Alien: Isolation

[Ezekiel]

Good lord, I don't remember the cutscenes looking THIS awful. Like they ran it through the lowest settings in Handbrake.

Thinking they went a little too far with dressing up old tech or didn't do it half as well as the filmmakers. Spotted an item that looked exactly like a big printer. The batteries for the flashlight look very much like current batteries. Those are so abundant, they should have just made the light unlimited.

Overall, too simplistic, the progression. Baby puzzles. A constant objective pointer because the level design/progression isn't solid enough to move the player along on its own.

 

[adddeed]

Uhm buddy that screenshot looks fine. How is anything in there awful?

 

[Zombra]

Uhm buddy that screenshot looks fine. How is anything in there awful?

I only count 18000 pores on her face, should be closer to 19000. immersion broken

 

[Ezekiel]

Uhm buddy that screenshot looks fine. How is anything in there awful?

How about the big macroblocks all over the place? The compression is so bad that a big halo follows around her head as she moves.

 

[Multidirectional]

I do remember cutscenes in this game looking worse than actual game. Especially when using TAA mod, game itself looked smooth while cutscenes were full of shimmering.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Ezekiel, I think that you just have a brain that is very different from most people's when it comes to processing visual input (and I genuinely mean no disrespect when I say that). In your posts over in the library you have a tendency to wax technical on aspects of film that are utterly arcane to me and would never be noticed by me unless you pointed them out (and to be honest, although I think you're almost certainly correct about any given issue, I can probably only see what you're talking about 50% of the time even when I'm actively looking for it). To be sure, this might just be a case of me being a retard, but in my experience I'm actually slightly more sensitive to this sort of stuff than Joe Blow off the street, so I think you may just be on the extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to this. I've often thought after reading through your posts that you should seek out a job in post-processing/film restoration. You clearly have an aptitude and passion for it.

Again, genuinely not intending any of that as an insult. You've given me a lot of interesting thoughts to think, and some great movie recommendations over the years, I just think your perspective here is pretty massively skewed from the average Alien: Isolation consumer.

 

[vortex]

Technical level is great in cutscenes. I don't understand your point. Minor issues is lip sync but I don't care about that nor is very noticable.

 

[Ezekiel]

Technical level is great in cutscenes. I don't understand your point. Minor issues is lip sync but I don't care about that nor is very noticable.

Wasn't talking about technical level, how the cutscenes were rendered, was talking about compression. Doesn't matter how good the cutscene looks if you then run it through a compression tool with poor settings.

I just extracted one of the USM video files and found it's MPEG-1. Who the fuck still compressed videos for PC monitors and HD televisions in MPEG-1 in 2014? I wanted to compress a video in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and 4 to see what the visual difference is, but Handbrake doesn't even have an option for outputting in MPEG-1, because it's so dated and obsolete. 12 Mbps for 1080p is kind of low, but I've seen videos at the same bitrate that look much better, only they aren't in MPEG-1.

https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/USM

Weird thing is that the extracted video played much smoother than in the game. The cutscenes are really choppy in the game. The extracted MPEG is a solid 30 fps.

 

[Ezekiel]

https://mega.nz/file/V2I1gYYR#tSnlO1wOZe5HcOoOB6EirDV6ewOE6-bJBwWxKfr6mEc

Here's the cutscene. Look how smooth it is. Why is it so choppy in the game? Probably USM is just a crappy container. The reason the file is so much smaller than the original USM (from 313 down to 149 MB) is because I did not bother to convert all the ADX audio files, which extracted separately.

I'm not alone.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/214490/discussions/0/618457398972899898/

 

[Sodafish]

Uhm buddy that screenshot looks fine. How is anything in there awful?

How about the big macroblocks all over the place? The compression is so bad that a big halo follows around her head as she moves.

I don't recall the cutscenes looking this bad.

Is that on the retail game, or a repack? If the latter they may have re-encoded the cutscenes at a lower quality.

 

[Ezekiel]

No, The Witcher 2 uses USM and I don't remember the cutscenes being so choppy, so what the fuck?!

 

[Ezekiel]

Uhm buddy that screenshot looks fine. How is anything in there awful?

How about the big macroblocks all over the place? The compression is so bad that a big halo follows around her head as she moves.

I don't recall the cutscenes looking this bad.

Is that on the retail game, or a repack? If the latter they may have re-encoded the cutscenes at a lower quality.

Retail.

 

[Morgoth]

Sega fucked up the encoding, hence the choppy playback. That's old news, and of course they never bothered to remedy the issue.

 

[vortex]

I just extracted one of the USM video files and found it's MPEG-1. Who the fuck still compressed videos for PC monitors and HD televisions in MPEG-1 in 2014? I wanted to compress a video in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and 4 to see what the visual difference is, but Handbrake doesn't even have an option for outputting in MPEG-1, because it's so dated and obsolete. 12 Mbps for 1080p is kind of low, but I've seen videos at the same bitrate that look much better, only they aren't in MPEG-1.

Don't care about that at all. Zero fucks given for this. Game was great.

 

[Ezekiel]

I just extracted one of the USM video files and found it's MPEG-1. Who the fuck still compressed videos for PC monitors and HD televisions in MPEG-1 in 2014? I wanted to compress a video in MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and 4 to see what the visual difference is, but Handbrake doesn't even have an option for outputting in MPEG-1, because it's so dated and obsolete. 12 Mbps for 1080p is kind of low, but I've seen videos at the same bitrate that look much better, only they aren't in MPEG-1.

Don't care about that at all. Zero fucks given for this. Game was great.

It's a good game that I have a 120 hours in. It also has electronics made for babies, a mediocre story, very limited options and doesn't do anything new with the Alien material. The game is stretched out with too little variety in all those hours.

The exploration of the derelict is actually dull, because it plays out almost exactly like in the movie and doesn't let you do anything but walk forward. Aliens came out seven years after but still didn't waste the viewer's time by showing that again. There is only an external shot of it with Newt in the big vehicle with her family in the Special Edition. You also play that chapter as another character, who could have simply told Ripley/the player what happened.

Really wish they would have used egg-morphing. That they had shown it. The developer said in an interview that there is a queen somewhere on the ship, but the positions of the eggs don't make sense for that. It's implied in the original Alien, either cut, that the alien can reproduce, but for some lame reason all media after Aliens has to say there is a queen. How far-fetched is it that the one facehugger that the ship brought back was a queen? The alien is scarier if any one of them can reproduce.

 

[Ezekiel]

Sega fucked up the encoding, hence the choppy playback. That's old news, and of course they never bothered to remedy the issue.

It's not the encoding, it's the way the game is playing the videos back. I just compared the opening where Samuels meets Ripley and confirmed the extracted MPEG-1 plays like a 30 fps video. In the game it looks under 20. I tried then simply renaming the .M2V file to .USM, but of course the game skipped the cutscene.

 

[adddeed]

Wasn't talking about technical level, how the cutscenes were rendered, was talking about compression. Doesn't matter how good the cutscene looks if you then run it through a compression tool with poor settings.

.

Ok i see, yes compression wasnt the best in the game. But a lot of games have engine rendered cutscenes that are playing as videos and compression not that good. I think developers want to show these cutscnes at highest engine detail, whereas if they were rendered real time on the person's computer they would render at whatever details they have chosen.

 

[Ezekiel]

In testing the cutscenes, I lost my save current file. Forgot that you can't reload an old save after starting a new game. But it's okay, because Hard mode is boring, and you can't switch from Hard to Nightmare. Items are too abundant. It's Nightmare or nothing. I'm gonna see how playable this is without using the objective magnet thing.

Ugh, just remembered the HUD is gone on Nightmare, which would be fine if you could only see your own health. Still, Hard's boring.

 

[Ezekiel]

Always found the glowing beacon pretty silly looking. I've been told that in the Alien novelization it's described as an obsidian box with an oblong piece sliding back and forth in the middle.

The scale of the pilot's chamber is totally off. They made it much bigger for no other reason than wanting it to look imposing, but it looks much more wasteful.

 

[Ezekiel]

Without the pointer, it took me an annoying length of time that I'm too embarrassed to specify to get from the Martial's Office back to Ski/Med Tower. Yet using the pointer feels too much like hand-holding. Sevastapol is a bad maze that really needs proper signs and maps on the walls, like any international airport. I couldn't use the pause map because Nightmare disables it. The map progression is a far cry from something like old Resident Evil. If getting to that standard makes the game somewhat shorter, so be it.

 

[Ezekiel]

The AI is so dumb. The humans see their buddies getting killed by the alien in the same room and still they shoot at Ripley when she's discovered and draw the alien. Developers don't think enough about behavior when designing AI.

Most stupid of all is the release for the docking clamp. They designed it like the nuclear self-destruct in Alien and even write "nuclear bolt" on the screen. It's just a docking clamp. Nostalgia-mining is so dumb sometimes.

Making Amanda Ripley the protagonist was a mistake. Now I have to think she went through this big adventure when I watch that short scene in the Special Edition of Aliens. Actually, who am I kidding? The theatrical cut is the default. It's a better cut. Ripley didn't have a daughter, because if she did she'd be the worst mother for leaving her for months or years on end. Also makes Newt feel like a weird replacement and makes the mother-daughter theme too on the noise. It's not like Ellen Ripley needs that motivation to protect Newt, after they bonded. A good adult should do that anyway.

 

[Beowulf]

I agree - the game has some poor design and aesthetic choices, and it's a criticism that's well deserved.
But for me the rest of the game was superb and Alien Isolation is one of the better games in the genre (horror walking sims with some gameplay elements).

It's not too reliant on jump scares, the environments are diverse and well crafted, you have some freedom (for the most part) on how to move around and go for the objectives, stealth is really tense if you let the atmosphere sink in etc. I could go on listing what made the game work for me.
My biggest gripe would be the unnecessary padding - the final quarter of the game feels forced and more constrained. They also fucked up with the DLC's, making them time challenges instead of short story missions, like with the other two (first movie DLC and the other one, that I can't remember right now).

 

[Ezekiel]

I was wrong to single out televisions. The game has color banding on all displays. It is only much more pronounced in TV color spaces. Look at this shit.

I agree - the game has some poor design and aesthetic choices, and it's a criticism that's well deserved.

Speaking more of the aesthetic choices...

Spoiler

Some of the old tech and popular culture in Alien: Isolation are just dumb. The rounded monitors from the movie I'm okay with because it gives the feeling of them looking back at you. But then you also have stereos, cassette tapes, big printers, AA batteries... Even filmmakers and science fiction artists in the 1970s would have thought this was dumb.

 

[JDR13]

I don't think I've ever seen someone talk so much shit about a game they played for 120 hours.

 

[mastroego]

Honestly I can't even understand what issues are being debated here.