I admire its purity - the ALIEN: ISOLATION thread

Ha I just switched from hard to medium! (You don't have to restart to change difficulty fyi, unless you have some kind of purist motivation.) And I'm still struggling! Feels like pot luck trying to avoid the alien with a tiny handful of not very effective distraction tools. Throw in the fact that half the time hiding in lockers is pointless as it makes a beeline for you anyway, and I'm tearing my hair out. Maybe I'm not putting my inventory to best use - I'm hardly using it at all tbh. Maybe it'll get a bit more even handed when I have some offensive weapons. Still, I'm sticking with it, it's certainly atmospheric, sound effects especially, and yep it's pretty scary, although somewhat in proportion to how far you are from a save point.

when you're in a locker, lean back so you hold your breath and the alien can't spot you. i was kinda frustrated with how hard it was for the first few hours of gameplay but it's v satisfying when you finally work out your own ways of getting through

things do get a bit easier once you get the flamethrower, yeah, but it's worth experimenting with noisemakers and the like because they can be really effective. just be careful not to overuse them because the alien will learn to ignore them :(

the other thing is that the pace of the game is a lot more varied than you might expect from the first couple of hours - the first few encounters with the alien are in extremely close quarters and super-tense but there are decent chunks where you'll find yourself in unexpected places doing different things (trying hard not to spoil some super-cool stuff here)

Yeah I've got into it now, done the super cool stuff - it was super cool, except for the er additional element, which was a bit rubbish - got the flamethrower, almost tempted to bump it back up to hard except fuel is low and really i'd rather enjoy ('enjoy') the game than lose my sanity playing sections over and over again. Your first post is otm, it's basically an atmospheric stealth-heavy fetch quest. What an atmosphere though.

the amount of time one spends looking for keys named 'crank', 'butane torch', and 'plasma torch'

Control system is a bit frustrating but I'm just as much to blame, feel like my grandad playing video games now. tab - no i meant space! right mouse button - no i meant left! I'm pressing 'a' - I'M PRESSING 'A'! Oops, no I'm pressing caps lock. Basically spent the first couple of missions not building any equipment because I couldn't figure it out.

They could have put *some* puzzles in instead of fetch quests, irritating mini games and laborious animations of equipment usage. Maybe it's a more 'realistic' depiction but then how come I have pockets of infinite size but can't climb over anything higher than my ankle? (Maybe I can't climb or jump because of the ridiculous amount of heavy shit I'm carrying.)

This game makes itself hard to love. Three or four times last night I had to spend up to thirty seconds walking up to and backing away from vents in order to get it to say 'press E to climb in'. Obviously the alien got me from behind on one of these occasions.

laborious animations of equipment usage

i am struggling with how to use the hydraulic crank thingy. press both trigger buttons while turning the view stick to counterclockwise. WTF!

I actually liked the abstruseness and ugliness of those controls a lot

just got killed by alien for the first time, thing i'm going to hang this up for the night and let my nerves recover

think*

irritating mini games

i really like the first codebreaking one

annoyed that 90% of the containers i open are empty and i'm not getting to craft anything

Still on nightmare difficulty?

yes! how do i tone it down? i couldn't find the option.

I think it's under options > game settings (on PC), can check later.

i'm stuck on mission three in the lorenz systech lobby ... dude who stays up at the top is like impossible to sneak past

That's when I switched difficulty. Do you have a noisemaker?

Great couple of sessions recently, after 'finally' dispatching the pesky xenomorph (still about a third of the game to go, so we'll see). Still plenty of tension and danger, but relief from the ball-busting unpredictability and invulnerability of the alien.

It's over! We had some good times (headshotting androids with the bolt gun in the reactor), some bad times (mission 16 really pissed me off), some lols (walking into a new room and seeing a stack of boxes collapse for no reason, thinking 'lol glitch' then getting jumped by the facehugger that was hiding in them.) The last few missions really dragged and I kind of wanted it to be over, then then when I was done I wanted more! Still got the dlc to take a look at.

Cannot conceive of playing it on nightmare difficulty.

haven't played it since i got stuck. maybe i need to level down and just jump the dude with my crowbar.

i never stuck with the dlc. seemed insanely hard and the lack of save points bugged me too much

quit this awhile back but i'm determined to finish it. bumped the difficulty down to novice to get past the stupid alien randomness. i swear they used a rng to determine whether the alien sees/hears you or not. the dizzying backdrop to the airlock part was really cool

finished. just not my type of game as i was horrible at it. u ppl doing nightmare difficulty are crazy. but awesome game all-around. shd prob win some awards, at least for environment or sound design.

I have wanted to play this since it was announced for consoles initially but now its on Switch, I took the plunge.

Its basically a cowering simulator...

I like it but if it gets any harder than the first alien encounter, I can see myself noping out of this pretty quick.

Spoiler: it will get harder than the first alien encounter.

I stopped playing it on the PS4 after a while, not because it wasn't any good but in a way because it was too good!

My break from this game became a ... well, break from this game. But I just came across this recent exchange with one of the AI developers, which is fascinating:

I was one of the AI Developers for this game, and you’re totally right. The way this worked is Director operated outside the normal save state system, so when you interact with one of the Xenomorphs or Androids, they will have some degree of knowledge about your play style and strategies. This was done to give the AI some degree of equal footing, just like the player, where continual attempts and save scumming could not allow you to find and exploit some minor flaw in pathing. This means they would learn and hold grudges. As a piece of trivia, we all watched and tried to mimic the Stargate SG1 episode Avatar just a ton of times while working on this routine.

edited 11 hours ago
I LOVE YOUR WORK. This game is a masterpiece and a classic. I wish that it made more cash and we got more sequels because you guys absolutely nailed the aesthetic. Really rekindled my love for Aliens. The polish on everything (like the AI!) really shows :) you guys paid attention to the important details. There's a reason they say it's a true part of the canon. Not many Aliens games hold that title. You should be proud of what you guys created!!
What you just said is prime example of you guys taking it to the next level with your design... I hope future games learn from your advancements!

tysonedwards
11 hours ago
I am right there with you. A lot of work went into the biofeedback engine, where player experience between save states - and even data from Optical Heart Rate Scanners and Micro Expression Frameworks (cough, Kinect v2, cough) - would tie into the play experience even making it so if the player appeared to be enjoying certain sections, dial up the difficulty, increase the number of enemies, or extend the length of a hallway by a few meters. If they are getting frustrated, dynamically dial back the difficulty, in advance of the player ever recognizing the change. Same with the AI design itself and letting actors become aware of evolving strategies between iterations. After all… the player gets to learn from each death.
The “grand vision” was that if people really enjoyed it, maybe Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo add galvanic skin response sensors, 1 lead ECG sensors, microphones, and accelerometers to the controllers so you can know how the player is doing physiologically.
But… none of that happened. Critical failure became cult classic.