Aliens vs Predator and The UK Games Biz

Aliens versus Predator on Consoles

BT: Are there any specific lessons that you learned from the older games that you’ve applied to the new AVP?

Jason: I think the new game is less lethal – less instantly lethal, anyway. If an alien got through in the original then it hit you twice and that’s it. You’re dead. Restart.

I guess, you could kind of describe things as dangerous balloons. The players were dangerous balloons in that, if the aliens got close then they’d hit you twice and you’d be dead. Likewise, you didn’t need to hit them that much. We’ve tried to soften that approach a little bit and make it slower.

BT: Like dangerous cushions?

Jason: Yeah, dangerous furniture. Really, I suppose we’ve de-spiked it. There were some really strong parts in the original, but there were also some weak areas and a lot of people just couldn’t play it. We needed to make it accessible, but we’ve not softened it to the point where it won’t be a challenge to a hardcore player – the difficulty levels are proper difficulty levels. Easy is exactly that, essentially a story mode where you’ll be scared, die once or twice, but pretty much anyone can get through it. Go up the scale though and…well, Hard Mode is bloody hard. It’s a challenge.


Those things have been part of our internal discussions for a long time. We’ve got to be as accessible as possible because that’s better for business and also, I think, a lot more fair. But, if you want to play it on Director’s Cut then have a go. If you can. That’ll be a challenge.

BT: This is the first time that a proper AVP game has been on consoles. Did you find you had to make specific concessions for that in terms of level design and so on?

Jason: Level design, yeah, a bit. There’s a big market on consoles and everyone talks about that, but to me it’s more to do with the controller than the console itself. I play a lot of my games on keyboard and mouse and I’m really good with that, like most everyone who works here. On console though you can’t get the same experience, so you’ve got to make a sort of stickiness for the aiming and so on because there’s nothing more irritating that continually missing a target because the reticule is zig-zagging over the target. That’s just frustrating and it isn’t gameplay.

So, we’ve had to compromise on the console versions a bit, just to help players with aiming, as every game does. Hopefully it’s seamless for the player though and they’ll just feel rewarded and not cheated.

BT: How important do you think the console market is compared to PC? Is there a specific reason this is the first that’s been done on consoles?

Jason: No, just opportunity. We’ve not had the chance before and we’ve now got an engine that works across all formats. For the original it was…it was just that we were only asked to do it for PC. Again, I don’t remember why. Maybe there was a console change going on at the time? It was a long time ago. Now though we’ve got to maximise the number of people who can get access to the game, so we put it on consoles.


Importantly, the consoles can actually do these games now. There was a time where they just really couldn’t cope. It was hard work getting the Atari Jaguar version of AVP going and that was absolutely cutting edge technology. You look at it now and it’s clunky, but at the time it was unsurpassed in terms of the resolution and the real-time graphics and all that. Now though, you can see what we can do with a home console. Quite frankly the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are bloody nice bits of kit. It’d be a shame not to do a good game on them.

BT: How did you approach creating the look of the game then? Did you just rely on the films or did you want to bring something a bit more unique to the series?

Jason: Well, we have to go back to the films because those were the original, real-world reference points. I keep driving the team back to the first films as much as possible and we try to avoid using the secondary or tertiary references. We look at Alien and Aliens, not other people’s interpretations of what those things are.

As I see it though, the look of the universe is very much science fiction but it’s a dirty, sweaty, oily science fiction as opposed to Star Wars. We’ve worked on Star Wars games and the look there is a lot cleaner and while you do see grubby stormtroopers everything is a bit nicer on the whole. The Alien and Predator worlds aren’t like that – they are dirt and blood and snot. Tears too. We try to incorporate that into the game and be the first game with snot.