Two years ago, Sega and Creative Assembly announced that they were finally working on a follow-up to our 2014 game of the year. Remarkably, in the years since Isolation there hasn’t been another stealth game that really captures its sense of dread—where most give their enemies set paths and routines, Isolation’s alien instead stalks you, using its own senses to hunt you down. Alien: Isolation’s reputation has grown in the years since release, in part because, as Fraser highlighted in a look back for its 10th anniversary, it gets so much else right around the alien itself, too:
“Alien: Isolation really gets it, and is an extremely tactile experience where much of my time was spent hammering away on clicky-clacky keyboards and wrenching open doors. Every interaction demands physical exertion, something rooting you in place, which not only makes the space itself feel so much more tangible, it makes the horror so much more effective… It’s the greatest horror game simply because it’s the one that scares me the most.”
After playing through a short introductory sequence from Alien: Isolation 2, which confirmed that the world’s tactility and the very smart alien are both very much still present, I spoke with two of the leads from Creative Assembly about the long-awaited sequel.
PC Gamer: Tell me about this alien versus the alien from the first game, in terms of its behavior and capabilities.
James Green, lead designer: The big new thing in [Alien: Isolation 2] is exteriors, and of course the alien is not going to leave you alone in exteriors. It is going to continue to hunt you there. So we’re pretty familiar with what it does in interiors, but its behavior pattern is quite different in exteriors. It hunts you in a very different way, it moves in a different way, and that’s really our big difference maker over the first game.
Al Hope, creative director: I really love the idea that players will be in those interior spaces and feeling really claustrophobic and trapped once again, wanting to get out, and then they manage to get outside, and then after that initial rush of like, ‘I did it, I’m no longer trapped,’ they start to feel really exposed and vulnerable, and actually want to get back inside again.
And then we get to play with that lovely seesaw of emotion and motivation, and sometimes we don’t let you do one or the other, and then we have the alien, obviously, as a big part of that, and just as in the first game, it learns, learning and adapting to its encounters with the player. They’ll do that in the exterior as well, and we’ve got some things that we’ll be talking about in the future, which could possibly increase your chances of survival, and then the alien needs to take that into account, so kind of an evolved game of cat and mouse.
When it comes to exteriors, did you find that you needed to nerf the alien somewhat, or play around the margins of what it’s capable of? Because I imagine all of a sudden you have a lot less cover.
James Green: Well, we never nerf the alien. You know, it would be really easy for us to turn the dial right up and have it kill you instantly, but that’s that’s not fun. You need the tension and release, you need the ebb and flow. So I think the thing we’re going for with exteriors is that exposed vulnerable feeling.
Al Hope: I’d say the fundamental core is the same. It’s listening and lurking, and so that’s the heart of the experience. So, yeah, in the exteriors the same skills that you use in the interior, about breaking the line of sight, about managing distance, about choices of when to move, those fundamental skills, moving from cover to cover, point to point, are still the bedrock. Obviously it’s an organic space, which is which is different, but surprisingly, there’s a lot of similarities there. But of course it’s different as well.
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It’s been 12 years since Alien: Isolation. Why make this sequel now and not earlier, since the first game was so well-liked?
Al Hope: I guess the simple answer is that it felt like the time was right to return. I mean, two years ago we announced that we were returning, and I guess it was before that that it felt like, OK, now’s the right time. I mean, as a studio, obviously we’re busy, but it felt like, yeah, now is the right time.
And, of course, what was been wonderful is that we released the game back in 2014 and over time it seems to gain this momentum of appreciation and gained fans daily as they discover the game for the first time. The original team did an incredible job. I think you can play the original game today and it still holds up really well. It hasn’t aged that much, so you get a great experience. And so I suppose that was the other benefit that we had of time, which is really understanding what what players really enjoyed and how they connected with the with the experience.
What is the team continuity like between folks who made the original and working on this?
Al Hope: From my perspective, we’ve got a really fantastic mix of old and new. So James worked on the original, I obviously did.
James Green: I knew I’d seen you somewhere. [Laughs]
Al Hope: Yeah, so we have some really fantastic veterans who worked on the original, have that experience of building the original, super talented. And then we also have an influx of new, really world-class talent that’s coming in with a lot of new ideas, fresh ideas. Obviously, they didn’t have that experience making the first game, but they’re seeing it from a different perspective. And that’s really nice, because it kind of mirrors what we’re doing with the game, which is a mix, best of both old and new. And so I feel very privileged to be working amongst such fantastic teams.
Can you think of an example of the benefit of having a member of the team who’s new blood, who didn’t work on the original but has presumably played it and analyzed it from that perspective?
James Green: When you’re faced with a problem in development they’re not always going to solve it in the same way. They’re going to find a new, novel way to solve a problem, and game development is all just solving problems, really. And if you keep doing it in the same way you’re never going to grow. That’s what fresh blood gives us. They’re going to approach a problem from a different angle, and hopefully that makes the whole game better. We don’t just want to do what we did before. It probably would’ve been really easy to make Alien: Isolation 2 set on another space station, a new set of corridors, a new set of rooms. I think that would be a really good game, but we wanted to do more than that.
Is building a great play space for Isolation different from building a space for a more traditional stealth game, where you’ll have enemies patrolling a specific route? They’re not agentic in the way the alien is.
James Green: Yeah, there’s no patrol routes in Isolation, even for the humans and other characters in the world, we want them to feel natural and believable. They don’t do the kind of square patrol route. The alien doesn’t follow a script at all, so that’s a completely different way of thinking about a level.
Al Hope: Because it’s systemic in nature, we need to give the player lots of, maybe not fallbacks, but choices. The build you played today, there were lots of options and choices you can make to try to survive. Some people find all of them, some people only find a few. But the challenge for us is creating a play space that gives lots of choice, and if you’re curious about the world you get to find more of these options and paths.
The way I think about it is a survival sandbox. Our job is to create something that has all the features that we need for players to survive. We get the player to enter the sandbox at A, and they have to get to B, and what happens in between is down to the player. The choices they make, and the reaction of the system to those choices. We like to take our hands off and let things play out. Everyone gets these micro shareable stories that can be eight minutes or eight seconds.
One criticism of the first game, and I would say this is a fairly rare thing, was ‘there was actually too much of it, and people would have been OK if the game were shorter.’ Is that a factor in your thinking at all for this one?
James Green: We do want to learn lessons from the from the first game, and I think mastery of pacing is definitely something we learned from the first game, and we continue to learn. Just as an example, the iconic save points in the original game that are one of the things that really sticks in people’s minds, apart from the alien—they were actually a pretty late addition. We had lots of discussions internally about what the right thing was. They went in pretty late, you know, sort of ripping out the automatic checkpoints you’d get in a shooter and replace them with those.
Whereas in this game, in the sequel, we know that’s the mechanic right from the beginning, so we can build everything around that, and we can push and pull that design, so it’s about building on those lessons.
Al Hope: Yeah, we really love the idea that one of the things the game is about is tension and release, and us, like I said, being hands-off, but being really aware of that roller coaster ride that the player is on, and so balancing, pacing, getting that rhythm right is something that we’re really conscious of.
Having said that, there’s a lot of players that really enjoyed the length of [Alien: Isolation]. So, we received quite a broad range of feedback, and it’s all super helpful. So, yeah, that’s definitely something we’re conscious of, and we want to terrify people, make the scariest game possible, but ultimately we want to make a game that’s completely unforgettable and lives long in the memory. You know, long after they put their controller down, it still lives with them, because they’ve been on this journey that they themselves have driven. We create this framework, but they themselves have made those choices to get them through, and it’s ultimately super satisfying.
On the spectrum of critique, ‘too much of a good thing’ is not the harshest, right?
James Green: It’s a good problem to have, I think.
With the structure of the of the sequel, maybe I’m asking too early, but is the idea for this game to be somewhat linear? will it be more of like a hub where you’re branching out to areas?
Al Hope: You’re right, it’s a bit too early. We’re sharing a little glimpse of the game today, it’s early on in the player experience and we’re looking forward to showing more in the future.
Am I going to get to drive that rover around?
Al Hope: We’re looking forward to showing more in the future. [Laughs]
Are you using generative AI in the game?
Al Hope: We’re not using generative AI in the game.
Is it annoying that the word AI, which used to best represent what you did so well as game designers—designing this creature that follows you around and is really intelligent and scary—now means something else?
Al Hope: Yeah, I don’t know. So this might seem a bit simple, but I think we’re just super focused on creating that experience for the player, like the best authentic Alien experience that builds on what we did in the past, that core Isolation experience, so yeah, sure, there might be noise around [AI], but I think ultimately our focus is creating that unforgettable experience, so that we’re still talking about it in a decade’s time, and whatever the conversation is that’s going on right now is all gone, but we’ve left this legacy within the IP that people remember and love and love to discuss and share. Ultimately for us that’s the most important thing, and not to get distracted by other things.
James Green: I think everyone who played today and played over the past couple of days, all they’re talking about is how smart the alien was, and how it killed them, and did you find this thing, and did it kill you here, and they’re talking about the experience they had rather than exactly what label it gets, and I think I think that’s always our goal. People are just distracted by how cool the experience is and how smart the alien is.
Are there ways in which the Alien franchise has expanded since that first game that have given you ideas, or made you feel comfortable exploring something you didn’t do in the first game?
Al Hope: Obviously we really love the IP, the whole umbrella. The area that we most focus on, and absolutely adore, is that original 1979 movie, and obviously Isolation is really close to that with Amanda, and then Isolation 2 takes place months after the events of Isolation 1, therefore we really love the idea of being able to expand and push and deepen the zone around that first movie, and we feel like there’s so much still to tap into with that first movie, it’s a real rich vein.
So we feel very privileged to be able to play in that space and push it, and to do things like the save station appearing in Alien Romulus is just mind blowing for us, that we create something in our little market town of Horsham in the UK, and it ends up on the big screen in the movie. So I think that’s that’s how we think about it, is we just love to tap back into that 1979 lo-fi sci-fi, all that aesthetic that we absolutely love.
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