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"The Alien's behavior is at the core of the game," Hope continues. "We wanted the player to feel underpowered and unprepared, to never feel entirely safe or in control of the situation. For this to work we couldn't choreograph the Alien's behavior. If the player was able to tell what was going to happen, all tension would just evaporate. So we designed an Alien that would use senses to drive its behavior: It's constantly looking and listening for the player. In fact, one odd but practical step we took early on was to give the Alien a voice in order to telegraph its basic intentions—whilst playing the prototype, the player would hear in the distance 'I'm hunting you' or 'I can hear you' or 'I can see you' as their actions triggered the Alien's senses, all voiced by one of the A.I. programmers. It was creepy and funny, and also very useful."We made the Alien unpredictable, and that's where the tension really comes from. We found players were as scared when the Alien wasn't on the screen as when it was in their line of sight—it doesn't need to be in the frame to continue to terrify. For me, this is the magic of Alien: Isolation. In every section of the game everybody starts and ends in the same place, but what happens in between is down to the players' actions. Their experience is created out of their own moment to moment decisions.""We wanted the player to feel underpowered and unprepared, to never feel entirely safe or in control of the situation." Al Hope, Creative Assembly
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Alien: Isolation never segues into a treatise on video game violence—it doesn't reflect on, or directly address in terms of story and characters, the sometimes discussed problems with violence in games. But its various mechanical conceits, its central set-up of being constantly threatened by a sophisticated and frightening creature, that will likely attack if you use a gun, forces a different mental model, one where you must contemplate rather than simply perform violent acts.One year on, after I and plenty of other writers have waxed lyrical about Alien: Isolation as a horror game, what I found most interesting—and personally consider the game's enduring legacy—is its subtle demurral against how video games treat killing. It isn't sanctimonious or stagy, and it doesn't retrogress, like Spec Ops and other games "about" violence, into player blaming, or post-modernism. Alien: Isolation, almost without you knowing, because you're so captivated by the images and the sounds and that bloody thing chasing you, pushes you to think about physical actions—and by extension violent ones—in a way you probably never have in a video game before. You can't just do things. You can't just cruise. When games typically reduce even the most morally charged human behaviors to mere inputs, that's a vital distinction.Follow Ed on Twitter.Related on Motherboard: These Could Be the First Things Aliens Hear from Earth