151 - Alien: Isolation E3 Impressions

[matt]

At E3, I played two Alien: Isolation demos (challenge mode one as well as the Oculus demo), so I talk about my reactions.

[ranger_lennier]

Challenge mode sounds like a good feature to include in the game for those who want it, but strikes me as an odd choice for the E3 demo. Most people going to the demo will never have played the game before, and they'll only have a few minutes with the demo. I'd expect that in the final game, challenge mode would be an optional extra that people would play only after being very familiar with the game's mechanics.

[JPrice]

Well first off, congrats on the E3 awards!

Back on topic though, I find it weird that they would opt to showcase a challenge mode at E3. I mean for a game of that genre, I'd figure that a vertical slice of gameplay would showcase the stronger elements of the gameplay. Then again I'm not exactly sure how these demonstrations are set up so hahaha
Also that Oculus demo sounds like it's rather cumbersome :/ Although I'm sure that it has its upsides, there's too many petty issues by the seems of things which is a shame really!

[matt]

I agree that challenge mode is a terrible thing demo at E3. Creating demos is a lot of work, so perhaps they punted on it, and chose something that already worked in bite size chunks.

That being said, I found the alien's behavior to be cheap and unfair, which would make for a very frustrating game, but hopefully that won't be the case in the final game. The alien's behavior is apparently procedural and not scripted, which sounds cool, but it might make for some frustrating trial and error, which is what the challenge mode felt like - just hope the random number generator smiles at you and the alien won't sneak up on you when you can't escape...

[gagaplex]

Alien Isolation sounds really odd like they don't know what they want their game to be. I remember hearing about the robots and that was an awful idea, now it sounds like they might be overcompensating in the other direction with the focus entirely on the alien and making that a really tough, really aimless survival mechanic? The devs might be scrambling.

[Grabthehoopka]

I was hoping that the last demo of the game was just a fluke, but the more overwhelmingly negative previews I hear, the more it seems like they really don't know what they're doing. A big budget game like this with a fall release is probably really close to going gold, so there's not much they CAN do to the game at this point, not without delaying it.

My guess is they're gonna focus on damage control. The PR wizards will keep the positive image up, they'll collect as many pre-orders as they can and try to break even by the weekend, before word of mouth spreads.

[matt]

Well, it's probably a minimum of 8 weeks to go from being "done" to on store shelves, so they probably have a month and a half left. It's possible the demo is just old or not a good representation of the game. There are certainly quite a few positive previews, so perhaps the other demo was better.

What is perhaps more worrisome is that I have been following it closely I don't really know what to expect from the game. I thought there were no guns. Now there are guns. I thought there were no robots or people. Now they are, but it's not really clear what their roles are... Is it all random? Is the game completely procedural? Is it a remake of Daylight? hahaha It's really tough to say, which makes me wonder if they aren't painting a picture of the game as a whole for a reason. I guess we'll find out October 7th!

[RightClickSaveAs]

Man that's weird. I haven't followed it much, but there does seem to be a lot of conflicting information. Do you think they're trying to do too much? With the robots and guns and stuff it kinda feels like "it's a survival horror BUT we also want it to be THIS, and also THIS, and why not THIS too while we're at it". I always wondered how they could pull off what they originally said they were going for, which is just a game where you have to not get killed by an alien, especially when they were claiming emergent gameplay rather than scripted sequences.

And now the game is supposedly going to be "about 15 hours long" I'm just wondering how they're going to stretch it out to that.