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Alien: Isolation has been out for several months now and is considered a solid contender for game of the year by many. If you are one of the fans who has already beaten the game, chances are you were left with many new questions about Creative Assembly’s Alien title. AvPGalaxy recently spoke with Alien: Isolation‘s Lead Game Designer, Gary Napper, to ask some of these burning questions.

“We wanted to imply that a Queen was on board but it didn't feel like facing off against a boss Alien Queen was very... "Alien". We were caught in a riddle of, "If we show an Alien Queen, the player will expect to fight her" and "If we don't show her, people will ask where the eggs come from". In the end we figured it was best to preserve the suspense and mystery by not explicitly showing her.”

Be sure to read the interview in full here in which Creative Assembly reveals more behind-the-scenes details about Alien: Isolation as well as the future inclusion of two new difficulty modes for the game.

Special thanks to SEGA and Creative Assembly for taking the time to answer our questions.

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I figured an unseen Queen (I'm a poet and I know it) was the most likely explanation, good to know the developers thought so too!

Interesting read, thanks for posting.

RIP Egg morphing theory :(

I would have loved to have seen the egg morphing instead but I'm glad to know it was considered.

I'm a little disappointed the question re: story-driven DLC was side-stepped.  :-\

Also it's nice to hear that they have heard the cries for a free roam mode, even if it sounds like they don't really want to do it.

Well if you're just looking for archives, it makes sense. I was going through on Easy when I was looking for the Nostromo Logs.

Yeah thats true, but they could easily have disabled collectables on a free roam mode.

I heard that someone managed to hack the game files and remove the Alien from the game so you only have to worry about Joes/Survivors which is pretty close to a free roam mode, but again it seems an unfair way to get collectables

I believe there's a mod somewhere that makes the Alien more docile. It's how they were managing to take awesome caps of the beasty.

The Alien's hardly a threat on easy, and you get so much flamethrower fuel you can just walk around blasting it whenever it shows. That's where I got my last few outstanding collectibles.

Dudes... can't believe you guys switched to easy to get the collectables!

I posted a comment which seems to have been lost in the ether but I was a bit annoyed that they just skipped the question on DLC. We know how they came up with Survivor, the story in itself is slightly annoying as what is fun for a Dev who has been working on the project for years does not = what your customers want!

Quote from: Xenoscream on Dec 10, 2014, 11:56:48 AMDudes... can't believe you guys switched to easy to get the collectables!

I already had 95% of them and had beaten the game twice on hard. I just didn't want to spend the time doing a full hard playthrough to grab that last few.

I always felt it was obvious there was a Queen simply for the fact the hive parts look and feel like Cameron's film.

It does suck though they didn't go with the egg-morphing, but I guess they don't want to go against the more widely understood life cycle. i.e. appeasing to the masses.

Great interview! I like that you guys asked the hard questions (even if some were dodged).

I get that they wanted to 'imply' a queen was on Sevastopol, but I'm glad that they didn't commit to it with a cinematic, or something. Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, but that leaves the doors open to explore egg-morphing in a sequel. And speaking of which, if they've got writers already talking about a sequel, that bodes well for more A:I!

Ugh, I love these guys and this game the more I think about it and the experience I had playing it through.

It came at a time where I was feeling both disenchanted by gaming and the Alien franchise, and managed to turn that around, completely owning both the medium and the series. That's saying a lot, seeing as I was a major skeptic expecting nothing but sheer disappointment after A:CM and so many other things that have come from this franchise following Alien 3, but it ended up being my favorite installment in the series since Aliens, with some things I liked more.

My game of the year for sure; playing it through for the first time is an experience I won't soon forget, and Sevastapol is a place I don't believe I'll soon revisit- and I mean that in the best possible way.

Quote from: Space Sweeper on Dec 11, 2014, 10:48:45 AM
Ugh, I love these guys and the game this more I think about it and the experience I had playing it through.

It came at a time where I was feeling both disenchanted by gaming and the Alien franchise, and managed to turn that around, completely owning both the medium and the series. That's saying a lot, seeing as I was a major skeptic expecting nothing but sheer disappointment after A:CM and so many other things that have come from this franchise following Alien 3, but it ended up being my favorite installment in the series since Aliens, with some things I liked more.

My game of the year for sure; playing it through for the first time is an experience I won't soon forget, and Sevastapol is a place I don't believe I'll soon revisit- and I mean that in the best possible way.

Well said :-)

Don't you wish they would just do an old school single player expansion pack though to let you do it?

It would be amazing.  Maybe if we make enough noise about it.

Time to stand outside of the Creative Assembly offices and blast dubstep at full blast with "MAKE STORY EXPANSION DLC" playing in a high pitched synthesized voice before a massive drop hits.