Give It A Whack: Alien: Isolation's Clunky Tech
Acts of VHS vandalism
They knew how to dream of futures, those film makers of the late 1970s and early '80s. The dusty leather of Mad Max, rain refracting flickering neon in Blade Runner, and chunky busted technology in Alien. What are we teaching the next generation to hope for, Google Glass and cloud computing? It's all too clean and too tidy, covering up the inevitable doom. Thankfully The Creative Assembly are putting an awful lot of work into recreating that analogue "low-fi sci-fi" vibe with Alien: Isolation, as a new video developer diary thing shows off.
The TCA gang are on hand to gab about analysing the film's concept art, trying to emulate prop-making techniques of the era, and committing VHS vandalism to get a fuzzy UI. It is very pretty.
However, we're still at a point in the marketing campaign where publisher Sega will only hint at Isolation's combat. They're not yet willing to say what we'll be fighting, with what, and how often. It'd be odd if they put this much effort into atmosphere--and from what I played, Isolation has bags of the stuff--only to turn it into an arcade-y shooting gallery but worse things have happened in licensed video games. We'll only know for certain when it arrives in October.
The Alien: Isolation we've seen so far is not how the final game will look. But it is pretty: