Quote from: SM on Feb 13, 2014, 12:56:37 AM
Considering Aliens smash down thick metal doors - I can't see them simply giving up when the little girl goes into a duct they can't fit into. They'll simply smash their way in.
Which only leaves the option that they couldn't find her.
I suppose that depends on where she chooses to hide. I've no doubt there are places the Aliens can simply try smashing through, but whether they can get to her or not would depend on how many feet of steel they have to smash through. If, say, she hides in a small duct surrounded on all areas by meters of metal it might take too much smashing to break through. The poor fella might just crush his hand or head trying.
It's also a matter of numbers, even if the Aliens needed direct LOS there's lots of the f**kers running around at night (well, mostly), and I'd assume that other people must have tried to hide but Newt must have had some quality that allowed to live that others did not. This is a little bit of narrative analysis and speculative intent, but my impression is that the scene in the DC serves the narrative purpose of helping the audience understand how this meek little girl could survive monsters that eliminated everyone else beyond plot armor - making the story a little more believable and thus helping the audience immerse themselves in the story. At least, that's how I'd do it if I were writing a girl that survives the Aliens. I thought it was quite clever - a little like how in
Them you can't help but wonder what the hell the girl does to survive the ants until later on you see other children apparently out of reach of the enormous ants.
It's a little too much speculation to be definitive, but it still strikes me as weird within the game. Even Newt simply hiding out of sight in ducts strikes me as a little more effort than simply crouching behind boxes but it is, after all, video game stealth and it is what it is. I would not consider it a deal breaker, as I'm far more invested on whether they can keep the Alien interesting through 9 hours of gametime.
As much as I like Amnesia, you do eventually start understanding the poor retard monsters too well for them to continue being scary. Other games might include many different enemies with different levels of awareness to keep you guessing, but my impression is that in this game the Alien is the primary antagonist. Supposedly the guy learns but the examples so far don't seem any more complicated than Mr. Freeze or Bane in the Batman games.
To give them the benefit of the doubt, they could actually use this to their advantage in a narrative sense. Perhaps at first the Alien does not really consider you a true threat, and thus, doesn't really care too much about whatever the hell your doing unless you obviously draw attention to yourself, but as the game progress and the Alien is foiled again and again it beings to focus more and more on you. Maybe you rescue some people from the Alien and that makes it mad. It learns about you just as much as you learn from it - as they kinda seemed to imply in one of the previews. Towards the later stages of the game the Alien might become more aggressive and meticulously perceptive, require proper use of weapons and traps to distract and disorient the more aware Alien. This makes the player need to apply everything he's learned until now and could keep things interesting.
It might be giving them too much credit, though.
TL;DR I bit.
