Alien: Isolation

[Darth Roxor]

I find their hunting comments more humorous than anything. I just assumed that all of their dialogue was pre-scripted to some degree by the manufacturers who made them (which is why they'll just constantly quote company phrases when they're idle, even when they are completely non-applicable to the current situation), so it conjures up the image in my head of a bunch of guys at the programming department going over all the SUPUR SCURRY dialogue that the upper management is forcing them to add in and wondering with a confused expression how statements like "I am patient, I can wait for you for eternity" and "I will find you" could be applicable to an android that's supposedly just there to do all the back-breaking menial work.

 

[Jick Magger]

That, I think, is an example of it done well. Totally none-threatening voice that's making these totally harmless statements about how it "just wants to help" while trying to turn you into chunky salsa, with the added glitching really helping to make the player feel uneasy and scared. Not to mention that the robot itself looks like a total non-threat right up until it blows up in your face. With the Working Joes I think the designers were trying waaaaaay too hard to push the uncanny valley, to the point where it spins back around and just becomes a little silly. It kind of reminds me of when I watched the trailer for Annabelle, and I just burst out laughing when the wife opens up her present, sees this fucking evil, old, dirty, satanic porcelain doll, and acts as though this is completely normal and acceptable. They're trying so hard to make these things look creepy that it just stretched believability too much for me.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I knew my video card was old, but not this old (second from bottom).

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I only run into the occasional slowdown in Alien: Isolation, and I have EVERYTHING ramped up to max.

 

[Multidirectional]

Meh, I run it on stable 50+ FPS with a GTX460 1GB with only couple of settings slightly toned down (shadow mapping High instead of Ultra, ambient occlusion Standard instead of HDAO). Game is very nicely optimized.

 

[chestburster]

So after the initial excitement over the good gameplay wore off, I started to think about the plot, which is full of unexplainable plot holes:

Spoiler

So W-Y has bought the space station, secretly. Did they know the station was infested when they paid? If they knew, then why did W-Y only send ONE android, one plumber woman and one lawyer to retrieve the blackbox? I mean, W-Y is megacorp. Can't they send space marines or something? If they didn't know about the alien, then why did they buy this junkpiece of a station?

Why did Apollo order killing humans? Clearly the androids are able to tell apart a man and a rampaging wild animal. If Apollo wants to deal with infestation, it could have ordered the androids to kill any roaming "new species" on sight.

So Ripley stopped the captain from destroying the station, because "there are people still alive on the station". But in the end, only she escaped to the Torrens, taking zero survivors with her. Just brilliant.

 

[Jick Magger]

So after the initial excitement over the good gameplay wore off, I started to think about the plot, which is full of unexplainable plot holes:

Spoiler

So W-Y has bought the space station, secretly. Did they know the station was infested when they paid? If they knew, then why did W-Y only send ONE android, one plumber woman and one lawyer to retrieve the blackbox? I mean, W-Y is megacorp. Can't they send space marines or something? If they didn't know about the alien, then why did they buy this junkpiece of a station?

Why did Apollo order killing humans? Clearly the androids are able to tell apart a man and a rampaging wild animal. If Apollo wants to deal with infestation, it could have ordered the androids to kill any roaming "new species" on sight.

So Ripley stopped the captain from destroying the station, because "there are people still alive on the station". But in the end, only she escaped to the Torrens, taking zero survivors with her. Just brilliant.

Spoiler

1. I don't think they knew the station was overrun. From what logs I've found in-game, Taylor was constantly sending them messages telling them that the black-box was W-Y property and that they can't open it. Bringing a team any bigger than what's necessary would probably tip Seegson off that there's more to this than they're letting on. That and we've got to take into account that W-Y still really don't know much about the Alien itself, seeing as the Sulatco was destroyed and Ellen Ripley was in her escape pod in the middle of nowhere with her log. They were probably thinking "Get Taylor to retrieve the Black-box, if she happens to get in a situation where she can retrieve one of the Aliens, then she should do so.

2. Apollo stated when Ripley tried to get it to stand down that the androids main priority was to protect the specimen. Since the thing is practically immune to small-arms fire, they could probably just leave most of the humans well-enough alone since they really don't have a chance fighting them. It's only when they successfully manage to jettison one into the gas giant that they really start getting serious and actively exterminate the remaining humans onboard.

3. Wouldn't really call that a plot hole, just inconsistent characterization. The thing is that Marlow is completely and utterly right: unless Amanda has some brilliant plan to save the remaining handful of colonists still alive in Sevastapol who haven't been killed by the Working Joes, the nigh-indestructible army of aliens, captured and/or facehugged, or killed by one another, just blowing it all up really is the best option. At least then they'll die quickly.

My question is simple: where the fuck did all of these goddamn eggs come from?

In retrospect, I think the game peaked gameplay-wise during the trapping and jettisoning section. Got the flashback to the derelict, introduced to the flamethrower, which added a new dynamic to the steal sections, but wasn't an outright game-breaker (it served a nice counterbalance to the revolver: it incapacitates the alien but mildly annoys a working joe while using alot of ammo per burst, while the revolver will kill a Working Joe but only mildly annoying the alien, with alot of headshots needed to guarantee a kill), this was also the last section where I found the alien legitimately frightening to deal with and not just another aggravating obstacle in a long list of aggravating obstacles on my quest to complete a questline that should've been done in 5 minutes, but has been padded out to 20 minutes because the developers wanted this game to be really long for some reason.

I don't even know if I'd say the game is unfinished: it just feels as though there was some kind of radical change production-wise between the scriptwriting and designing stages, like someone high up just swooped in and demanded that they added another 5 hours to the game or else they're all fired, which left them desperately scrambling around trying to pad the story, levels, and objectives out to accommodate it.

 

[chestburster]

Gameplay-wise, maybe (still think medical bay is the best part and everything after that becomes less scary). Plot-wise, it's nice that they're mirroring the first two films: you escaped from the Nostromo/colony, you thought you won? No there is still another 20 minutes of the film! Same here: you thought you killed the beast? No way we gonna end the game this easy! Have another four hours after that!

 

[Aldebaran]

Spoiler

My question is simple: where the fuck did all of these goddamn eggs come from?

Spoiler

I believe they are referencing the Alien's original lifecycle as seen in the deleted scenes of the first movie. It actually slowly turned living and dead people into eggs. It was never shown on screen, but the production crew's idea was for it to inject people with its tail. Personally, I think it worked better as filmed: you have no idea how the Alien turned Brett into an egg, but you can imagine.

I kind of wish they had included that scene in the final cut. It is certainly a more unsettling lifecycle then the final boss that was the Queen Alien. Unfortunately, it did get in the way of the pacing of Ripley's escape sequence.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

So after the initial excitement over the good gameplay wore off, I started to think about the plot, which is full of unexplainable plot holes:

Spoiler

So W-Y has bought the space station, secretly. Did they know the station was infested when they paid? If they knew, then why did W-Y only send ONE android, one plumber woman and one lawyer to retrieve the blackbox? I mean, W-Y is megacorp. Can't they send space marines or something? If they didn't know about the alien, then why did they buy this junkpiece of a station?

Spoiler

W-Y bought the station two days AFTER the Torrens took off with the trio, 3 weeks BEFORE they arrived on Sevastopol. My question is: Why?

It's hard to explain this when the game's story isn't even finished, we still have a DLC to take us through the final part of the game.

 

[chestburster]

Spoiler

I believe they are referencing the Alien's original lifecycle as seen in the deleted scenes of the first movie. It actually slowly turned living and dead people into eggs. It was never shown on screen, but the production crew's idea was for it to inject people with its tail. Personally, I think it worked better as filmed: you have no idea how the Alien turned Brett into an egg, but you can imagine.

I kind of wish they had included that scene in the final cut. It is certainly a more unsettling lifecycle then the final boss that was the Queen Alien. Unfortunately, it did get in the way of the pacing of Ripley's escape sequence.

Was going to write exactly the same thing in response to Jick Magger until I remembered that the original film had no hives. If there is a hive like in this game (or the second film), it doesn't make sense: so the Alien turns one victim into an egg, and captures another victim so the facehugger from the first egg can find a host -- you need TWO victims to make one new alien. Seems highly inefficient. Also, in the first film's deleted scene, the egg transformed from Dallas was much, much bigger than the small eggs in the derelict ship. So perhaps the large eggs mature directly into big Aliens instead of facehuggers.

Anyway, after the hive, I was fully expecting the game to throw in a QTE Alien queen battle at the end, during the space walk. Probably they ran out of budget.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

On a related note: DANGER! ALIEN AT WORK!

 

[chestburster]

That is the most photorealistic graphx I've seen in a vidya game.

 

[DragoFireheart]

On a related note: DANGER! ALIEN AT WORK!

Is that... in game graphics?

 

[Sodafish]

Yep.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Yep.

That can't be PS4. PC with higher end card.

 

[Sodafish]

It'll be PC version prob, but it doesn't require high end hardware. It's extremely well optimised actually.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

That could be a screenshot from my computer, and I stated very recently that my graphics card is on the bottom of the scale.

This game looks amazing.

 

[Caim]

On a related note: DANGER! ALIEN AT WORK!

Better graphics than the actual movie.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

The game does look excellent. I seem to have a lot of trouble running the latest games, I think in most cases due to incredibly poor optimisation on their part. Alien Isolation automatically set everything to max and all I had to do was turn off motion blur and DOF - I left everything else cranked all the way up at 1920x1080. My graphics card is only a GeForce 560 TI, although it does have a chunk of VRAM.

 

[Multidirectional]

DOF actually works quite well in this game, I've enabled it back on, while I prefer to play everything else without it.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Wow. I went and sauce'd that gif I posted, it's from a LP.

Check out the guy's YouTube name.

 

[ghostdog]

Wow. I went and sauce'd that gif I posted, it's from a LP.

Check out the guy's YouTube name.

Hey, apart from his hair, this guy isn't bad. Much better than that annoying pewdiefagie. He has some amusing DS videos too.

 

[Sodafish]

DOF actually works quite well in this game, I've enabled it back on, while I prefer to play everything else without it.

Yeah it's not at all intrusive. As far as I can tell it's only used when you are looking at the motion tracker.

 

[SuicideBunny]

Wow. I went and sauce'd that gif I posted, it's from a LP.

Check out the guy's YouTube name.

hm, i wonder why they fucked up reflections or if they just didn't notice it.

 

[Sodafish]

wot? They're diffuse reflections broken by surface dirt/smudges etc. There's nothing wrong with it.