilgenbach
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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I finally finished it this weekend (wow I just realized it took me nearly a month of off and on playing) and I'm with you. The game would have been so much better as a shorter experience, because as well designed as the levels are, there is quite a bit of padding. Holy crap I lost count of how many generators I had to start up, in some cases there are daisy chained generators or access terminals/switches/levers you have to hit in order, and you have to backtrack through a lot of them. Most of the objectives just felt like busywork to bloat the length, and the little hacking minigames got really repetitive.

As for the Alien, it was utterly terrifying at the beginning and so well done, but it loses its edge after a certain point. It ran into the problem I figured it would, not being able to sustain tension over such a long period of time. I came in around 30 hours total for the game, and after about the first 10, I just started getting annoyed at the alien sections. Hiding from it isn't interesting or frightening after a while, you just want it to go away so you can get to the next section. And the random AI apparently means it will do things like jump up into an air vent, making you think you can finally stop hiding, only to pop right back out of the same vent a couple seconds later. That happened to me way too many times. Thankfully you get the flamethrower at some point, I don't think I could have finished the game without that. Maybe I should have used distractions more or something, I always just found the spaces to be so enclosed that they weren't that helpful.

I also kept it on Easy after trying out Normal for the first few hours, it may be more tense on Normal and Hard but I'd never have the patience to find out.
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Re: 204 - Alien: Isolation midupdate

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It is crazy how long it is! You make a very good point about how silly the daisy chained generators are. I did record a dev diary with my final thoughts that I'll post soon. I started playing The Evil Within, and I'm only on chapter 3, but I'm not really impressed so far. The game design seems a bit messy and hasn't been scary yet...
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
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