What made you decide to take this approach, and can you explain in more detail how it works? The game’s difficulty settings can really shape the experience, impacting not just the effectiveness of your weapons and the strength of your enemies, but things like whether Xenomorphs are outlined by your weapons. The end result makes encounters challenging-you have to watch all methods of approach in order to succeed. It took quite a lot of iteration to make sure we were hitting the right notes and giving the enemies choices without completely overwhelming the fireteam. From there, our level designers took special care to design spaces they could maneuver through utilizing these unusual methods. Our systems designers and engineers worked together to create Xenomorphs that could traverse walls and ceilings. Zinkievich: It was certainly tricky! Most games of our genre stick to floor-bound enemies, but to really sell the Xenomorph threat, we had to make them come “outta the goddamn walls,” as it were. How did you design around such freedom of movement? They stalk, run, some of them run up walls or skitter along the ceiling. The movement of the various forms of Xenomorphs you come across during the game is enthralling.
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And, with the number of Xenomorphs we wanted the player fighting and how they swarm and surround you, we found that little, extra bit of 360 visibility was important to help manage the innate chaos of our combat. There’s a cover system in the game that’s needed when you fight some of the enemies in the game, those are hard to pull off in first-person. Zinkievich: It came down to several factors: We’ve got great customization options for your marine and we wanted you to be able to see them. What made you decide to present the game through a third-person perspective rather than a first-person and did that come with challenges when trying to instill a sense of fear in the players? It comes from thinking you have a situation under control, then all hell breaks loose and you wonder if you’re going to get through it. The horror or tension in Aliens: Fireteam Elite doesn’t come from wondering if there’s something stalking you in the dark. So, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is much more closely inspired by the second movie, and by titling our game with Aliens rather than Alien, we hope to communicate what kind of story players should expect and where we drew most of our inspiration from.
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The second movie largely featured the colonial marines, and the Xenomorphs were present in swarms, many of which get taken out by the marines themselves throughout the movie. When you look at both of the original movies, you can see that they had significantly different stories and ways of telling those stories. Zinkievich: It’s definitely an Aliens with an S game. What made you decide to take that approach and how did you balance the action with the innate horror of the franchise? When we started making Aliens: Fireteam Elite, we asked ourselves the simple question “What Alien video game experience do we want to play?” The experience of being part of a team of badass marines taking on waves of terrifying, intelligent enemies that swarm through doors and vents, scramble across walls and ceilings, and ambush your fireteam from every angle.Īliens: Fireteam Elite plays very much like an Aliens, not an Alien game, with a greater focus on strategy and hunting than on running and surviving. Zinkievich: We’re huge fans of the franchise, always have been-have seen the movies, read the comics and books, and played the video games.
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How did that influence your early design choices and approach to the sort of game you wanted to make? The Alien franchise has a rich history across film, comics, books, video games, and more.