Man, this was a lucky escape. I was at a preview event for the upcoming Aliens vs Predator remake/sequel’s multiplayer mode a few weeks back, at which Men With Cameras were on the prowl for talking heads – specifically, a few journalists to give this game they’d seen (frankly, not all that much of) a big thumbs-up. Hmm. A fortunate confluence of having to run for a train and looking like a hobo meant I dodged this fate. The gentlemen below did not. As well as all their smiling for their close-ups, there’s some footage of the multiplayer and commentary from a Rebellion senior bod.
Apologies for the rather squiffy video quality – that’s me being a bit over-aggressive with the compression settings. I have much to learn.
My feelings on the multiplayer remain uncertain, incidentally. It was certainly close to the olden game in many ways, so I felt both the joy of familiarity and worry about limited novelty. The major difference was the ability/limitation (depending on how you look at it) of the Aliens and Preds to auto-leap to specific spots and to activate stealth kills from quite some distance away, which will hopefully lead to more cinematic takedowns and not too much annoying ganking.
Alas, I had to play it on a Playstation 3, so any muscle memory I had of the original on PC was lost, and the controls seemed a little over-complicated as a result. So I’m keen to play it on PC before passing any kind of judgement – and most especially I want to try out the new game’s interpretation of Skirmish mode, which sadly wasn’t in the build I played. A game I shall continue to follow keenly, certainly. But not to the point that anyone can film me offering wide-utterances about how double-plus awesome it looks.
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hahaha. this is all you are to these companies, game writer persons
I hope you washed your hands afterwards… ;)
I thought torturing was against the Geneva convention.
zing!
Hahahaha Geneva Convention. No one follows that anymore.
Wait, the joke was about torture wasn’t it?
But John it was your time to shine!
Wow, John Romero’s wasting away.
A ’strong brand experience’ is what I look for in my gaming.
The only thing I like more is an experience which has been monetized…
That’s how you make things bleeping awesome.
I can’t wait to consume this end-user product.
Managed to get a game on this at the Eurogamer Expo a few weeks ago, and had a go as the alien in multiplayer. I was just getting used to the crazy speed when a chap next to me pointed out there was a sprint button, at which point I became some sort of xenomorph pinball.
My main concern with the multiplayer was the stealth kills, which seemed to effectively mean as long as you were behind someone you could press a button and get a one-hit kill – this was quite easy to do with a bit of practice by zipping past enemies as the alien, doing a hasty 180 and whacking the button – it just felt a bit cheap. Otherwise I’m really impressed by what I’ve seen so far, but I’m more interested in the single player campaign.
Why do British game developers always look a bit weird and scary?
Please don’t balls it up…
It’s not developers who are scary, but journos.
i see no video, just a blank white space.
Turn off your ad filtering then buddy.
I’m not your buddy, Guy
even with adblock plus off it’s still not showing anything.
Quoting South Park…
You clearly don’t deserve to see the video.
Yes that’s right, i should probably go off and sob into my bedsheets and blog about this terrible day.
or not…
My main question is: what is this freakin hobbit doing in the game at 00:30 ? Isn’t that a weird try to cater to the Lotro fans ?
That’s quite disturbing if you ask me.
I’m full expecting this game to be a great big steaming pile of…
It’s going to be a sucky consolitus suffering borefest – It’s idea of “respecting the franchise” is going to be a few in jokes from the movies, and maybe a couple of hidden eastereggs mocking the AvP movies. Then filling the rest of the setting with cheesy lines and bad story so terrible that it becomes a bad parody Aliens. It will feel all through the SP like it really wanted to be starship troopers instead, and fail at that too.
The multiplayer will lack dedicated servers, or cheat protection – it will probably run through GFWL or Gamespy, if it runs at all.
The multiplayer will be unbalanced and cheap, a skill-less spamfest of grenades for the Marines, to counter the one hit kill stupidity of the aliens, and the overpowerdness of the predator.
All in all it will suck harder than almost any PC franchise resurrection in history.
I keep telling myself that every time I see a post like this or a new vid, because then when it happens I’ll have fully expected it.
All the while, a hidden, repressed little voice in the back of my mind is hoping and praying for this to be awesome.
Why pour so much emotional investment into it? If it’s bad, I won’t bother playing it and I’ll be mildly disappointed. If it’s good, I’ll rent the console version. If it’s great (and the multiplayer holds up well), I’ll buy the PC version.
Nothing wrong with ‘just’ hoping that it’s good.
“Then filling the rest of the setting with cheesy lines and bad story so terrible that it becomes a bad parody Aliens.”
So, anything ever called Alien Vs. Predator?
Dom, I don’t – I honestly couldn’t care less about AvP3, I enjoyed AvP2, missed AvP utterly then could never get it to run when I tried post AvP2.
Just a bit of dry humour is all.
Pomp… erm one or 2 of the books were, erm okay… okay?
I’m kind of agreeing with you on this since I heard a rumour that it will be shitty listen servers only for PC.
We shall see….
reading you’re post told me you’d never played avp and you don’t know that this is the same developers and that most of the stuff your saying is already been proven not true, e.g. they’ve explicitly said there will be dedicated servers, given all that rebelion are very hit and miss and so it’s still not a given that it’ll be great.
No I have played AvP, just didn’t play it for long, I simply didn’t enjoy it. But I was playing it well after AvP2 (which I enjoyed greatly, especially the multiplayer) – Ironically, I owned the game (still do in a box someplace) but it wasn’t until I found a prepatched and fixed torrent I could get it to run. Maybe it was the age of the game showing but I struggled to enjoy it, it had atmosphere yes, but the graphics and controls were terrible.
One of those things, we all like to pretend graphics don’t matter, but sometimes when you go back to play an old game it’s so ugly you just can’t get past it – my most recent example, Nights into dreams, loves that game when it was new, tried to play it recently and just couldn’t – it was too ugly.
Yer chumped.
There’s nothing else besides Thief 4 being developed that I’m so nervous about. It’s less the fear of disappointment I’m worried about though, and more the missed opportunities.
@ Starky, Rebellion said this game was gonna have dedicated servers. Still, and judging by their last 2 games (Shellshock 2 and Rogue Warrior), I’m not expecting this to be any good :\
Shellshock 2 was abominable, but Rogue Trooper was excellent, so… yeah, Rebellion are still all over the place.
Not Rogue Trooper, Rogue Warrior, the apparently abominable thing being advertised all over the Steam store at the moment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSDXn7cDQIo
I hear Rogue Warrior starts off terrible and then proceeds with that idea.
That footage of Rogue Warrior is sooo early to mid noughties.
Sniper Elite had its good moments too.
Sniper elite was a great game. A forgotten gem, in my opinion.
Video will not play in Chrome, Firefox, or IE. And there’s no HD option so I can’t use my usual trick to get it to play.
*RAGE*
Huh.
Worked fine for me with Chrome.
No clue what’s going on there.
And for me on Firefox.
Peculiar. It works fine for me in Firefox. It’s almost as though you’re using Adblock, but you wouldn’t do that on a site like RPS would you?
ctrl F5
@ Dominic, yes, Rogue Trooper was pretty good but Rogue Warrior (their latest game) is pretty lousy. AI is horrible, gameplay is extremely shallow (What’s with lack of depth in today’s games anyway?) and it took em 3 hours to finish it
Gaston’s expression goes a bit maniacal when he talks about players getting decapitated. Christ.
This video made me less excited, because it showed console footage, showed console gamers, and interviewed a guy from a console magazine. I thought that AvP was PC centric series. It’s just some irrational disappointment, but WTH.
I’m thoroughly looking forward to playing it. Not sure if it’ll be a fantastic game, but I always love immersing myself in that world for a few hours; fingers crossed.
It will need autojump spots because with the lack of dedicated servers it will be so laggy that any precise control will be impossible.
Are you saying that no-one will bother setting up dedicated servers for it, or did you just miss the announcement that it’ll have dedicated servers on PC?
I missed that. I heard an anoncement just a few weeks ago that it wasn’t going to have them. I guess they changed their minds after the fuss with MW2.
I think it’s just that they were non-committal about it initially, which after MW2 wasn’t a good move.
Here’s the owner being committal: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/dedicated-servers-for-aliens-vs-predator_9
I think the autojump in general is a good thing. Jumping around in first person, Metroid Prime series aside, is hard. Couple that with some of us having no sense of direction or place, and jumpy bits in shooters quickly become an exercise in frustration.
They could be a bit more subtle about it, though. Giant red markers are distracting.
I had the opportunity to play AvP multiplayer at Eurogamer in London, and i have to say i was extremely dissapointed. Having read about the joys if the originals multiplayer, i went there with high expectations for it. I found that the controls were too numerous and complicated, until i realised that as soon as you came within a certain distance of someone, you simply needed to tap a button to insta kill them.
So combat as the aliens and predators is simply a mad dash to enter within a certain distance of the enemy and then be the first to tap X. Also i played the game on a HD tv and the graphics actually looked like a PS2 game. The only saving grace was the marine class, as it feels so underpowered that landing a kill on an alien or predator feels like a real achievement.
I`ve got the same problem as Thrawny, there is no video showing, just a blank square space (in my case it is grey and not white, mind you). AdBlock has nothing to do with it, neither does my cookies setup or my pop-up settings. I’m using Firefox. Would anyone be so kind as to post a direct link to the video? Thanks in advance!
You’ll regret that!
Oh dear!
Oi!
Just You Wait!
I’ll Get You!
oh man, Worms. Good times, good times.
For those not seeing a video, I CAN see it. I have FireFox 3.5.5 with AdBlock and NoScript.
AdBlock is disabled for RPS and these addresses are set to allowed in NoScript…
rockpapershotgun.com, google-analytics.com, giantrealm.com, quantserve.com.
As I stated above, I am using Firefox aswell (most recent version of course) and tried shutting down AdBlock. I don’t have NoScript, so I suspect it’s got nothing to do with that too.
Not working for me either. Firefox.
I had that problem too a couple of times. Today, it worked. And I’m still using Firefox with Adblock Plus running.
I wish there was a kind of a skirmish mode where you were allowed to be one of the aliens attacking that group of soldiers/preds. Just for the fun of it
AvP 3, Thief 4, Deus Ex 3… Truly 2010 is going to be the year that the venerable masters return.
If they all suck, I plan to nuke the entire site from orbit. And cry.
It sounds reasonable for aliens to be an instant kill if there in a certain distance, as that is just a fact. If there razor sharp limbs dont get you then the acid will.
I could definitely see shades of the original in those clips. I’m just wary of when they used the words story, I wish they would leave that up to the player, you’ve gotta do things, then other things happen, because you know whatever they are going to come up with will be rubbish, and fit for one single playthrough.
“so I felt both the joy of familiarity and worry about limited novelty.”
Considering AvP2 is still being played on at least one server quite regularly even after all these years, provided the gameplay is solid I don’t see it getting old very quickly.
I haven’t been following this too faithfully, but I am cautiously optimistic. Does anyone know if life cycle is being brought back?
“console gamers expect an interesting story”
Erm… riiiggghhhttt *backs away slowly*
Oh look, it’s elitist PC snob, who thinks that console gamers are all drooling simpletons!
Well hai there!
Seriously though I dislike most recent shooters and consoles are not renowned for there strategy and rpg titles thanks to the godawful controller so…
Oh dear, here comes another 4 hour game as well then
:’(
I must say I didn’ t think AvP was multiplayer centric at all. Perhaps the second was a bit more so than the first. I never played the first multiplayer and I think I soon tired of playing the predator (easy mode!) but the marine single player campaign was a real treat.
At least, that’s how I remember it and I’m not going to ruin it by playing the game again tyvm.
It occurs to me after rereading the title that we’re avoiding talking about this very topic? My bad. :-)