It's going to come down to a matter of personal preference, but I respect the direction that Creative Assembly took with the game.
Also, I think the practical necessities of reviewing a game are the wrong fit for playing a survival-horror title. When you have to rush through a game as quickly as possible, you are going to play through it at long stretches. I never play survival horror games like that. I will play them for a few hours, and then take a break. That level of tension is always going to bear down on you if you expose yourself to it for huge stretches. A game like this ought to be consumed in manageable chunks, not a marathon session.
I liked the one mission in AvP where you made your way into an alien hive to rescue someone, and then had to run all the way back out with a hundred aliens or more on your tail. There were too many to fight, all you could do was run. It felt right.
I'm very much looking forward to giving this one a try on Tuesday.
I think the game looks and sounds great... Amnesia was also a hide and seek game, but was entirely fun and kept me entertained all the way through. Aliens is a great franchise, and if your going to make a game off of it, this has to be one of the best ways to do it, to really put the dread and fear that resonates with the alien itself into the player.
I don't trust many reviews lately, especially IGN. Their review gave it a 5.9/10, but the text itself was really mediocre it felt like and also a bit biased (felt like whoever wrote it didn't like horror games). In addition, one of the "negative points" on the game was:
...the alien’s unpredictability is both Isolation’s greatest strength as well as its most crippling weakness.
So the game gives you some great, unpredictable horror monster, and you say its one of the worst parts of the game but also the best?! Make up your mind maybe?
Also, like Richard said above about the breaks between gameplay and tension is also neccessary. It does indeed seem like some game reviews are simply rushed to be put out as new content, and you can't exactly rush around in a horror game without either dieing alot or having a very incomplete experience (IGN review also said they died alot, could this be why?).
Polygon also gave it a bad review, but other people around the net have been giving it very positive reviews too, like Kotaku. It seems that people either really like it or don't, but like others mentioned on the previous page too it doesn't seem like there's much in these reviews about bugs or glitches, which is always a great sign compared to Colonial Marines.
I don't think anyone at CA is particularly surprised by getting polarised reviews. I can obviously only speak for art department, as that's all I've been involved with ... but the overall feeling I get is that we tried to do something a bit new - some people liked it, some people didn't. That seems pretty legit to me. If anything, I'm kinda happy that we got some bad reviews. It indicates that we didn't sell out and try to please everyone.
Also, like Richard said above about the breaks between gameplay and tension is also neccessary. It does indeed seem like some game reviews are simply rushed to be put out as new content, and you can't exactly rush around in a horror game without either dieing alot or having a very incomplete experience (IGN review also said they died alot, could this be why?).
This is an important element that Creative Assembly had to take a risk on. Really good horror movies live or die on their pacing. You ratchet up the tension slowly, and then you release it. Rinse and repeat. It's how good horror always works.
But Creative Assembly opted to essentially let the Alien off the leash. The unpredictability of the Alien makes it impossible to strictly control the pacing. The pacing of the build up of tension and then release is not in the developers' hands. There are far fewer pre-scripted sequences. It sounds like most of the events in the game occur in a more organic fashion. Without that tight control the pacing is up to the Alien AI, and to a certain degree, the player.
This is not a flaw, as it seems the build up of tension is just fine. I am wondering if Creative Assembly will be making patches to the Alien's AI based on metrics gleaned from users' play sessions. And I'm also wondering which of the difficulty settings would provide me with the Alien experience I most crave.
But the general lack of technical complaints has me thinking this one's going to be a day-one purchase for me. I've heard nothing but praise for the game's art-style, atmosphere, and audio. That's the kind of triple-A I crave.
The game sounds like a mess to me. Unpredictable teleporting Alien, that's also a cheater that stalks you everywhere you go. Couple it with very infrequent save points and linearity of the levels and no way to predict or plan on anything. Based on what I read, the story is paper-thin and your only role in the game is to crouch all over the ship trying not to die suddenly, pushing buttons and pulling levers for 20 hours.
I haven't played it yet, but I don't think it's something I would enjoy. It looks great thought, with all the retro sci-fi look going for it. At least there's some value to be had just looking around...
I'm looking forward for this game. I was a big fan of AVP and such not a big fan of console or anything but if it goes under Pc i'm going to buy it for the nostalgia.
It also needs to be good also, i will read reviews before hand and make a decision.
The game sounds like a mess to me. Unpredictable teleporting Alien, that's also a cheater that stalks you everywhere you go. Couple it with very infrequent save points and linearity of the levels and no way to predict or plan on anything. Based on what I read, the story is paper-thin and your only role in the game is to crouch all over the ship trying not to die suddenly, pushing buttons and pulling levers for 20 hours.
I haven't played it yet, but I don't think it's something I would enjoy. It looks great thought, with all the retro sci-fi look going for it. At least there's some value to be had just looking around...
Just curious, but did you watch Alien? And if so, can you tell me how the experience of the crew members is any different?
Just curious, but did you watch Alien? And if so, can you tell me how the experience of the crew members is any different?
I watched the first three movies. In movies it's very different. In movies, Alien can actually be killed, in the game he's indestructible. Also in movies Alien doesn't stalk Ripley for 20 hours straight and never teleports from one place to another. There's also a story in these movies and interesting characters. In movies, at least in the first one, Alien is portrayed like an intelligent hunter, in the game it's just a random cheater AI-controlled instakilling machine. In movies, characters were able to hide from Alien when they were discovered, that's not the case in the game.
I understand what devs tried to do with this game and I think they have the right idea, but right now the execution seems lacking.
The Polygon review's being received poorly by Alien fans but they do a good job summing up their frustrations.
The combination of:
* Alien can appear any time, unpredictably
* Long gap between save points
* Once you start an action, it's very long to cancel
paints a picture of the kind of frustration I'd hate to put up with. One of my biggest peeves in games is instakills that you can't have avoided, and these three things sound like you'd not just have those instakills, but you'd also have to redo 20+ minutes of progress afterwards.
i can always applaud to someone who is trying something new, to me two things are already checked, unscripted and no jump scare for a horror/survival (even with a bit of an AI cheating), besides the graphics looks so damn good.
I watched the first three movies. In movies it's very different. In movies, Alien can actually be killed, in the game he's indestructible. Also in movies Alien doesn't stalk Ripley for 20 hours straight and never teleports from one place to another. There's also a story in these movies and interesting characters. In movies, at least in the first one, Alien is portrayed like an intelligent hunter, in the game it's just a random cheater AI-controlled instakilling machine. In movies, characters were able to hide from Alien when they were discovered, that's not the case in the game.
I understand what devs tried to do with this game and I think they have the right idea, but right now the execution seems lacking.
Exactly my primary thought, a game with a cheating A.I and no real smarts.
As an alien fan, i don't care about creative assembly. Total War Shogun 2 is one of my fav strategic games.
I enjoyed amnesia. the dark descent, Outlast + its dlc, and i'm sure i will enjoy this one. But right now, i'm more interested in the horror game "The evil within", so i will purchase this alien game on sale .
The Gearbox game: alien colonial marines was a shit in all the senses, but i ended picking it up in a nice sale with its season.
Picked it up today off steam, started playing. Its a beautiful looking game, only thing off putting so far is it seems like none of the ingame dialouge matches up to any of the characters mouth. Its picky, but very annoying to look at it.
Otherwise, the game is the definition of "NOPEEEEEE" (in the good way).
Yeah the lip syncing is pretty naff! I'm enjoying it so far though! It's nice to be able to play it through a little more objectively having not worked on the game for the past 5 months!
I also acquired a copy via Steam yesterday. I got to put in about an hour of play time. Spent most of it moving slowly through the game, and drinking in the art and environmental design. The rig I put together a year or so ago is handling this game well, it defaulted to "Ultra" for most of the graphical settings. It looks really, really good.
I haven't gotten to most of the gameplay elements yet. I will likely encounter the Alien sometime tonight. I could actually play during the day, but it just seems wrong to play this particular game while the sun is out.
They had a deal on GMG with 20% off for the PC Version. Regular copy would be $40.
Also read that performance is very good even on older rigs. So getting good performance and quality should be no problem. I am excited to play this game.
I'm playing the PS4 edition and have to say it's really awesome! They nailed the atmosphere of the original perfectly. You can definitely sense that the folks at Creative Assembly are huge fans themselves. BUT the framerate during cutscenes breaks the immersion so badly every time, I can hardly imagine how this was able to pass QA. It's really weird since during gameplay it runs rather smoothly, hope they fix this asap.
I also acquired a copy via Steam yesterday. I got to put in about an hour of play time. Spent most of it moving slowly through the game, and drinking in the art and environmental design. The rig I put together a year or so ago is handling this game well, it defaulted to "Ultra" for most of the graphical settings. It looks really, really good.
I haven't gotten to most of the gameplay elements yet. I will likely encounter the Alien sometime tonight. I could actually play during the day, but it just seems wrong to play this particular game while the sun is out.
Yep, same here, the game runs really smoothly and looks beautiful. My machine that I haven't updated for a while now also defaulted to ultra on 1920x1080 and I've been getting 60fps just fine. Only had a chance to put a couple hours into it so far (finally saw a glimpse of da alien). Another thing Ive noticed is that the crafting elements are not well explained, or I somehow missed something on them... but after messing with it with it for a couple minutes you can get it easily. I'm also really enjoying the interactivity with the environment - even saving leaves you so vulnerable to any enemies around you. Its a good game so far :poly124:.
So far impressions on the PC version haven't been good.
The game looks fantastic, but the cutscene audio is clearly out of synch and the moment I'm in control, the audio collapses completely and is crackly and constantly breaking up, rendering the game completely unplayable. I'm guessing CA have used DirectAudio and the buffer is under-running, but I can't seem to get around it at all.
Small annoyances include the FOV defaulting to 45 (do you want to make me nauseous?), which can be modified in the menu, though for some reason you have to slide the slider to the left to get higher FOVs. There's some kind of mouse acceleration that I can't disable that makes control somewhat awkward. Also prompts like 'press the move keys to move' are pretty useless. I've also seen the unskippable startup movies several times trying to resolve these audio issues
My main gripe is that audio issue though. Until that's resolved, I can't play the game.
Is there any technical postmortem presentation or slide published about the engine and graphics?? i'm really impressed with the game performance and quality....
So I played this game for 30-45 minutes last night and was honestly floored at how good it is so far. The environment and sounds and the way Ripley feels as I walk around is just amazing. I haven't felt like I was actually in a video game world this strongly since I played Half-Life 2 when it came out. I'll be able to say more when I've played it more, but so far...my impressions of this game are very good. I inched along every corridor terrified that rushing would somehow notify the Alien. And because I moved slowly I was able to suck in every inch and detail of the ship as I passed. So gerd. I might be a little biased as the original Alien is in my top 3 favorite movies. But even the controls are so cool! For instance when you use a computer terminal you have to use different keys on your keyboard (pg up and pg down) like they would've used in the past to operate older computers so it literally feels like you are crouching over this terminal trying to find the keys. Good stuff.
Is there any technical postmortem presentation or slide published about the engine and graphics?? i'm really impressed with the game performance and quality....
Only about 90 minutes in but this game definitely delivers on the atmopshere I was expecting! I cant wait to get some time this weekend to dig into it.
marks, just checked out your site. Awesome stuff! You guys should definitely do an art dump
interestingly they never mentioned what engine this game is built on, it looks like a highly capable one for at least interior use and funnily it always looks a bit
Unreal4ish.
I vaguely remember something about the studio switching to PBR during the middle of production, which you(Mark) led I believe? It'd be nice to see some stuff on that, maybe how the in-house engine is handling everything with shader options, or even how the team learned it quickly. Or what exactly went into the Alien acting the way it does, with things being random and sounds triggering it?
All I know is an art dump is certainly needed for this beautiful game.:thumbup:
I'm at a point where I'm running around with a flamethrower not being scared of the alien anymore, played a couple of hours
amazingly beautiful game, perfect atmosphere
level assets are great and the leveldesign is not too complicated
except at the start where I was supposed to look for a vent hole with my flashflight and I couldn't find enough batteries in the room and had to slide along the walls until I found the vent
human characters don't live up to the quality of the levels though but the droids work fine and I don't hate them as much for taking time away from the alien as I thought I would..
playing on hard, don't know if the alien AI is smarter than me or if it's just cheating too obviously .. it's happened many times that I can't get out of a room because the alien always comes back to check in that room as soon as I exit a locker (which is way too loud.. would have loved to be able to just open the locker door and not basically kicking it open)..
hide in a locker.. alien sniffs around.. get out of the locker, alien comes running, hide in the same locker, alien sniffs around, over and over.. more of an annoyance than scary after the 10th time you have to get back into the same locker
some gamedesign annoyances but the atmosphere lets me over look that
"finally an alien game done right" kinda thing, I would love to see a predator game rather than a sequel to this - but not with as many guns as one might expect, just replace the alien with a predator and put us in the jungle ;D
I only play late at night with my headphones at max.. the audio is amazing..
have to throw the headphones off as soon as the alien sees me and comes stomping behind me though, the sound of that is way too intense for my fragile heart.. I'll just take the death thank you :poly142:
like everyone here, I'd also love a tech breakdown - of the alien!
the tail is probably just basic ragdoll physics but it looks good enough for a walkthrough of the tech I'd say! some alien animation bugs which don't make sense (switching from one animation to another seems to bug out, such a basic funcction) but it's all good.. you're not supposed to look at the alien anyways I guess
except at the start where I was supposed to look for a vent hole with my flashflight and I couldn't find enough batteries in the room and had to slide along the walls until I found the vent
There are multiple batteries in the same place you get the flashlight, and the character even prompts you to pick them up - how did you miss them??
Did they give this to the teaboy to animate? Ugh. The atmosphere is great, massively let down by the total sub-par and possibly even a generation behind in animation.
granted that except for the alien tail being cool (probably using a similar tech to tomb raider 1 ponytail but still), the animations do their part? I'd say it's more the implementation of the anims and the bugs surrounding them rather than the animations that's wonky?
animation doesn't really have any generation leaps as other game assets do..
it's always gonna come down to the same principles to make animation look a way that fits the game (which these anims do I'd say?)..
the only advances I can think of that I'd expect very soon are more IK solutions.. it's always gonna be the same joints driving the skinned mesh though..
the game does stay in the half life era when it comes to npc's aligning themselfs to where the player is standing, just having an idle and a turn left and right depending on where the playing is going, with a slight aim constraint on the head.. that could have been explored more sure, but a massive let down? I dunno
I think Super may be referring to the cut-scene animation, which looks so-so. It's nowhere near as polished as the rest of the game, and as Super said, is kind of a letdown.
Holy moly this game is so beautiful. I don't know how it's possible for such a beautify game to play so smoothly on Ultra in 1200p on my rig. I love the design and everything, even though I hate horror games, it's worth it!
Ive been really enjoying it a lot so far. It's tense and well put together. I'm only about a third in (I think) but it's already getting up there with AvP2000 in terms of how faithful it feels to the franchise. Great work guys!
Replies
in the first two games, you felt like a mouse in a base filled with cats. even your biggest guns didn't do much.
Also, I think the practical necessities of reviewing a game are the wrong fit for playing a survival-horror title. When you have to rush through a game as quickly as possible, you are going to play through it at long stretches. I never play survival horror games like that. I will play them for a few hours, and then take a break. That level of tension is always going to bear down on you if you expose yourself to it for huge stretches. A game like this ought to be consumed in manageable chunks, not a marathon session.
I liked the one mission in AvP where you made your way into an alien hive to rescue someone, and then had to run all the way back out with a hundred aliens or more on your tail. There were too many to fight, all you could do was run. It felt right.
I'm very much looking forward to giving this one a try on Tuesday.
I don't trust many reviews lately, especially IGN. Their review gave it a 5.9/10, but the text itself was really mediocre it felt like and also a bit biased (felt like whoever wrote it didn't like horror games). In addition, one of the "negative points" on the game was: So the game gives you some great, unpredictable horror monster, and you say its one of the worst parts of the game but also the best?! Make up your mind maybe?
Also, like Richard said above about the breaks between gameplay and tension is also neccessary. It does indeed seem like some game reviews are simply rushed to be put out as new content, and you can't exactly rush around in a horror game without either dieing alot or having a very incomplete experience (IGN review also said they died alot, could this be why?).
Polygon also gave it a bad review, but other people around the net have been giving it very positive reviews too, like Kotaku. It seems that people either really like it or don't, but like others mentioned on the previous page too it doesn't seem like there's much in these reviews about bugs or glitches, which is always a great sign compared to Colonial Marines.
This is an important element that Creative Assembly had to take a risk on. Really good horror movies live or die on their pacing. You ratchet up the tension slowly, and then you release it. Rinse and repeat. It's how good horror always works.
But Creative Assembly opted to essentially let the Alien off the leash. The unpredictability of the Alien makes it impossible to strictly control the pacing. The pacing of the build up of tension and then release is not in the developers' hands. There are far fewer pre-scripted sequences. It sounds like most of the events in the game occur in a more organic fashion. Without that tight control the pacing is up to the Alien AI, and to a certain degree, the player.
This is not a flaw, as it seems the build up of tension is just fine. I am wondering if Creative Assembly will be making patches to the Alien's AI based on metrics gleaned from users' play sessions. And I'm also wondering which of the difficulty settings would provide me with the Alien experience I most crave.
But the general lack of technical complaints has me thinking this one's going to be a day-one purchase for me. I've heard nothing but praise for the game's art-style, atmosphere, and audio. That's the kind of triple-A I crave.
I haven't played it yet, but I don't think it's something I would enjoy. It looks great thought, with all the retro sci-fi look going for it. At least there's some value to be had just looking around...
It also needs to be good also, i will read reviews before hand and make a decision.
Just curious, but did you watch Alien? And if so, can you tell me how the experience of the crew members is any different?
I watched the first three movies. In movies it's very different. In movies, Alien can actually be killed, in the game he's indestructible. Also in movies Alien doesn't stalk Ripley for 20 hours straight and never teleports from one place to another. There's also a story in these movies and interesting characters. In movies, at least in the first one, Alien is portrayed like an intelligent hunter, in the game it's just a random cheater AI-controlled instakilling machine. In movies, characters were able to hide from Alien when they were discovered, that's not the case in the game.
I understand what devs tried to do with this game and I think they have the right idea, but right now the execution seems lacking.
The combination of:
* Alien can appear any time, unpredictably
* Long gap between save points
* Once you start an action, it's very long to cancel
paints a picture of the kind of frustration I'd hate to put up with. One of my biggest peeves in games is instakills that you can't have avoided, and these three things sound like you'd not just have those instakills, but you'd also have to redo 20+ minutes of progress afterwards.
Exactly my primary thought, a game with a cheating A.I and no real smarts.
I enjoyed amnesia. the dark descent, Outlast + its dlc, and i'm sure i will enjoy this one. But right now, i'm more interested in the horror game "The evil within", so i will purchase this alien game on sale
The Gearbox game: alien colonial marines was a shit in all the senses, but i ended picking it up in a nice sale with its season.
Picked it up today off steam, started playing. Its a beautiful looking game, only thing off putting so far is it seems like none of the ingame dialouge matches up to any of the characters mouth. Its picky, but very annoying to look at it.
Otherwise, the game is the definition of "NOPEEEEEE" (in the good way).
I haven't gotten to most of the gameplay elements yet. I will likely encounter the Alien sometime tonight. I could actually play during the day, but it just seems wrong to play this particular game while the sun is out.
Also read that performance is very good even on older rigs. So getting good performance and quality should be no problem. I am excited to play this game.
http://blog.playfire.com/2014/10/alien-isolation-out-now-get-20-off-plus.html
Just go to GMG and use this code when checking out.
Yep, same here, the game runs really smoothly and looks beautiful. My machine that I haven't updated for a while now also defaulted to ultra on 1920x1080 and I've been getting 60fps just fine. Only had a chance to put a couple hours into it so far (finally saw a glimpse of da alien). Another thing Ive noticed is that the crafting elements are not well explained, or I somehow missed something on them... but after messing with it with it for a couple minutes you can get it easily. I'm also really enjoying the interactivity with the environment - even saving leaves you so vulnerable to any enemies around you. Its a good game so far :poly124:.
http://bradleywright.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/alien-isolation/
The game looks fantastic, but the cutscene audio is clearly out of synch and the moment I'm in control, the audio collapses completely and is crackly and constantly breaking up, rendering the game completely unplayable. I'm guessing CA have used DirectAudio and the buffer is under-running, but I can't seem to get around it at all.
Small annoyances include the FOV defaulting to 45 (do you want to make me nauseous?), which can be modified in the menu, though for some reason you have to slide the slider to the left to get higher FOVs. There's some kind of mouse acceleration that I can't disable that makes control somewhat awkward. Also prompts like 'press the move keys to move' are pretty useless. I've also seen the unskippable startup movies several times trying to resolve these audio issues
My main gripe is that audio issue though. Until that's resolved, I can't play the game.
Is there any technical postmortem presentation or slide published about the engine and graphics?? i'm really impressed with the game performance and quality....
Not much: http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2014/10/07/high-tech-fear--alien-isolation
marks, just checked out your site. Awesome stuff! You guys should definitely do an art dump
Unreal4ish.
All I know is an art dump is certainly needed for this beautiful game.:thumbup:
amazingly beautiful game, perfect atmosphere
level assets are great and the leveldesign is not too complicated
human characters don't live up to the quality of the levels though
playing on hard, don't know if the alien AI is smarter than me or if it's just cheating too obviously .. it's happened many times that I can't get out of a room because the alien always comes back to check in that room as soon as I exit a locker (which is way too loud.. would have loved to be able to just open the locker door and not basically kicking it open)..
hide in a locker.. alien sniffs around.. get out of the locker, alien comes running, hide in the same locker, alien sniffs around, over and over.. more of an annoyance than scary after the 10th time you have to get back into the same locker
some gamedesign annoyances but the atmosphere lets me over look that
"finally an alien game done right" kinda thing, I would love to see a predator game rather than a sequel to this - but not with as many guns as one might expect, just replace the alien with a predator and put us in the jungle ;D
I only play late at night with my headphones at max.. the audio is amazing..
have to throw the headphones off as soon as the alien sees me and comes stomping behind me though, the sound of that is way too intense for my fragile heart.. I'll just take the death thank you :poly142:
like everyone here, I'd also love a tech breakdown - of the alien!
the tail is probably just basic ragdoll physics but it looks good enough for a walkthrough of the tech I'd say!
well anything
Btw how did you guys did the reflection for the floor, standard render texture (mirror) with realtime convolution?
+1 on this
How you made it through production with a full head of hair.
animation doesn't really have any generation leaps as other game assets do..
it's always gonna come down to the same principles to make animation look a way that fits the game (which these anims do I'd say?)..
the only advances I can think of that I'd expect very soon are more IK solutions.. it's always gonna be the same joints driving the skinned mesh though..
the game does stay in the half life era when it comes to npc's aligning themselfs to where the player is standing, just having an idle and a turn left and right depending on where the playing is going, with a slight aim constraint on the head.. that could have been explored more sure, but a massive let down? I dunno