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Alien: Blackout seems to be that mysterious new Alien shooter

Probably not battle royale

For a film series which is the main influence for 70% of video games, Alien and Aliens have received disappointingly few decent video game adaptions over the past forty years. The unexpectedly splendid Alien: Isolation broke a streak of duffers, but what will come next? Fox seem to be winding up to announce their next game at Geoff Keighley's Game Awards next week, and trademark filings suggest it'll be named Alien: Blackout. Considering that Cod Blops 4 named its battle royale mode Blackout, let's assume it's about 100 players trying to be the last colonist standing without an egg in their guts; that way, whatever they do announce will be a pleasant surprise.

20th Century Fox last week filed a trademark for Alien Blackout (as noted by Bloody Disgusting), covering video games and such. Their games division, currently named FoxNext Games, did announce earlier this year that they had a new Alien shooter coming. It's being made by Cold Iron Studios, a studio founded in 2015 by three folks formerly from City Of Heroes devs Cryptic Studios and now owned by Fox.

"Cold Iron adds a whole dimension of game development and play to our arsenal: long play-session MMOs targeted to PC and console gamers," FoxNext head Aaron Loeb told GamesIndustry.biz back in January. "The kinds of games Cold Iron develops will enable us to deeply explore the worlds of our franchises, starting with the Alien universe."

So probably not battle royale, then.

That being the only Alien thing we know coming, that's probably what we can expect to see announced on December 6th. Awardman Geoff Keighley earlier this month tweeted the marketing-o-rama's slogan "Worlds will change" in a style which sure looks like a mock-retro Alien thing, with a big ol' W presumably for that scamp of a megacorp, Weyland.

I suppose we'll see soon.

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