Interview | John Dennis (Team 17)
By Greg Giddens
For what seems like an eternity, Alien Breed fans have been waiting for their beloved series to reappear.
It’s been 13 years since the franchise last saw a release, with Alien Breed 3D 2: The Killing Ground. Now, thanks to the opportunities provided by the digital distribution channels on consoles and PC, Alien Breed is back, with improvements galore. Shying away from the previous FPS iterations, Evolution returns to its roots, with a top-down perspective similar to the 2D days of the first Alien Breed titles. The game makes full use of the Unreal 3 engine, and looks truly gorgeous. Even in dark corridors, illuminated by your character’s torch, the details jump out at you, whether it’s from the magnificent fire and explosion effects or the impressive care that’s been lavished on the walls and floors. We only had time to play for a short while on a single interior level at last week’s Eurogamer Expo, but Team 17 promises to deliver many more locations just as visually impressive, and based on the quality of the locations we did see, excitement is growing for what else there is to see in brighter settings.
The visuals are further complimented by the general design of the experience. The look and feel of the game remains authentic to what fans of the original fell in love with all those years ago, yet feels modern and fresh thanks to the benefits of present-day presentation and mechanics. It all works to maintain the core experience that made the originals so successful in the first place, but adds much needed updates to keep the formula relevant.
With our session playing Alien Breed Evolution over, we sat down with Team 17’s Design Manager, John Dennis, for a chat about the game.
Resolution: Why bring back Alien Breed? What made you decide to do it?
John Dennis: Well, we’ve been trying for years. I’ve lost count of how many ‘almost’ Alien Breeds we’ve developed. You know, for years we’ve been shackled by third-party publishers, in the sense that we could only make the games that third-party publishers see as economically viable, and they have to factor in a number of things into that calculation. For us as an independent to start publishing our own games, that’s an entirely different calculation, so with the success of Worms on XBLA and PSN, it essentially proved to us it was a viable market and we may be able to recoup our development costs if we made another Alien Breed game. So really it’s circumstance. We’ve been wanting and trying to do this for years, getting that game and that content to the audience.
R: Other than the obvious – the new engine – what else is new or improved in Alien Breed Evolution over the originals?
JD: Oh wow, I don’t really know where to start. Firstly, the level design. In the levels in the original Alien Breed, you’d have limited keys and you’d have to shoot doors; sometimes you’d find yourself in a position where you couldn’t complete the level any more. There’s none of that in Evolution. Our levels have all had a lot of time lavished on them, a lot of design. There’s loads of new weapons; the aliens in the original all behaved the same way, and now they don’t. We have lots of new and different aliens that act in different ways. They all require different strategies from the player to deal with them, and that’s something that we felt makes a larger scale game – you know, maybe this can occupy you for five to eight hours. That was important, so the experience doesn’t get stale; you always have to think, you’re always tested.
The other thing we’ve done is we’ve kind of added a survival horror element, so when your player character gets to low health he starts limping around and he can’t run, so it becomes even more dangerous. Health is always in really short supply – so is ammo – so you’ve got to be sure to use the weaker weapons on the weaker aliens rather than using your really powerful ones, otherwise you’ll really struggle later on. We’ve also got intelligent audio, where it ramps up when you’ve got lots of aliens on screen. And also, when you become injured, the screen drains of colour, it kind of goes black and white, and you get a heartbeat sound effect and a heartbeat rumble on the controller, so it scares the hell out of you. It goes all out to really make you nervous. So we’ve done lots of things to try and induce that unnerving feeling, and coupled with that we’ve got the narrative as well. It runs over the three episodes, so that provides a context and a meaning to your actions that the original never had.
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