14 DAY TRIAL // Alien: Isolation, the upcoming survival horror game from Creative Assembly and Sega, has a first-person camera in order to amplify the experience, even though it initially had a third-person one.
Alien: Isolation was revealed to the world earlier this month and it seems to offer an experience geared towards survival horror, instead of action like Aliens: Colonial Marines.
The game will have a first-person camera, putting players right in the shoes of protagonist Amanda Ripley, but according to Creative Assembly's Alistair Hope, the initial prototype had a third-person view largely because other horror games at that time also had such a system.
“When we started, I think survival horror was stereotypically or archetypically, a third-person experience, and so when we started that’s what we did, it was third-person. Because in a way, when we started back then, that was one of the things you were expected to do,” he told XboxAchievements.
“So we played around with that for a bit, but I had always thought of it as a first-person thing. It’s something that you should have a direct relationship to and not try and have it through a character. It’s interesting, at a time when some of the other franchises are chasing Gears of War, it felt like we needed to stay true to what we were trying to do.”
The decision to move to a first-person camera, however, came after one of the developers fiddled with the prototype and managed to get the camera glued to the protagonist's forehead.
“When we started developing, the guys would corner me and say, ‘Al, come and look at this’ and what they’d done was hack the game camera so it was effectively on the forehead of the in-game character and it was amazing, a completely different experience.”
“That was a watershed moment for us because we were going back to what I thought we originally should be doing, and that was great because it changed everything. It’s not a character hiding behind a box, looking at the alien. You’re looking at the alien.”
This new experience makes players relate to the protagonist and feel more immersed into the action, according to Creative Assembly.
The game will be released in late 2014 for PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, and Xbox One.