Aliens RPG Needs You

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Alien 4 never happened. I refuse to accept it.

 

[inwoker]

I hope at least in this game it is possible to enslave entire nations with necromancy.

 

[thesheeep]

I hope at least in this game it is possible to enslave entire nations with necromancy.

You know.. some day....

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I hope at least in this game it is possible to enslave entire nations with necromancy.

You know.. some day....

I have a dream...

 

[bat_boro]

I hope at least in this game it is possible to enslave entire nations with necromancy.

That is reserved for the expansion

 

[Wyrmlord]

Actually Davis said that Aliens won't come in wagons to provide you with gunmeat - he pointed at the first two movies and said that they were pretty heavy on character interactions while aliens' attacks were pretty rare.

But either way: so what?

RPG is a combat genre. After all it evolved from tabletop wargames, did it not?

To quote what you yourself said so rightly once: "Some of the old RPGs did a great job in terms of combat and object/clue finding. I wouldn't want anything more than that because that stuff is far more fun than clicking through long dialogue trees (unless the writing is Torment quality)."

Nothing wrong with an all-combat RPG.

Well first of all - I didn't say that.
And second - I wasn't saying that all-out combat RPG is a good or bad thing here. However I will say that it is nice to see that aliens won't be just an exp/gunmeat for once.

No? Must have been someone else with an Anachranox avatar.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

I probably said something like that back when I had a Sly Boots avatar. It's a hobby horse of mine, e.g.

Exploration and combat have always been the core gameplay elements of RPGs. That's exactly what most 70's & 80's P'n'P RPGing was all about: exploration and squad-based combat with a story tacked on. That's the base-line RPG style and it's something that CRPGs can - and did - do very well. What CRPGs can't do well compared to a human GM is C&C, non-linear storytelling and NPC interaction; a good implementation of the base-line features is far superior to a half-arsed implementation of those secondary attributes.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Console RPG, eh? What the hell does that mean now? No PC port or what? Where's the news anyway? :wink:

Actually, speaking of the films, I hope they've learnt the lesson from the last couple that after Aliens (2nd film) you can't go back to the premise of the 1st. Particularly problematic in the 4th one, where they go out of their way in a typical, albeit very early, Joss Whedon script, to show how 'badass' the team is (and yes, they do a pretty good job of that - Ron Perlman is always badass), only to reveal later on 'oh no, there's like a whole 8 or 9 aliens on this station'. As soon as I heard that I was 'wtf!!!!

Yeah, we were a bit stumped back then at the cinema ourselves. But that's not the reason why Res didn't have that much of an impact. One of the main reasons Aliens (as a sequel) works so well: it takes everything the first film established, and turns it upside down. It adds its own twist to a succesful but dead-end formula, similar to what Cameron later did with Terminator 2 as well to huge effect.

But that's still not the story by a long shot. Aliens doesn't just work as a sequel. It works as a stand-alone movie as well. It has clear themes (war, motherhood) and direction, and totally runs with all of those. The guerilla style attacks, the way the movie is filmed, the sheer terror, the entire situation spiralling totally out of control and the pace slowly picking up with every minute - it's Vietnam all over again. Whereas Res is all about The Return Of Slimey Monsters From Space. Monsters that suspiciously look and act like leftovers from Spielbergs Jurassic Park somehow - a far cry from the biomechanical human-but-not-quite nightmare from Alien, but that's another story. Anyway, it's the stuff fanboy obsession is made of. And whatever else follows (the cloning, etc.) acts merely as a backdrop, an excuse for why the film was made in the first place. It's a shame, but there's almost never anything ever much explored, or genuinely toyed around with, or anything. We see sequences that hint at something unique, only to find the movie reminding itself that it's merely a sequence of action sequences strung together by not so very much. It's a monster feature, kinda like Deep Blue Sea with aliens isntead of sharks. But Khondjis camera work still kicks ass.

Still, that's the *movies*. Hopefully Obsidian come up with something genuinely interesting to make their *game* shine. Whether they decide to go with Alien, Aliens, a ton of cannon fodder and an extra pizza for everyone but the producer is really, really not the point. Personally I'm hoping for a more intimate approach, I've no time to save yet another bloody universe from yet another horde of fucking bugs these days. Just as long as they don't make one of 'em monster games, I'm in. Likely I won't be able to resist anyhow. I'm a fanboy of kinds.

 

[sportforredneck]

Alien 4 never happened. I refuse to accept it.

Joss Whedon wrote the script. He said the director fucked it all up.

 

[Gragt]

Convenient.

 

[sportforredneck]

Convenient.

True. But there is this:

Jeunet was given creative control, contributing several elements to the script including five different endings, although the expensive ones were dismissed. He also opted to make the film a dark comedy and was encouraged to include more violence.

As well as:

"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable."

 

[Azrael the cat]

Alien 4 never happened. I refuse to accept it.

Joss Whedon wrote the script. He said the director fucked it all up.

Actually Whedon scripts have never been done well by anyone but Whedon. The same thing happened in the original buffy movie - he wanted something like what the TV series ended up being, but the original movie's director just couldn't get her head around it and tried to do a 'so-bad-its-good' comedy. I suspect that he's not very good at putting onto paper the way the scene plays out in his head - a pretty big flaw in a commercial script writer if you ask me, but not uncommon for writer-directors. When watching both the original buffy movie and Aliens you can see all the elements of the buffy series and firefly there, but as though its a puzzleboard with all the pieces shoved together in the wrong places. His own work takes what, at the time, was an odd line - playing very very close to straight, but with a slightly heighented and hence slightly comic reality, with doses of comic relief (again played as though they're 'straight' scenes) between doses of flat-action. In the 80s that didn't make much sense in US films - UK came pretty close with series 5-7 of Red Dwarf (after it amps up the sci-fi/action side of the show) - it either had to be hard action or goofball comedy, and flawed characters had to be characatures.

Having said that, my feelings about his script in Alien: Res are mixed. The movie didn't do his script justice, sure, there's lots of bits where you can tell that the director didn't 'get' Whedon's joke, or didn't get how the scene was supposed to work and the director's interpretation was crappier. But he was too young and shallow a writer to do a good Aliens movie. The first two Alien movies had a huge thematic weight underlying their horror and action - both in their visual themes and their drawing upon war, capitalism, political v military aims, post-humanism, birth and rape etc. Even as late as the buffy TV series (of which I love the 1st 3 seasons, like the 7th and enoy about half of 4-6 - basically for me it goes downhill as soon as the Angel spinoff starts getting good. He seemed to transfer his energies and best co-writers to Angel once that got up) Whedon was a good fun writer who could tie in popculture, teen angst and coming-of-age stories together with action-horror-light into good light fun. He didn't really start doing darker fare until about season 2 or 3 of Angel, and the first time he really nailed a thematic setting was Firefly. I love Firefly's 'ex-Southern-Civil War vet', i.e.'on the losing side and maybe even the morally wrong side of the war, not a hero any more' backdrop, but that's the first thing he did which had the kind of thematic strength to underly a good Aliens sequel. If anything I doubt he had enough experience of being alive back when wrote Aliens 4 to pull off something like that.

 

[Suchy]

Tactical in real-time, are you kidding?

Rainbow Six?
Armed Assault?
Space Hulk (to get closer with the genre and theme)?

Also All-combat and RPG kind of don't fit. Was Diablo or JA a RPG?
So far I like what I read about Aliens. Especially if what Skyway said is true - heavy character interaction and not so much alien bashing.

 

[Trash]

AvP had my marine killing tons of aliens. I still nearly crapped my pants during that game.

 

[Severian Silk]

Tim Cain is already taken.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Whedon sounds a lot like Paul Anderson when he blamed The Studio™ for turning his movie into the apparent bonkers brainchild of silly fanboy obsession - but then one could argue that's all the AvP fare could ever have been good for anyway.

As if the incoherent, ill-paced string of escape sequences lacking any tension whatsoever that take center stage of Whedon's script aren't a testament to his own lack of imagination. Seeing that the movie's look is its strong point, one could be tempted to argue that the best bits might well have been all Jeunet's (and Khondji's of course) "fault".

 

[Azael]

Alien: Resurrection aside, I'd say that Jeunet is a much more creative and innovative film maker than Whedon could ever hope to be.

The first movie of the series is my favorite, by far, but I liked what Cameron did with the sequel in that he just didn't try to copy Scott's formula and instead created it into something different and still very good. All the later movies have fucked things up, the less said about the AvP franchise the better.

 

[sportforredneck]

Alien: Resurrection aside, I'd say that Jeunet is a much more creative and innovative film maker than Whedon could ever hope to be.

Fuck you.

 

[Gragt]

He's right, you know.

 

[DefJam101]

He's a faggot, you know.

 

[Gragt]

That might be true as well but it does not prevent him from being right about Jeunet being a better artist than Whedon.

 

[sportforredneck]

Did Jeunet ever make a good movie? Amilie is his most famous, but I couldn't stand it. What's so great about him?

 

[Helton]

AvP was a cool game but now I wish it hadn't happened because, as a franchise, it is much less than the sum of its parts.

 

[Atomic]

Did Jeunet ever make a good movie?

Well there's that movie with Ron Perlman. City of Lost Children its called. But you probably think its shit anyway so you cares right?

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Delicatessen is wonderful.

Talking about the topic at hand, is there any estimated release date, artworks, screenies or anything as of yet?