Status Update on Sequel and Mod Support

[D88M]

If Rebellion stays away from a sequel, i am all in.
The first AVP game did a lot of things right, specially for the time, but it has atrocious flaws like the complete lack of anything resembling a story among other things (Xenoborgs, WHAAAT), the third game i have played it only a little, but i have no interest on wasting my time on it (and i would literally check anythign out that has the Alien/Predator tag on it, be it games or books or whatever) it has the same dumb endless tutorials in each species made for totally casual and mainstream "gamers" as they are called now who need to be reminded to "Press X to open door" trough the ENTIRE game, and it took stuff from from the movies.
The ideal thing would be to make a game that takes ONLY as a source the first two/three Predator/Alien movies and nothing else, with the three classic campaings and a good story up to today cinematic standards of videogame storytelling, basically, a mixture of Alien: Isolation with AVP2

[YTL_Hunter_H2]

I've been playing these games since 99 and rebellion did an amazing job on avp ago gold and ago 2010. There's a few beefs but they did a better all around job imo than any one else that took on these projects. Will give credit where it's due on avp2 and primal hunt but rebellion did great stuff for the fans

[skull-splitter]

It's the botched and forced paper-rock-scissors element that did it for me. Along with the gameplay from 1999.

[Corporal Hicks]

I actually rather liked the melee system. I appreciate others don't but I enjoy it - it felt more visceral to me.

[AJL]

The rock paper scissors melee system felt pretty good and fitting for predators but not so much for marines and aliens..

[The Old One]

Wristblades should be treated like a skinning knife for an animal, except in other rare cases as method of attack but certainly not the primary weapon of attack. For a creature known for all his deadly gadgets, having one melee weapon and four others that can only be used at medium-long range isn't very inspired. It reeks of lazy game design.

[The Cruentus]

I actually rather liked the melee system. I appreciate others don't but I enjoy it - it felt more visceral to me.

I liked it as well but there were problems with it, namely the auto-lock and distance, I remember getting hit with a melee attack despite being a good few meters out of range, which breaks the immersion.

AVP 2010 was not a bad game but it wasn't great either, multiplayer was botched and the campaigns were too short, plus the Predator campaign final boss always makes me shake my head.

[lost dragon]

Rebellion themselves were kind enough to at least detail why the game had turned out the way it did,when i had the opportunity to express my disappointment in it (it was a day 1 purchase for myself on PlayStation 3 at the time),to them via  a RVG forum community interview:


" The market had changed and there were more mass market pressures on us to make the game easier and more non-core gamer friendly if that makes any sense. We also lost about 5 months at the end of the project because of publisher business pressures and release schedules, so really we didn't get the time we had planned to put the final polish on the game. Bizarrely looking back now, we were told we were going up against ACM's release, which ironically took another three years to hit the market (They took seven years in total, we took just over two...)."


They also explained how the need to make the game easier and more simplified compared to say the original PC game (this was my personal beef with the game, the A.I routines seemed far,far weaker than those used in the Windows 95 game i had loved,for starters), was down to making it for the causal gamer.

I strongly suspect no matter who might be given the development rights should another AVP game be planned,similar pressures will be applied to them by the publisher.

It's simply the state of the industry these days

[The Old One]

Isolation had free reign , CDPROJEKT always does, as does Obsidian- so I don't believe it's an inevitability.

[lost dragon]

I think i have just grown so cynical towards games based on franchises i love.

So often development teams talk about having had poured over the films, been given resources direct from 20th Century Fox, having spoken to people responsible for the original design work on said films etc and then start to big up their graphics engines, as marketing love these..lots of lovely static screens to be touched up for press coverage.

But when the actual games hit..A.I routines on the Xenomorphs sadly are either scripted as in Isolation or reduce the Xenomorphs to mere FPS fodder...

Alien Trilogy (Probe), AVP 2 (Monolith), AVP on Console/PC ( by Rebellion), Aliens:C.M (Gearbox )..

If they appear at all. ..PS1 Aliens:Comic Book Adventure planned for April 1996..never arrived, Climax's RPG cruelly canned etc..

I've grown tired of developers saying they dumbed things down for the casual gamer or what was originally shown was merely prototype/proposal footage or just a build created for E3. .



The prospect of VR being used in an Aliens game was doing the rounds back in the days of the Atari Jaguar..With Atari UK'S Darryl Still hinting he'd like to see it in AVP II, custom Virtuality headsets were in use with the Jaguar version of AVP..

Yet here i am as a PS4 owner, still waiting for a home VR Aliens experience and the last atmospheric Alien Game that really impressed me was Alien Reserection on the PlayStation and that underwent numerous rewrites to be the game it finally arrived as.

[The Old One]

Sorry, but you're just wrong about the A.I in Isolation;

[lost dragon]

Isolation had free reign , CDPROJEKT always does, as does Obsidian- so I don't believe it's an inevitability.

Gearbox often talked of Fox giving them their blessing to be flexible with aspects of the storyline for Aliens:C.M and it was Fox themselves which came up with new Xenomorph types such as The Crusher and Spitter and were happy for the life cycle of the Xenomorphs to be extended over what had been accepted as canon, so even when things aren't set in stone as it were, we still get sub standard experiences sadly.

The franchise has such huge potential.
Developers are no longer restricted to hardware with lowly 8 or 16 bit processors..

Games like Scarface, Alien Isolation,  Alien Trilogy etc on Home formats have been allowed freedom to expand on events set out in the films..

I still think you could do a splendid game based on the events leading up to the marines arriving on the Colony...

Starting out with the Jorden family being sent to investigate the signal...

Colony medical team attempting to save Newts Father...

Colony itself trying to defend itself-Film makes clear they made last ditch measures with barricades set up, small arms fire, mining charges etc used.

A colony of 158 souls must of had some form of security or police detail.

It doesn't just have to be Marine vs Xeno..

Sorry, but you're just wrong about the A.I in Isolation;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt1XmiDwxhY

I have a personal opinion, based on my own experience of the game on PS3 ..which involved more times than it should, myself simply running to the next checkpoint,  rather than outsmarting the Alien.

I completed the game and i am toying with idea of picking it up on PS4 given my PS3 just died.

But it's A.I was as scripted as Evil Within om the 360, Soma and Outlast on PS4.

I don't need to watch anything footage wise as i have spent hours on these types of games and a lot of my own money and i have yet to find a single title that offers truly belivable A.I.


There's no right or wrong.
Just personal experiences.


I think Creative Assembly simply over stated how great the A.I routines were:

"The alien is systemic across the board. We can just drop the alien into an area and see how it behaves. It knows when it sees something and it knows when it just suspects something... Obviously, we bookend certain areas to give you an objective, but most of the time the alien is in the world and it's hunting you. You'll acquire some abilities you can use to defend yourself for a while, but then suddenly the alien stops attacking you. It stops doing what you thought it was going to do. You're looking at this alien and something's changed. It learns."
That kind of AI enemy is typically the stuff of dreams, but lead artist Jude Bond backs up Napper's claims: "Yes, it's a piece of AI and it has parameters we can tune, but the alien's network of behaviours is so insanely complicated, the thing is almost sentient. There's a difference between artificial intelligence, where we know what its parameters and behaviours are at a glance, and it being so sentient we have to dig into the code just to find out why and how it did what it did during our playtests."

To describe it as almost sentient was a bit silly.

For the game to work, it had to have the Alien follow preset patrol routes,if it simply went off and explored other areas of the station, the player wouldn't have a sense of dread..

The game also couldn't let the player rely on 1 tactic, so it had to respond and send the Xeno to investigate if you relied too heavily on hiding in a locker for example, but that's not coming close to sentient A.I by a long shot.

[skull-splitter]

The rock paper scissors melee system felt pretty good and fitting for predators but not so much for marines and aliens..

Sorry for necroposting but something akin to Bad Company 2's melee system would have worked fine, it was semi scripted but offers more flexibility than the system we had on AvP'10, without countering ridiculously with your gun or blades... really not a fan od it and it felt like quick time events. It looks decent but really pulled me out of the game.

Also: Fox coming up ideas for a game... I remember Jason Hall having to plea to Fox producers not to include jump pads in AvP 2, which they asked for since Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament had them...

[Inverse Effect]

Necroposting too. But i wish Rebellion would make another AVP Game.

[Corporal Hicks]

You and me both. I'm glad there's still active servers, but I do miss having a current AvP game.