14 DAY TRIAL // The Creative Assembly says that it plans to use solid game design and good balancing in order to make sure that it manages to create tension all through the campaign of the upcoming Alien: Isolation.
Gary Napper, the senior designer working on the title, says that all those who see the game inquire about the way it will progress past the initial sequences.
He tells the Official PlayStation Magazine that the most important elements are, "game design, balancing, the flow of the story and the mechanics, when you introduce things to the player. Obviously, we work in peaks and troughs with our approach to the action. How often you’re against the alien, and how often we show it. A lot of it is down to how the player feels like they want to play."
Alien: Isolation will star just one xenomorph, which is impossible to actually destroy, that stalks the player as he explores a dark and old space station, while searching for clues about the mysterious enemy.
Jude Bond, the leading artist working on the title, adds that his team has no way of predicting what the player will do and that means it needs to create separate behaviors in order to track every possibility.
He states, "So you have some players who will sprint through the level, collecting things, scavenging in the world and trying to defend themselves, yet other players will take that careful slow approach, gripping the motion tracker for dear life and just getting through it."
The developer also offered some insight into the difficulty level of Alien: Isolation by saying that most gamers who played sections of the game died between 8 and 12 times, with the most careful only dying twice, while some more reckless players managing to expire 30 times.
Alien: Isolation will try to create an atmosphere that's as close as possible to that of the original movie and the team hopes that it can incorporate realistic weapons and environments.
The entire experience has been described as being similar to that of the Amnesia titles, but The Creative Assembly wants a more complex set of core gameplay mechanics and a bigger focus on the alien.
Alien: Isolation will be launched on the PC, the PlayStation 4 from Sony, the Xbox One from Microsoft and current-gen consoles before the end of the year.
The Creative Assembly and publisher SEGA have promised that they will deliver an official date at the upcoming Rezzed event.