Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[bluwolfie]

I searched and couldn't find a thread for this game, so I decided to make one.. For those of you who have the game.. Is it just me or is the alien, kind of cute sometimes?

Also I appreciate that he tends to put you out of your misery pretty damn quickly when he does happen to catch you, at least he's not a sadist.

[Sartain]

Technically, it's a drone with the ability to develop into a queen (if I remember correctly). So, no a "he"

Also, waiting for a used copy I can take home and return once I've tried it because I'm not very good at this type of games.

[Cthulhu]

It's a pretty decent space station repair simulator in the vein of the first Dead Space but I found the horror sequences to be a little tacked on.

In all seriousness it's alright.  The biggest issue for me is that the alien is supposed to be "dynamic" and all, tracking you with its senses and behaving realistically instead of scripted, but I don't know what perceivable difference there is between an alien that tracks you like that and one scripted so it appears to behave like that.

I don't know if that changes later on.  There are sequences to introduce you to the three main types of enemy and I dunno if I'm still technically in a tutorial and the game gets less on-rails later on but right now the alien shows up in certain areas as if on cue and I don't know how its AI is supposed to be special.

There's three types of enemy like I said, it's not just the alien.  You've got the alien, who's super fast, super deadly, unkillable, and will fuck you up if it catches you.  Then there's Working Joes, which are cheap synthetics that have gone haywire and will kill you if they find you.  Pretty hard to kill but slow and stupid.  And there's humans, who are the easiest to kill but they have guns.  The alien hunts the other humans as much as it does you, so there's plenty of opportunity for shenanigans there.

I love the aesthetic and I do like the alien, though it moves like a dude in a suit (true to the original, like the rest of the game's aesthetic) it still feels like a killing machine.  The aliens in most of the games felt like bugs.  They popped and splattered and crunched and it only took a couple shots to kill one when they're described as the evolutionary apex of predation, the ultimate killer.

My favorite vidya alien was actually the one in AVP3, the game that came out a few years ago.  It had the slithery non-human movements and it wasn't something you could mow down in droves.  It felt big and heavy and dangerous, more like a tiger than a bug.

Overall I think the game's okay but it's not that scary and the interface is really clunky and the graphics aren't as good as you'd expect. 

[bluwolfie]

I dunno, I think the game is really well done. The graphics are good IMO (But I'm on PC and I can run it at max settings) and the AI as far as I know mostly applies to how it acts when it's hunting you.. I did kind of find it annoying at times when he showed up in the medical bay area (Where I'm at now, not that far into the game yet) and he just hangs around.. If he doesn't notice a human there I don't understand why he'd hang around, almost like the alien is OCD or something.Also this is on hard, dunno how far you are or what difficulty you have it on but he can get kind of annoying on hard.

It's suppose to track you and learn from what you do, like I was hiding in one of those vents (I was convinced he wouldn't be able to fit in there) and I had my motion tracker up, alien heard the little beeps whenever the vent door would open.. He walked past it once, walked to the other end of it where the other vent door is, and walked back. As if to check it out, so he does seem to be programmed to "learn".

Or she, I still call it a he :p

[Cthulhu]

If you want to kick it maximum old school here's a sweetfx that goes all out with the VHS look.  Add CRT for godmode.

EDIT: Scaryt hing I somehow missed.  Working Joes make no noise when they walk.  Scary shit can happen.

[i2amroy]

In all seriousness it's alright.  The biggest issue for me is that the alien is supposed to be "dynamic" and all, tracking you with its senses and behaving realistically instead of scripted, but I don't know what perceivable difference there is between an alien that tracks you like that and one scripted so it appears to behave like that.

They are both on a computer, so technically even the "dynamic" one is still "scripted to appear to behave like that". As a computer controlled player it can always know where you are, the real key comes in scripting something that can act like it doesn't. The only thing that differentiates between the two is level of complexity of the decision tree and amount of programmed stupidity in the AI.

[Cthulhu]

I mean like, it could move through the station tracking you with its senses or it could just appear at predetermined times and since I don't know what it's doing when I dont' see it there's no real perceivable difference.

And I just had my first dynamic AI experience.  While working joes are nearly silent the alien is not.  Pay close attention for any out-of-place sounds.  I got pulled into a vent.

[Parsely]

So I've been watching LPs of this game. One thing I'm not clear on is why the working androids are hostile to everybody.

E: And apparently they're not all hostile? Amanda wakes up one that doesn't attack her, but before that there were droids that woke up or were already awake that tried to kill her. They attack the station denizens the same as Amanda, and I don't think they bother the alien ever.

[Isdar]

So I've been watching LPs of this game. One thing I'm not clear on is why the working androids are hostile to everybody.

E: And apparently they're not all hostile? Amanda wakes up one that doesn't attack her, but before that there were droids that woke up or were already awake that tried to kill her. They attack the station denizens the same as Amanda, and I don't think they bother the alien ever.

As long as you are not in a restricted area, they don't bother you much.

[Cthulhu]

So I've been watching LPs of this game. One thing I'm not clear on is why the working androids are hostile to everybody.

E: And apparently they're not all hostile? Amanda wakes up one that doesn't attack her, but before that there were droids that woke up or were already awake that tried to kill her. They attack the station denizens the same as Amanda, and I don't think they bother the alien ever.

They're cheaply designed, basically only the bare minimum.  They don't even have working faces.  They're also hooked up to the station's Apollo AI which is also a piece of shit and has probably been tampered with by the marshals, which may be why the joes are trying to kill people.

[bluwolfie]

Is it just me or does the alien completely avoid coming out when you're around working Joes? Is it afraid of them?

[Parsely]

I dunno about scared of them, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't care about them at all because they're inorganic. The alien wastes humans any chance it gets but I've never seen it take out a Joe. Not sure how the Joes would react to the Alien. Maybe the game deliberately avoids having those two in the same room together so they don't interfere with one another's interactions with the player.

[Aptus]

Got this as one of my free games when I upgraded my graphics card. Read yesterday it can be played with oculus. All of the nopes.

[ventuswings]

I dunno about scared of them, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't care about them at all because they're inorganic. The alien wastes humans any chance it gets but I've never seen it take out a Joe. Not sure how the Joes would react to the Alien. Maybe the game deliberately avoids having those two in the same room together so they don't interfere with one another's interactions with the player.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also there is that APOLLO AI, which controls Working Joes, have gotten command from its new master W-Y to cut off all contact & have preservation of the live specimen as priority.

When Working Joes see an alien, they just remark something like "unspecified lifeform" [sic] and just keeps doing about their own thing.


I also liked the game. It does have some problems which could have been done better, but you can see that the developers really put in a lot of effort.

[LordBucket]

Alien: Isolation

I've been reading a lot about this game lately. Apparently the original demo at E3 was full VR on the Oculus Rift. People were doing things like hiding inside lockers and physically moving their heads around to see through the grill, and falling to the ground and screaming when the alien ate them.

But then Sega abandoned VR support.

Then people with Rift developer's kits discovered that the code was still present and figured out how to re-enable it. I've been reading claiming it's so scary that they can't play, and suggesting that Sega disabled it because they didn't want to be held liable for heart attacks.

Anyone have a Rift developer's kit?

EDIT:
Here we go: E3 Oculus Rift reaction video