Aliens Vs. Predator

Hey guys, so first off I want to thank SEGA and Rebellion for reinvigorating a franchise I so dearly love and can say after playing today that they did a great job. I also wanted to thank Clumsy for allowing me the chance to come into the studio to try out the game weeks before arrival. I also wanted to say thanks to Tim Jones who was a very cool guy and absolutely loved AvP, it really showed! Now on todays events!

RACES:

I jumped into the game with some single player first as the Predator followed by Alien and then finally Marine. The single player was good but wasn't the reason I was here nor was it the reason I was buying this game. After everyone was done learning the controls of every species, we jumped into some multi player starting with a death match. Before I go on about the multi player, a bit about the controls.

We were all playing on an Xbox 360 and the controls were rather easy to understand and felt good. As predator you have two melee attacks and also a long range attack. The ranged attacks are all weapons that you pick up that include the spear, disk, mines and a shoulder cannon. The predator has a jump ability which he can use to jump to high areas. It was interesting to know that although it seemed like predators could jump far distances, they were actually very limited to the places they could jump. On many videos you will see a marker of where you can land, but in the places that are too far, there is an x indicating you cannot jump that far. It was pleasing to know after playing the predator that the jump felt good and balances nicely between the aliens. The jump ability also felt very in touch with how the Predator hunts and playing as him felt even more like the Movies than any of the previous AvP games. There were only two vision modes aside from the normal mode, one for marine and predators and the other for aliens. The predators, which sound perfect have a big disadvantage, in that they have to find all of their weapons and rely on energy. Your hud will hint to where your weapons are located which are usually at the highest point in the level. All of the weapons were incredibly pleasing to use and although they were easy to get the hang of, some of them seemed rather hard to master. My favorite was the spear, the sound it makes when you throw it, and the arch of the weapon makes it feel like there is real weight to the thing. It's no surprise that the spear deals huge damage resulting in a fatality. The disk was also very fun to use as it did not auto lock or home in on the targets. You certainly had to aim the thing but it's also an instant kill weapon which can ricochet off objects in the map making it effective in corridors. I didn't get much time with the shoulder cannon as most of my time was spent combating other species with melee.

The Alien was the most pleasing to play and was the species I was looking forward to the most. The Alien auto clings to walls, so you don't need to hold a button to climb up walls. It was much easier to navigate as the Alien than in any of the previous AvP games. There is a button you need to press that will allow you to transfer to other surfaces such as from a wall to a ceiling or from a wall over a pipe, etc. Moving around the environment as an alien never felt so intuitive, although it's still easily confusing where you are when walking upside down. You can also tap the wall walk button to fall back to the ground. I especially liked being able to press the jump button which would fly me and latch me to a wall that I was pointing at. The mechanic is similar to the pounce in AvP2 without the actual damage. It's mainly used as a way to jump to a ceiling to get away. The alien, like the other races has a sprint feature but is unmatched by any species and is used often to escape and pursue enemies. You also have a unique ability which allows you to blend into dark areas. Unlike Previous AvP games where you had an alternate vision mode, your vision will change depending on how dark your environment is. Your cross hair will also change color when you are hidden in the dark, making the hud useful for the alien but not distracting one bit. My favorite part of playing the Alien was watching enemies through walls, then holding my target button and melee'ing to pounce at them, followed by a TK with a tail through their neck.

The marine was also a good race to play as and was the most simple out of the three. You start off with the pulse rifle and are usually tasked with sticking with your allies. I was only able to find the Smart Gun, a Shotgun and a Sniper rifle, so I do not know what other weapons there may be. The sniper rifle was definitely the marines best weapon, but my favorite was the shotgun. I also absolutely fell in love with the Marine HUD. Everything about it made it feel as if I was playing through a video camera which reminded me of Aliens. Unlike the other races, marines do much better in numbers and can beat any race when 2 or more marines are together watching each others backs. Probably the most controversial add that Rebellion gave the marines are the use of stim packs and the ability to block and melee. The melee isn't for damaging enemies but is mainly to push enemies back to allow you space to continue firing. The stim packs are a welcomed addition because they are slow to use like the predators heal ability and the Alien heals over time which takes a bit of time to do as well. Also some people were complaining about no crouch and there is no need for it. There is also no room for a knife, no need to stab something when you can melee with a weapon and there is no need to crouch in any situation, you always want to be moving, never staying in one spot.

COMBAT:

Perhaps the best part of the entire game was the melee sequencing. The other AvP games don't have a melee combat quite like this game. Where AvP 1 and 2 are more about circling your enemies and using your strafe to fight, this game is more about facing your enemy and using your attacks at the right time to score hits. You have a light and heavy melee attack, a block, a lunge and a counter. The blocks are only useful against light attacks and only work once for a set period of time. When you block, you can counter your enemy to push them back. This move is the marines most effective move which allows them to push back enemies and allow them to gun down their assailants. The predator and Alien use their blocks to counter light attacks which leave the enemy vulnerable to heavy attacks or Trophy kills. Heavy attacks will peirce blocks and almost always equal a kill but are very tricky to time. The trophy kill is only useful when alone, because you are a sitting duck while performing this move. I noticed when we were playing that many people will target others doing these animations for easy kills and there was even a moment where 4 of us were TK'ing one after the other. It was worthy to note that if you performed a TK then a TK was performed on you before your animation was finished, you would still get the kill. Tk's are risky, of about 30 or so different sequences that occur at random there are some that are slower than others and some that only last about 3-4 seconds. The other way of attack is to hold down the targeting button and melee which lunges you at your opponent, briefly knocking them down and allowing for a TK as a follow up. It was certianly faster and safer to not do a TK but in moments of short life span, the TK is there at the risk of your life. I was a bit disappointed to know that the Alien lost it's Head bite ability as a normal attack and also couldn't charge the Tail attack. The spear for predator is also only used as a ranged attack and only uses his claws to melee. The melee system was definitely the games strong point and it will be a deciding factor for a lot of buyers if they like the way it works or not. I was only able to play the game for 3 hours and just started to get the hang of it, so it will be interesting to see where the balance lies on game release.

MULTI PLAYER:

First we played two death match games followed by the infamous and soon to be most popular game type, Infestation Mode which features an entire squad of marines vs. one randomly selected alien. This mode was insanely fun, where at first things seemed really easy, soon turned to hell as marines started dropping one by one. Everything about Infestation reminded me of the Alien movies in how the humans are at first eager to kill the bugs which then turns into fear of getting over run. We had 9 marines and 1 alien in the beginning which ended fast but was very fun the whole way through. I would recommend 10+ players for this game mode.

After that, we jumped into a Team Death match on a map called Pyramid. In this mode, I was playing as a marine and it was our teams duty to stick together and fight together. This map was really interesting and was perhaps the scariest map there is. Similar to the AvP movie, you are in a pyramid that shifts shape every 30 seconds or so which closes off some areas and opens up others. There were plenty of tunnels and shortcuts for the Predators and Aliens, but the Marines had to stay together or else the pyramid would cut them off which leads to inevitable doom. This map was definitely the most intense one I played all day.

We then got to play a CTF mode called Domination which basically had Capture points on the map. I wasn't entirely sure how this mode worked exactly but I believe that you win once you capture all of the points. I was unfortunate to find out that there are no hud indicators to where these points are which can make playing a slow race such as the marines difficult. There is a narrated voice that comes on that will tell you when flags are being captured, but to know which point is being captured is a guess. I don't think domination mode was the best gametype to play and didn't seem entirely balanced as we had 5 aliens vs. 5 marines and stormed the points rather quickly.

The next mode we played was Predator Hunt which features marines hunting down a predator. The concept is simple, one predator spawns and the rest are marines, the first marine to kill the predator takes his spot. You only gain a point for becoming the predator and killing the marines. When we first jumped in the game it was a bit slow, we basically had to wait until the predator did something stupid or until he showed himself so that we could attack. Don't get me wrong, as soon as I took down the predator for the first time and re-spawned as the Predator, I had a complete blast. There's nothing like being able to jump to a high area, cloak, pick up a spear and chuck it across the map only to have it fly through a marines head and for his buddies to flip out. We had 1 predator and 9 marines when we played so I would recommend this game type to have less than 10 people. I recommend a lower amount of players because you will have a higher chance of running into the predator as there will be less enemies for the Predator to hunt.

Finally we played Survior which unfortunately only features 2 maps and can only support up to 4 people. When asked about this, Tim replied that the 4 people were the limit because it helps with optimization. Tim helped to clarify that the amount of Aliens you see on screen at a time is so staggering that any more players might cause FPS issues. The Survior mode was really fun, but I was displeased to hear that Rebellion didn't want it to be the main portion of their game which it could have very well been. The two maps were both small and very basic. The most time we got was to 8 minutes, but Tim told us that as time keeps moving, you eventually fight harder enemies such as Pretorians and possibly Predaliens.

The last match we played was a death match, whoever won this would walk away with a nice pair of head phones with a mixer that connected into the TV. It was an amazing headset with Aliens vs. Predator logo's on the sides of the headphones. Unfortunately I did not win, but it was interesting to note that we had 1 predator, 3 aliens and 6 marines with the victor being a marine. I found that marines could very well be the strongest race in this game, although when the game is finally released we will know for certain.

FINAL THOUGHTS PLUS SOME Q/A:

I was also able to ask Tim Jones a few questions about the PC version of the game and a few other ones about the console version. It's important to know that both Console and PC versions will feature a match making process. There will be ranked and player matches with PC having the option to host dedicated servers. It's worthy to note that there unfortunately won't be any host migration and when players quit, bots won't join to fill their spots to even the teams. Dedicated servers won't have this issue of hosts quitting for obvious reasons, but I was led to believe that for us to achieve ranking we need to play in ranked matches which is the match making process. All that I know about the ranking is that it's only useful for unlocking skins but there might be other goodies that unlock as well. I believe there are a total of 7 skins for each race. Some people were asking if Hicks and Hudson were included as a skin and I can't tell you because we were only able to see the default skins for each race. I could see the names of the locked skins but none of them had the names of the characters, so it's probable that those skins are there, they just might have different names associated with them.

Also you cannot switch races during a game which was quite a let down but made sense for a few reasons. The main reason is for Ranked matches and species death match so that players don't switch to a winning team. I believe rebellion thought it would be important to keep that consistent, so it's a bit annoying that even in player matches you can't change your race. I asked about if the PC version could do this and I believe you cannot.

I also asked about a SDK and Tim said that to do that takes a huge amount of time to get ready for the public to use. Tim told me that they were definitely looking into doing an SDK for AvP but had no current plans except to release the game on schedule. I also asked about any add-on campaigns or bonus missions like the old AvP games and he also said there were no plans but is a possibility. I asked about Rcon and Plugin support for dedicated servers and he did not know the answer to that.

So after playing this game for nearly 3 hours and talking AvP all day, I would highly recommend people buy this game. I have a feeling, like most M rated games, there will be those immature players who will quit games early and ruin it for everyone, so I will have to recommend buying it for pc for the dedicated servers. Also, if an SDK comes out, it will be well worth it as we will have a plethora of custom content such as maps, skins and anything you can think of to make your game better. There isn't any demo confirmation date yet, but we were led to believe console will receive the demo first, probably by next week and PC will arrive soon after that. There are 7 MP maps and 2 survivor maps with 2 MP maps and 2 survivor maps as DLC. I hope you guys combine this thread with other interviews and videos out there to help you purchase this game. I know there are some people out there who will be disappointed that this game is NOT AvP 1 or 2. If you are expecting the same two games but with updated graphics, look elsewhere as this game is new, bad and ready to take 2010 by storm.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to post here and I'll try and answer as best as I can from what I remember Tim telling me.