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As if Alien fans hadn’t had enough to chew on lately, Sega’s acclaimed studio Creative Assembly confirmed it’s working on a sequel to 2014’s hit horror title Alien: Isolation.
The studio’s creative director Alistair Hope posted on X to celebrate the original game’s 10 year anniversary, and added a nice little surprise at the bottom of his post.
“On the 10th anniversary, it seems only fitting to know that we have heard your distress calls loud and clear,” Hope wrote. “Today, I’m delighted to confirm, on behalf of the team, that a sequel to Alien: Isolation is in early development.”
Hope added that the team will share more once they’re ready, which is probably going to be awhile. Considering the game is in ‘early development’, it would be fair to assume that Alien: Isolation 2 (or whatever it ends up being called) isn’t likely to launch until at least 2028: and given how long games taken to develop these days even that might be optimistic.
Beyond the knowledge that the sequel is coming, we don’t know anything else: is it launching in this console generation? Is it a direct sequel featuring Amanda Ripley, or a whole new story?
The prospect of a long wait hasn’t dampened fans’ excitement, though, with Hope’s post garnering plenty of goodwill from players who have waited a decade for news of a sequel.
The game, which launched to critical acclaim and has gone on to be recognised as one of the finest ways to be stalked through a mostly-abandoned space station, has left quite an impact on the broader franchise. Alien Romulus’s director Fede Alvarez recently sharing that he took inspiration from the game when designing the movie: specifically, the phone booths seen in the game as save points regularly show up in Romulus – specifically when the Xenomorph is near.
Perfecting the Perfect Organism
And, as X user @res0lve said above, the game has been particularly praised for the impressive AI of the titular Alien, which used a surprisingly complex, two-pronged approach to tracking and stalking the player, and essentially set the bar for what enemy AI in games can be.
Rather than focusing on creating scripted segments and jump scares, the team at Creative Assembly instead focused on making the Alien always find a way to turn up at the most inopportune moment and ruin your plans. In a talk at the 2016 nucl.ai conference, former CA developer Andy Bray explained that they accomplished this by always pointing the Alien in the right direction.
Bray explained that there’s two main behaviour systems in the game: a ‘Director’ AI, and an ‘Alien’ AI. The Director always knows where you are, and gives the Alien periodic updates as to where you are in the world. Once the Alien AI has a read on where you are, it’ll appear and start searching.
It doesn’t know what the player is trying to do, just that they’re in the vicinity and that they’re essentially helpless: with essentially being the key word. You can survive run ins with the Xenomorph, through patience, strategy, or a little bit of fire power, but you’ll never actually triumph – just buy yourself some more time on Sebastopol Station.
Isolation essentially created the scariest game of cat and mouse and let us all loose in it.
That kind of creative AI has been absent in a lot of games in recent years, and we’re incredibly excited about what could be in store for us in whatever Isolation’s sequel ends up looking like. In the meantime, there’s plenty of Xenomorph goodness to enjoy while we wait.
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