‘We Wanted To Match the Original and Go Beyond’ – Alien: Isolation 2’s Director on Improving a Survivor Horror Icon

If you read any account of the original Alien: Isolation’s development process, at some point there’s always mention of how Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece was playing on a constant loop in Creative Assembly’s offices. When I stepped into those same offices a couple of weeks ago to go hands-on with the long-anticipated sequel, the first thing to greet me was a massive TV mid-way through a screening of Alien. The fact that this very same ritual has been resurrected a decade later is perhaps one small indicator as to why Alien: Isolation 2 feels so in step with its predecessor.

“We feel like there's such a rich vein within that original 1979 absolute masterpiece,” says Al Hope, the director of the original game who has returned to helm the sequel. “It's so beguiling. That world is our greatest focus and greatest inspiration.”

Once again, all the little touches are there. The 1970s logos. The VHS fuzz and scan lines. The beautiful, eerie glow of CRT terminals, made newly dynamic thanks to completely custom lighting systems built atop Unreal Engine 5. The blips, clunks, and whirrs of Seegson technology, as well as the tell-tale audio cues of the xenomorph itself, are also provided by completely custom audio systems. I may have only seen 30 minutes, but Isolation 2 is clearly a labour of love crafted by Alien obsessives.

You’d think such obsessives wouldn’t want to wait a decade and change to create a sequel. A second chapter had been on Hope’s mind since before the original game was released, so why such a long gap between projects? The popular theory among internet forums is that poor sales (influenced by some middling review scores, including our own) are responsible for keeping a sequel out of production, but Hope says differently: “I guess the truth is, as a studio, we've been really busy for the last couple of years. And so I guess it wasn't until recently that it felt like, okay, maybe this was the right time to return.”

Perhaps it wasn’t until recently that Hope and his team felt like they had the right ideas needed to advance what they had built before. “We absolutely didn't want to copy and paste what we did in the past and just stick a “2” on it,” says Hope. “I think for us to return, we really wanted to do something that absolutely matched the original and went beyond. We are finding new ways to expand and evolve that in really meaningful ways, really terrifying ways, to create the kind of greatest Alien: Isolation experience possible.”

For us to return, we really wanted to do something that absolutely matched the original and went beyond. That brings us to LV-921, a brand new planet the Isolation 2 team has created for the Alien canon. Its surface is home to the Weyland-Yutani outpost Kurosaki Station, and its corridors are where much of the action takes place. But Alien: Isolation 2’s big new change is that you can step outside of the station and venture into the storm-ravaged wilderness beyond its perimeter.

“Now we have these exterior spaces where, once the player manages to get out, after that initial rush of, ‘Yes, I'm no longer trapped,’ they start to slowly feel quite exposed and vulnerable,” explains Hope. “They’d quite like to get back inside again. Having the player ride that seesaw of emotion and motivation is what I think is making the sequel really special.”

While the outside spaces promise to provide a different atmosphere and a different approach to generating tension, they’re still built on the same fundamentals as Kurosaki Station and Sevastopol Station’s corridors and vents.

“It's about movement, it's about choices, it's about line of sight,” explains Hope. “Very simple building blocks. And they work for the interior spaces, but they also work really well for the exterior spaces. But then you add in all the tools and gadgets that we can give the player, plus new ones to help them divert, distract, and disrupt. It’s all in order to try and change the odds of survival and to make it absolutely terrifying.”

Hope is hesitant to reveal too much – he stops short of explaining in any detail the kind of playspace we can expect from the new outdoor environments, nor will he reveal the specifics of any of the new gadgets we’ll be able to deploy. However, he does tell me that he hopes Alien: Isolation 2 will better communicate the relationship between environment, tools, and player.

Technology has moved on, but the tenets and the approach has remained the same. “I think there's a bit of a meme that Alien: Isolation is a game about hiding in lockers,” he says, referencing a common complaint from both frustrated players and more negative critics. “And it really isn't a game about hiding lockers, but I think maybe some players may have hidden in a locker and it may have saved them, and then they feel too scared to try too much else out. And then maybe it does feel like it's a game about hiding in lockers.

“And so I think one of the things we can do with the sequel is to help players understand the opportunities [provided by] all of these different tools and gadgets that they have at hand,” he continues. “How they might be useful to them and how they might change the odds.”

That lockers meme was born out of Alien: Isolation’s greatest triumph: the AI that powers the xenomorph. It is genuinely terrifying. More advanced than pretty much any of its contemporaries and arguably still much smarter than most of today’s enemies, it’s able to learn your survival tactics. No wonder it had so many running for the nearest locker. But you can’t rely on them; if the alien discovers you hiding in a locker too often, it’ll begin to routinely tear them open as part of its hunt. If it catches you in a vent, it’ll scour the ducts it encounters in future encounters. Hope once again refrains from talking too much about what we can expect from version 2.0 of gaming’s most deadly organism, but reassures me that a smart, systemic xenomorph is still the heart of the game.

“Technology has moved on, but the tenets and the approach has remained the same,” he says. “It's unpredictable, it's kind of mysterious, unknowable. This creature is able to learn from every encounter they have with the player and adapt their behavior based on that.”

As I detailed in my hands-on preview, the short prologue that I was able to play wasn’t detailed enough to truly show what kind of enhancements have been made. But knowing the xenomorph and its original hunter concept is still the heart of the experience gives me confidence that Creative Assembly hasn’t lost sight of what made its original such a unique and enduring cult classic. The studio has yet to provide a release date, but hopefully as we get closer to its now-assured launch, we’ll learn more about the advancements and new ideas that put the “2” in Alien: Isolation 2.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.