MLMarkland said:
Your ideas are cool and definitely in line with the IP I've refrained from going in depth on the design of the game for reasons unrelated to the discussion here - I don't work at Obsidian anymore and it's not my job to talk about Aliens.
My main disagreement with you has been over whether using the word stealth as a shorthand for design discussions internally on the Aliens game was some sort of transgression (which it isn't).
Unfortunately, you run into the stigma of what the shorthand meant to the rest of the industry. I could hardly care if you called the mechanics "beanie weenies" internally.
Eventually, as it happened on these forums, it would have slipped out. It would have given some kind of preconception to the mass media of what to expect from the design connotations the term implies. The idea of hiding from a xenomorph is highly anathema to the setting, because except in certain circumstances, you can't just hide in a closet to escape as if the xeno were a crazed axe murderer (and even then that doesn't work out as movies changed to have the axe murderer go back and check all doors to eliminate possibilities).
Unlike you or me, the mass of Aliens fans don't know squat for game design mechanics aside from what the gaming media tells them.
Books and comics were definitely used by people for reference, but they are officially secondary canon compared to the movies (specifically the first 3 movies).
Some of them really, really stink. Most Alien fans tend to be fairly consistent about them.
I don't see how people failing to hide successfully has anything to do with my claim that standing up to the Aliens in a fight almost invariably led to bad results (except Ripley).
And yet, somehow, Ripley was a better combatant than marines, regardless of the situation. Aliens can also smell through ventilation ducts and track down people through their scent of fear - which is quite strong to a predator species. Now imagine the metaphorical confusion of a wolf stalking into a flock of sheep to find another wolf - but one that wants to kill them.
Stop trying to play gotcha, it just degrades your other points which have merit and your ideas which seem to be sound.
Nope, just pointing out a glaring error. Ripley has been a case among cerebral witch doctors for quite some time as a poster child of initial and reinforced cases of PTSD portrayed in film. Add in pheromone research, and you get into why some entomologists adore the series. The Hive, essentially, is a giant cluster of parasitic ants to them.
Many of the neat little morbid things those guys like about insects, from wasp to ant.
These are all cool ideas -- just don't assume that Sawyer and the other designers didn't have similar trains of thought on this subject matter. It takes a lot more than well reasoned design to keep a game from getting canceled.
All it would theoretically take is a leak of the idea of using stealth around xenos to the wrong people, and it would have caused problems. Media titles have been shitcanned for less, see the example above of the poor quality Alien work and why some books don't have sequels.
I just disagree with all this. Stealth is not contra to the IP. Being evasive is the best way to survive.
Unfortunately, the main theme and why Aliens were so fearsome a villain, would be mainly because there is no running from them.
You get facehugged, you're going to die and take your friends with you.
You hide in a closet, they will find you.
You run, they can chase you down.
You fight, they flank you or wait until they can hide
from you and attack you in surprise.
You can only hide for so very short of a time before they find you, as your fear leads them right to you. The use of pheromones wasn't an overt thing in the movies, it was a subtle detail of Giger's design - as they were modeled after a hive species like ants, it was natural to adopt many of their traits like scent trails.
A race that didn't need to breathe suddenly stops and draws in air. Hmm... Then you get into the xenos doing the same thing to a trapped victim - which is the sign of a sentient or semi-intelligent predator, savoring the fear and the meal to come soon.
They are the embodiment of stealthy killers. It took a special case for a "prey" to survive for so long, and that was because they weren't technically prey any longer.
The simplistic concept of stealth driven by most games is certainly not the kind of moment-to-moment gameplay experience we were shooting for; but the exact word we put on it isn't really relevant.
Until the public found out, before playing the title. It was certain to get out or be slipped out somehow, like I was waiting for. EA aren't the only ones with spies in Obsidian (though information was sketchy at best, probably given the ambiguity of what was talked about as stealth
). Stealth already has a meaning to the gaming market.
Mistakes like that aren't good to make. Just something to note for the future. Unfortunately, Obsidian has for a long time subscribed to the Feargus mentality and seems to keep doing the same thing over and over that in fact pushes away some fans over time. That isn't good, either. This title was the last, best hope many of us had for the dev house.
The experience is what is important. How that experience ended up being marketed by Sega if the game had been finished would've been completely disconnected from my own activities in relation to the game.
Unfortunately, the term was already dropped, long before the marketing department at Sega had touched it. That is a negative impact that wouldn't go over well with fans.
"Stealth" was already known before it was dropped into this thread.
I doubt you'd like a Zero Punctuation-esque treatment of a soldier sneaking by a xeno on his tiptoes, which would be readily identifiable by fans of the Aliens setting (you know, the reason why you guys were making a game in the setting) as a bullshit concept.
Obviously, which is why that never would have happened in the game.
Except that "stealth" was already being leaked out. I've merely been pointing out what kind of a media mess that would have been if people weren't mourning Nambla Jackson and the death of this title (if the info were leaked out to mass media at this time, that is). I still don't want to see it mistakenly reported by the mass media, either, as honestly that would have given discredit towards Obsidian's last attempt at decent gameplay.
My beef of the terminology aside, I really didn't want to see this title die. I've known it was dead or on hiatus for quite a while.
Sneaking past Alien eggs was distance-based. The olfactory nature of things was not definitively established by the movies however, which were our primary canonical sources.
Even then, it wouldn't really be sneaking. Just avoidance, like a land mine. It turns the gameplay from anything like stealth into a proximity maze.
As I mentioned before, EA already has a spy there at Obsidian, and it's giving me a few chuckles. They aren't
my spy, but I've heard from my own at EA that Obsidian was one of EA's Borg targets to assimilate or put out of business.
I can say with good probability that I have the largest current spy network in the game industry, though they aren't always in the departments I would like. As I've been telling folks for years: Rosh is only the spymaster. I have been approached by a few execs threatening lawsuits, but unfortunately that would simply bite them in the ass in return as they were held accountable for truth in advertising laws. Back in the Origin/UO2/UIX days, they hated me, and it was the information gained that probably made EA decide to cancel UO2 because of all the robots and other science fiction additions. EA has since toned down much of their commercial hype, churning out the same copy/paste styles of development for their devoted fans. In exchange, I am to be selective about what I investigate, and that is why I don't run a news site (though I have far more than enough info to do so). Some things like Spore and The Sims I don't particularly care about, so I leave those well enough alone.
That's okay with me, as EA is where decent game development goes to die or be milked to death.
