217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Developer diaries about creating Neverending Nightmares.
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matt
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217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by matt »

I finally finished Alien: Isolation. While I enjoyed the game overall, I had some mixed feelings about it. Here's my take.

-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
ranger_lennier
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by ranger_lennier »

So, what's next? I picked up The Evil Within on sale, so might try that one before too long.
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matt
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by matt »

I'm about halfway through The Evil Within. I almost gave up in the 3rd chapter, but I stuck through it, and it got better. Overall though, I'm not super impressed. I'd say it's okay. I have a lot ready for the developer diary to complain about, but I'm waiting to finish it.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection has been taking up my time as of late because I can play it with my wife. I've also been playing Bayonetta 2 off screen here and there while my wife watches her shows. I'm enjoying both quite a bit. I also played the first half an hour of Sunset Overdrive, which didn't exactly grab me, but Joe said it was really good, and I love the Ratchet & Clank games, so I suspect I'll like it.

Those games will keep me busy for a while! :)
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Grabthehoopka
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by Grabthehoopka »

On the whole, I really liked Alien Isolation. Yes, it was much longer than it needed to be. Yes, there was a lot of cheap deaths and some meat grinder trial and error sections. Yes, the crafting was a little weird and they tried to have strict item management while raining scrap and crafting ingredients down on you like mana from the heavens. Yes, the alien does everything in its power to give you a good look at it. Yes, the artificial intelligence on the humans was terrible.

But, I really liked it. I think it failed as a horror game, but it really succeeded as a suspense thriller-type game. And I think it largely worked because of the artificial intelligence of the alien. The frustration of dying over and over again on the same section was offset by the fact that the alien didn't do the same thing every single time, so it didn't really feel like trial and error.

Yahtzee Croshaw has a really good theory he put forth that he calls the three C's that make up a good game - Challenge, Context, and Catharsis. When writing about Max Payne 3, he defined Challenge as "the ability to fuck up", and said that the physics-based slow motion diving in that game was so satisfying to do because about 25% of the time, you'd come up with a plan to dive through an open doorway and spin around in midair, shooting everyone in the room like a cool guy. You run towards the door, gracefully dive through the air in slow motion, smack your head on the doorframe, fall down, and lie there in shame while everyone in the room riddles your crumpled heap of a body with bullets. It was because there's always that chance that something could go wrong that makes it satisfying, and if you do something awesome, it's because you did something awesome, the game didn't go out of its way to ensure that it happened.

Anyways, the reason I bring all this up is because that's how I felt with the alien encounters. At any moment, it could drop down, and at any moment, it could totally fucking kill me. When I'm cowering behind a waist-high obstacle, I'm really afraid that it'll kill me because there have been times that I thought I was safe, but then it saw me. With very few exceptions, nothing is scripted, and so not only does it necessitate thinking on your feet, but each encounter felt like I was matching wits with a real, intelligent, unpredictable thing. The first time I played through it, I noticed the encounters getting harder and harder since it seemed to spot me so easily each time. Then, I read somewhere that they programmed the AI to learn from the way you play and adapt, and I figured out that the reason it was spotting me so easily is because it would stop and listen for my motion tracker. At that point, I fell in love with this game.

So, even though that it's nowhere near perfect, I think that it's still a great achievement, not only in terms of the aesthetics, but in nailing the cat-and-mouse atmosphere of getting stalked by an unstoppable monster better than any game I've ever played.

Also, the ambient sound is fucking amazing. If you haven't tried yet, I recommend playing it with the music volume turned all the way down.
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matt
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by matt »

Out of curiosity, what difficulty did you play on? I wonder if the difficulty affects people's enjoyment of the game.

I think they had a help message that said the Alien can hear your motion tracker, which I think was a really nice touch. They did a lot of neat things with the AI and made it feel pretty adversarial - at least at the beginning. I felt like I was able to understand and work around the limits of the AI by the end of the game.

I am VERY skeptical of any time anyone claims that AI learns. Learning algorithms are really really hard to pull off and rarely learn what you want them to. I'm not trying to say anything bad about the AI in Alien: Isolation, just that I am skeptical that it learns.

All of that said, overall I liked the game. The DLC with Ripley was really underwhelming though. :(
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Grabthehoopka
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by Grabthehoopka »

I played on hard, only cause the game recommended that I did.

While I can't say that there was much tangible evidence of it learning, I remember a bit of pre-release info where the developers said that if you throw a flare to distract it, it'll work, but if you keep doing it, it'll get less interested over time, and instead take it as a sign that you just threw something and look for you wherever the flare isn't. I remember being really conservative over the course of the game with my distractions cause I was specifically afraid of it getting wise to my shit and ignoring my noisemakers, even though the game gave me no indication that it would do so. I just didn't want to take the chance. I did, however, notice at least one distinct change in its behavior a ways into the game. It screeched and charged towards me from way across the room, so I held my flamethrower out, waiting for it to get close to me, but once it started getting within range it started slowing down and then stopped and started posturing at me, standing up tall and hissing. Of course, I realized that I'd already torched it quite a few times already, so any smart organism would probably be able to recognize the flame thrower by now. Of course, it started tip-toeing towards me and I had to torch it anyways, and it ran away and gave me a slap on its way out just to be an asshole, but it was such an incredible little moment and it's attention to detail like that that made it feel like a living, thinking thing, and that's why I think this game is worth playing. Creative Assembly tried something really ambitious that they could have screwed up in an infinite number of ways, but I think they succeeded in creating something that feels like a living thing. From little details like its head bumping into the overhead lights to the nuances in its body language (the dev team says they based its movements and animation on cats, and all of its animation was done from scratch, no mo-cap), I just kept thinking that you could teach a whole class about this thing, and I'm sure the dev team could write a doorstopper-length book about what went into making it.

If it does actually "learn" like they say, maybe they just cheated and have a much simpler system where the value of its reactions to certain things have diminishing returns or something, I don't know. Then there's the issue of *cough cough*there being more than one alien*cough cough* which kind of puts a hole in the logic behind one continuous curve of "learned" information over the course of the game. Or maybe it's just on an encounter-by-encounter basis. I don't know. God, I hope they do a postmortem on this game.

Now, if only they'd spent half as much time and devotion on PR and their show floor demos than they did on the alien itself.
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matt
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by matt »

That is an interesting point. I was thinking about machine learning algorithms, but like most things in game AI programming, it's much better to cheat. Just keep track of flares used, and change the probabilities based on that.

It would be interesting to see a postmortem, but sometimes you wonder how much of that is PR spin. I heard a talk by a guy at Valve about Half Life 1 AI, and apparently the enemies can "smell" you. I think it probably just amounts to a distance check so you can't sneak up on them, but it sounds much more exciting if you call it smell.

In that sense, the asylum patients in Neverending Nightmares totally smell you. hahah.
-Matt Gilgenbach
Lead Frightener at Infinitap Games
Grabthehoopka
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by Grabthehoopka »

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"When our design committee came up with Neverending Nightmares, we had a simple goal - we wanted the enemies to really smell the environment, and the player, but we quickly found out that - we couldn't really achieve this with any current tech out there today. So we said hey, we need to really...build this from the ground up. The team's really breaking new ground here."

*WHOOSH woosh!*

"See here is the "inmate" enemy, and you can really see, right there, he's got a nose - he's smelling-he's smelling so many things right now, you don't even know. We, uh, used a modified form of CryEngine for this, just for this one part of the game, so...the game is using a...waveform sorting algorithm to track all the olfaction particulates in their smell matrix, and as a result, see, here, they're-they actually respond to the smells in real time. See, here, he-he doesn't...he doesn't smell the player, see, he's just going on his standard patrolling routine - really advanced AI, by the way, but we'll talk about that in another press release - but if the player gets within a positive smell value range, well let's just see what happens. And, there you go, they get murdered. It's-it's incredible, really, what we can do with technology these days."

*WHOOSH!*

"See here, this is the "baby" monster enemy, everyone here at the office loves these guys...and if you go- if you hide in these closets, see...the baby will smell...he'll smell the closet, and then- oh...oh, well he didn't really...do much that time, but you know, that just goes to show the...the dynamics...and the advanced AI we're dealing with here. Here he comes back. Maybe he'll smell the thing agai- no, no, he's just gonna walk on by. That's fine, too. He's smelling so many things right now, you don't even know."

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"We think that this is the next big step in next-gen gaming, honestly. We've only brushed the surface of the murdering/not murdering applications of Turbosmell®, but in time, when other studios get their hands on it, and as it becomes more widely available to smaller developers, you know, who knows what they'll come up with. Sports games. Racing games. Fighting games. JRPGs, rhythm, and hidden object games - the sky's the limit, really. Yeah, they'll look back on this, years from now, and they'll be saying...you know...yeah. Neverending Nightmares. Good shit. Changed the playing field. So-"

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preorder now for the neverending breathers pack absolutely free and get a boost for inhalers in the in-game store preorder today



See? You just needed the right marketing team.
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RightClickSaveAs
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by RightClickSaveAs »

Smells like a winner to me! *Turn to camera, sunglasses slide down, rock guitar solo kicks in*

I feel like I've gone on about Alien Isolation a bunch already, so I'll just say I liked it but didn't love it. I played on Normal for a while, then switched to Easy, which may have not been the "best" way to play it, but I also would have never finished it on Hard or even Normal either, so I take responsibility for that.

My biggest complaints are about for how "random" the AI is supposed to be, the alien is almost always in the same area you are, which cuts some of the tension, because once you have the scanner, it's just a matter of keeping an eye on that, then hiding when it pops out. And you can always tell what areas of the game are set up for the alien to be constantly tracking you. It would have been more effective to make it truly random and have the alien just disappear for 10 minutes or so all throughout. Think how much more nerve wracking it could be not being able to see it on the motion tracker but knowing it's still out there. They do that in some areas but it feels very staged, like when you first get to the security office with the surviving marshals, you right away get the sense that's going to be a sanctuary for however long you stay there.

Also the alien constantly would pop out of a vent, stalk around trying to find me, and pop back up only to pop right back down the same vent the second I tried to leave hiding and get on with the game. That's the annoying kind of random.
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Re: 217 - Alien: Isolation final thoughts

Post by Grabthehoopka »

And, speak of the devil, Creative Assembly just released a patch that added super easy and super hard difficulty levels.

http://www.alienisolation.com/news/2014 ... ulty-modes

And, consequently, they've been posting concept artwork ranging from really cool (environments) to really bad (a slew of mad max-style improvised weaponry that I'm glad they cut) and downloadables like wallpapers, the in-game posters, and sounds from the game designed to be used as alert noises for your phone.
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