New Game Design/Gameplay needed for dealing with Enemies in future games

[jamman39]

I think Frictional themselves would agree that the run/hide/sneak mechanic is getting a bit played out, and of course any attempt to use that game design will inevitably lead to comparisons to games that took said gameplay and ran with it full throttle, such as Outlast, or the much higher-budgeted Alien: Isolation.

What could be done though? I personally haven't the slightest clue, and I'm the last one who would ever suggest something like adding in "Combat" systems to such a game. I agree with the articles that have stated that Horror works best when it is nebulous and unknown, and by allowing you to fight back diminishes it greatly. Case in point Alien: isolation, which wasn't really "scary" to me at all, other than the tension of "being caught". The Alien was a known quantity and something we'd seen in media over and over again, and its algorithms of tracking were quite, "cheap".

I wouldnt be so quick to throw out Alien: Isolation, it introduced some really fresh although complicated concepts to Survival Horror that could eventually be used to better effect in another game.

First, Alien mixed hide and seek gameplay with classic RE/Silent Hill resource management survival horror, by giving you 'weapons' to use against an invulnerable enemy. This is a really great new idea, instead of using your weapons to kill the enemy you use them to deter it. This keeps the player from feeling empowered but it also lets you feel like a more capable protagonist than the ones in Outlast or Amnesia.

Second, although the randomized AI goes too far, having a truly unpredictable monster can lend itself to some incredible encounters. Even the development team from Alien: Isolation could never feel comfortable predicting what the Alien would do in a given situation, thats a triumph of solid AI design. This needed to be balanced a little more in favor of the player, the stakes were way too high, for the threat level to be as high as it was. The Alien will never completely despawn from an area, which it probably should have occasionally especially after the player used a high level weapon against it.

Third, the game prevents players from spamming the Alien with attacks, or trying to cheat the AI. The most amazing and horrifying thing Alien: Isolation did was allowed the Alien to watch and learn and adapt to what the player was trying to do against it. If a player threw noisemakers to distract the Alien too often, the Alien would begin ignoring them. If the player attempted to spray the Alien with a flamethrower too often, the Alien would approach the player slower, keep its distance, and wait for the player to waste their flamethrower fuel before pouncing and attacking.

Alien had its fair share of problems, almost all of them stem from difficulty balance, but it doesnt deserve to be ignored, I believe the future of survival horror games can be plucked from the work Creative Assembly did. If Frictional are able to implement (or are even interested in implementing) some of these routines into their AI in their next game there wont be nearly as many threads of people complaining about the monster's AI