LEAKED: Alien: Isolation’s Development Hell

Another video that's more of a whistleblowing than a leak - the absolute shambles of a development process of Alien: Isolation, arguably the one good thing CA has managed to put out over the past decade, nonetheless mired in apparent gross misconduct, with bullying rampant and incompetence being utterly rife.
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#alienisolation #creativeassembly #leaked
0:00 Intro and context
6:50 Initial leaks
10:30 Senior developer
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[@Crappy1441]

Shame Colonial Marines indirectly fuck over Alien Isolation due to people are cautious/apathetic newer games and skip it. Now Sega skips Aliens Franchise all together and we will never get a sequel for Alien: Isolation

[@lazyvoid7107]

Colonial Marines was supposed to be scary but nope

[@Randomstuffs261]

Imagine making one of the best-selling and highly regarded horror games in history and still barely breaking even. This company needs a shake up

[@DR3ADER1]

It happens all the time. Many, many good games were actually commercial flops/faced development hell, administrative faux pas' and total managerial upheaval. Alien: Isolation is a mere statistical skull in that mountain of corpses. Beyond Good and Evil was a sales failure, despite its narrative, environmental and mechanical brilliance. People adore playing Final Fantasy 16, yet that game's sales were also underwhelming. The positive critical and player reception of Vanquish and Anarchy Reigns did little to aid sales figures. The Evil Within 2 also flopped hard, and then there's the mediocre sales of the God Eater Trilogy. I can go on and on and on about good games being minor or massive commercial failures in the computer game industry. I've played a ton of them.

[@mossy3565]

It's such a shame because it's a damn good game, probably the best Alien game in the entire franchise... Which, considering how the franchise is so often handled, makes sense that games made within it are so similarly mangled

[@andreidecker]

It's the best first person horror game ever made. I've never seen something like AI.

[@NebLleb]

Of all the horror games out there, Alien Isolation was the scariest I have ever played. Given the crunch, sackings, incompetence and abuse the developers battled against, it's a miracle that the game became the cult classic that it is. Seriously, Isolation is easily the best Alien game; a game that's so frightening, I refuse to return to it for seconds because it's so effective. So learning that even that had Creative Assembly mismanaging all over it says a lot about them as a company and makes me happy that the people who worked on it are no longer at the company and/or have left the industry entirely. This is the kind of mismanagement that makes even androids weep.

[@doltBmB]

I find it's really not that scary at all, a good horror game keeps you guessing and wondering which corner you'll turn, which dark hallway the monster might be lurking in without you knowing. The Alien stomps around so much you always know exactly where it is, and after just a few minutes it becomes painfully obvious that it's cycling on a timer, going away then coming back, going away then coming back, it feels so artificial and gamey that any illusion of an intelligent foe is immediately shattered, it so obviously comes to exactly where you are then pretends not to see you, takes me right out of it. The animation and sound is amazing but the gameplay itself deflates all tension.

[@NebLleb]

@@doltBmB Eh, I'll have to disagree. What, were you expecting me to launch into a long reddit-tier screed about how wrong you are? That's the mark of a total holier-than-thou douche!

[@rumplstiltztinkerstein]

@@doltBmB I thought it was terrifying.

[@noway8662]

@@doltBmB Majority is all that matters.

[@maxmustermann-zx9yq]

think you need to crank up the difficulty@@doltBmB yes you are often playing for time, but that's the horror movie vibe of hide and seek until the alien fucks off however there's much more to it (at least on highest difficulty): 1) the Aliens starts to counter your most used tactics (searching lockers/under tables more often, gains fire resistance, is less distracted by your gadgets etc. ) 2) the AI constantly play hot and cold with your location aka camping wont work 3) on key m,oments there are other non despawning enemies (humans/Androids) or even the Alien wont despawn at key moments

[@badrhetoric5637]

So the devs were working hard but management kept getting in the way? I am shocked to my very core....

[@Usako2000]

Thanks for making this video Volound, it's really important that situations of worker abuse are given attention. If enough people see what's going on and generate enough pressure eventually workplace norms can change. Getting the word out there is the first step and very important. It's absolutely despicable all of the abuse people went through. Two things really suck with me from this video. People's personal lives falling apart due to stress (divorce) and the unpaid labour through coercion. Unpaid labour through coercion is something which is so common in many fields of work and it really shouldn't be and CA should be held liable for that and the psychological damage they placed on workers to the point their personal lives fell apart. This whole thing is heart breaking. I doubt little to anything has changed in a positive direction since then, from everything that came out in 2022, it's probably even worse now. "Best place to work" award, what a joke.

[@Volound]

divorce costs and therapy costs (for the people AND their psychologically permanently damaged kids) are never part of the bottom line of these companies.

[@Usako2000]

@@Volound It's messed up. CA is destroying human relationships, families and harming the minds of children for a quick buck and their sheer incompotence.

[@noway8662]

@@Volound Game industry has been such crap for ages. People working themselves to death for pennies, while those on top or owning stocks collect the real payout.

[@DR3ADER1]

I HIGHLY doubt that Unions will solve this problem, it'll only make the High school/University clique problems WORSE (ask the Student Unions how they're doing because I can tell you for free that building expensive fucking buildings didn't do shit for my concerns at College), considering that the people most abused were contractors who didn't officially work as salaried employees at CA and the soy-filled thugs were the legacy people who worked at CA for decades before Asgard's development commencing. Remember, the senior developer stated that the people who were initially there before Alien: Isolation conducted their siege against the newer devs because they saw the new hires as a THREAT! The one thing that Unions are infamous for throughout history is their capacity to restrict and throttle a lot of innovations, developments and emergent industries for the sake of protecting THEMSELVES over other people (and it has led to the industries they claim to support DYING OFF as a consequence, the saddest examples include the British Car Industry and many old school labour unions in the United States, particularly Projectionists and Elevator Operators/Liftmen due to their protectionist stances, ADoseofBuckley and The Academic Agent have superb videos about this behaviour and why customers, the people who keep the doors open might I add, despise unions, it's ghoulish) because they perceive any new thing as a "threat" to their windows of control. It's all Narcissism and BPD and all the other Cluster-B bullshit you see everywhere in a horrid working environment, particularly with management. Giving more avenues for bad management types to infect everything is not a smart option, it never was. Look at the shitshow that are the Acting Unions and the Writer's Guilds that are infighting right now. As an aside, ALWAYS take "Best Place to Work" awards with a sandbag's worth of Sodium. Those "awards" are jokes that are often bought and paid for by the candidates themselves, quid pro quo doesn't even describe it, think North Korea or Mugabe-era Zimbabwe/Nguema Administration-run Equatorial Guinea with 99.9% of the votes going to themselves. If you think that management in the corpo-sphere is shit, look at what happens when you expand and amplify that bad management and stupidity into large, unionised groups, George Carlin had a few choice words about stupidity in large groups.

[@lcmiracle]

I honestly believe this is just the norm within the tech industry, to be expected across all game development, if not all IT development these days. Management, competency, professionalism, and standards have dropped markedly since the 90s, and so has salary in the field, so you also have some of the lowest morale since start of the industry. I believe Fromsoft crunch just as hard, if no more -- hell, Studio Ghibli was well known in Japan as a hellish studio to work in under Hayao Miyazaki. I've come to believe that all works are like this, if you want good resutls, you need a lot of elbow grease. The problem is the ones at the top -- the visionaries, the captains of the ships. If they are charismatic AND understands their product and their audience, all these works won't be in vain, and those participating in the works at least have something they can take prid in.

[@KroM234]

I played it and finished the game on max difficulty, it was not too challenging but very immersive and seemingly well crafted (I was miles away from thinking that the labor could be such a mess). As an Alien world/IP fan since the first movie, I felt right at home.

[@SkyFly19853]

Despite against the odds and all of those difficulties... They have created a wonderful game. The number one horror survival game.

[@Freesorin837]

23:45 Considering that android seems to have been given a beatdown it could just be talking about Samuels since he is a WY synth. Of course the way it plays out here is probably meant to create the possibility of Ripley being a Synth. Is the working joe talking about Ripley upon seeing her or is it remotely observing and referring to Samuels and just happened to say something as Ripley walked in?

[@slinkerdeer]

It may not be Total War, but it's Volound. *clicks*

[@12LoLproductions]

The atmosphere in Alien Isolation is unmatched, it's like being transported directly into the first film

[@DruidsTears]

It's a shame the Alien franchise seems to always get shafted game wise. Only a few gems like Aliens: Fireteam Elite/Aliens: Dark Descent were really good imo.

[@Titanscreaming]

Alien Isolation is the one game I have played 3 times, with a but load of years inbetween that... So I had forgotten most of what happened in the game itself. Having played it 3 times, the last two times were just as powerful as the first time I played it... This is the definition of an almost near perfect game.

[@Fastball115]

This game terrified the crap out of me... I still haven't beat it! Lol. However I am playing Alien: Dark Descent right now, and it is fantastic! Both should be picked up on sale if you're a fan of the Alien franchise.

[@smoadia85]

i haven't even start it though I bought it on huge discount more than 7 years ago :D

[@vindik8or]

Alien: Isolation starts out very strongly, but it suffers greatly from familiarity breeding contempt. Too soon in the total length of the game, the xenomorph turns from a terror into a tedious nuisance, and then they compound it by turning the situation into a xenomorph infestation. In the end I found the Working Joes to be a more appropriate and consistently chilling foe. I think the developers maybe didn't realise that they had essentially made an exploration game, and it had more in common with walking simulators. The xenomorph ultimately works against that by frustrating the player's attempts at deeper exploration that ramps up its assaults on the player the more they try to play the real game. The Working Joes, on the other hand, provide a dangerous but temporary challenge to your exploration - once you overcome them, you're free to investigate whatever they were guarding. A lot less would have been a whole lot more with regards to the xenomorph.

[@franzosisch5965]

Of course you find the game frustrating because you've made up in your mind that it's a game that it isn't.

[@vindik8or]

@@franzosisch5965 go on then, tell me what sort of game it is then. Don't say horror, because that wears off at the same time the xenomorph becomes a pest rather than a nemesis.

[@franzosisch5965]

@@vindik8or It is horror bud. Just because you'd rather play a space station walking sim than Alien Isolation doesn't change that.

[@vindik8or]

@@franzosisch5965 this isn't about what I wanted to play, this is what I experienced as the most rewarding things to do in the game. It's not a horror for two reasons - first is that it's not a thing you do, it's something you feel - games are almost always described by what you do or what it does. That's why for videogames horrors are almost always couched as 'survival horrors', but it's not that either. Second, as I said, that feeling while effective at first quickly dissipates. About the moment you realise it's actually just random chance if the xenomorph kills you in the locker or walks past. It stops being survival when you realise you've got more junk accumulated than you need to get through a level. I'm not saying that it IS a walking sim, just that it has more in common with those than survival horror. At its core it is a puzzle game, where exploration and mystery are the fundamental gameplay and reward loops. The xenomorph, far from being a puzzle to solve becomes an agent of chaos that can randomly end your exploration or cut off further investigation. It works counter to what the game is otherwise about. It works much better in the Nostromo dlc where it is the focus of what you're trying to accomplish, but not in the main game.

[@franzosisch5965]

@@vindik8or You're once again saying the game is something it's not just because you say so. It is a horror game because the Alien remained a constant threat through my whole playthrough and, guess what, made me scared. I can do the exact same thing. You're just saying words with no meaning other than "because I feel like it". And the majority of people don't even agree with you.

[@JonWilde2105]

AI is a very solid game that I still go back and dip into for an hour or two - it captured the world of the first movie extremely well. It's sad to hear how poor the working environment was, but the devs can be proud of the game they put out despite that. It's a shame we will never get an AI 2.

[@frozenlimemix]

Second best horror game I've played, behind only the original Dead Space. It definitely deserved more.

[@trueseeing]

Pyramids being made in suffering is a misnomer, current scholarship is that they were made by skilled artisans in the down time between seasonal crops so they had an income and something to do. Not slave labour.

[@Volound]

i never said anything about slaves, but nonetheless we know that 3000 years ago the world and its empires were all powered by exploited labourers at best, or otherwise just entire slave castes. btw misnomer refers to surface terminology not deep level concepts. you must mean urban legend.

[@olefredrikskjegstad5972]

Working hard manual labour in the egyptian desert is going to be extremely unpleasant no matter how not a slave you are.

[@brendanworthington3888]

Nice to know, but do you really think this helps the point? Most people aren't Pyramid scholars or up to date on ancient Egypt. They aren't going to go, "Oh Volound's saying is stupid because I know that pyramids weren't made with slave labor." They just went "ah, I get what he is saying".

[@chrish1657]

It was a figure of speech, not an essay on ancient Egyptian society 😂

[@Orendiz]

skilled artisans to carve out the slabs maybe, to pull and stack it all together required a mass effort and mostly large scale manual labour rather then skilled artsmenship.

[@tedjones1021]

Imagine - Alien Isolation's xenomorph AI and level design to support it - coupled with Colonial Marines' original concept of a co-op 4-player, left-4-dead but slower-paced and more tense game.

[@lazyvoid7107]

That was the plan

[@Normal-Eagles-Fan]

So Rob is still working at CA. Are you going to address this since you made plenty of videos saying he would be/was?

[@Volound]

i leaked the actual email notice of the firing. the one where the head of the entire studio announced to the department heads that he his position was made redundant. the legal statutory minimum notice for someone working somewhere for over a decade during a consultation process of over 100 people in the UK is about 3 months. now is around the time where that expires. but a lot of companies take longer than that, especially for people in more important positions. so theres nothing to do but wait so i can say told you so to the people that are children that think i can fake months of leaks that get everything right in the end.

[@beetheimmortal]

Update: Rob was indeed fired, back in february. How about that?

[@Normal-Eagles-Fan]

@@beetheimmortal source?

[@beetheimmortal]

@@Normal-Eagles-Fan His own LinkedIn page, friend.

[@Volound]

reminder to cause feelings of embarrassment. and screenshot to save for posterity: gyazo.com/7842ac494b91612d43ec80c277157989

[@captnd7902]

honestly, with how good the game really is, i didnt expect such a fuster cluck behind it. when i think of situations like this, i think cyberpunk. maybe im just naive but the fact still stands, this is hands down one of the best horror games to date. in fact, the only one i stopped playing from fear. never once had that feeling before from a film or game. mind you, this was when i was 13 lmfao

[@maxmustermann-zx9yq]

I would add to your opion on the game that it is super optimized, I ran it on an absolute potato of a laptop once without huge fps drops or looking bad

[@Sombre____]

Alien : Isolation was great. Sad they didn't make a new game behind this one.

[@shreksnow1918]

That was interesting. I have this game laying around, but haven’t gotten around to playing it. I really should. Also, there’s a mod that tweaks the ai, graphics, and gunplay of Aliens Colonial Marines to make it into something that’s actually good, or at least just not trash.

[@honeybadger6275]

You talking about the ini file edit that changes one line of code to fix the ai or something else?

[@gregskuza7166]

I absolutely love Alien/Aliens movies but I did not know about alien isolation until few years later when I bought it as a Alien pack!!!! What a fuck up not to even advertise it properly because I still think it’s the best game ever made at least for me!! I still play it a session of AI every day!!! Thanks for the video, we need AI2 or someone help me learn the AI scripts because I want to do all levels open scavenger mod

[@brendanworthington3888]

This game did really deserve better sales. This type of gameplay isn't for everyone, but the quality is easily observed even to someone who doesn't want to play it like me. Shame it came at such a serious human cost.

[@Titanscreaming]

WHAT!? A hard sale and a hard product to get to its potential audience? Dude, I cannot believe that in any logical way. Because there have been alien fans all the way back from 1979. Many million know it. A couple of millions would definitely buy alien related stuff. Now I just have the question in my head... How many people have played Alien Isolation? Would you say that hundreds of thousands of people bought it? Or just a couple of thousand? Less than 10.000 people? Or would it be save to say 20.000 people played alien isolation... I'd say if you could sell you game to 20.000 people, it is a huge success...? no? aha. - Just makes no sense, that the only alien game that was any good, ( aside from playing alien in avp games ) was insecure about its success. Colonial Marines or not... Wich didn't live up to expectations BUT was a pretty decent shooter game none the less! And for all its flaws, Colonial marines didn't suffer from the Ripley Syndrome. My only massive fucking grip with Alien Isolation is that it features Amanda Ripley... A character that should never have been seen or mentioned again in the alien universe, following up the scene that reveals her in Aliens. Ellen Ripley seeing her daughter as an old woman on a photograph and has just recently died was all that story needed and she never struck me as a person who encountered the xenomorph on Seegson's station, saw multiple deaths, escaped death numberless times. Just a normal person that poses for family photo's. If Amanda Ripley really had survived all that stuff she did in the game, I can't ever see that person coming to a normal life, getting married and dying of old age. All Amanada would have thought was her mother vanished in deep space, not she was eaten alive by black monsters that bleed acid so i need to avenge her ;p. great vid!

[@nomercy8989]

The game was alright. Visuals were good besides the always sweating character models. The gameplay was pretty boring and the game was twice as long as it needed to be. A solid 6/10 for me.

[@Erik_Arnqvist]

How can you fail to market this? Sci-fi horror was a thing already. FEAR and Dead Space comes to mind. It's just that but remove the guns and go all in on stealth+atmosphere. Laying them off was a rare CA win.

[@Gherichto]

Once again lots of content, very interesting ! Cheers mate

[@Tenshihan-Quinn]

@23:54 = nice transition there!

[@TiGGowich]

How do we know all this stuff you discuss is legit? I mean I know CA is in shambles because I have worked with them in the past as a consultant... but all these things were not obvious to me at the time. Is there any way all this stuff can be proven?

[@Volound]

they admitted to the worst of it publically like i described. there was workplace sexual harassment and sexual abuse happening constantly.

[@danielelkin995]

Life has always been about who ya know not what ya know.

[@RemusKingOfRome]

Jingles played this game and he, we, loved it. Very scary !

[@frenchcoupon3391]

I paid for Alien Isolation on multiple platforms, at the release and since 2014. Sadly, the players who didn’t support it at launch are part of the problem. It shows that the true Alien fans gamers are far and few in between. Not like for Call of Duty. (Sega’s wishful thinking).

[@YamatoPower9000]

I recently played through Aliens: Fireteam Elite with my pal and oh boy. I didn't liked what Riddley Scott tried to do with his late movies but this game made me rethink my criticism. It was creepy and disgusting and I loved every minute of it. Made me appreciate vision of prometheus that Scott has. Also composer for that game.... like holy shit, you want an alien soundtrack you go to Austin Wintory.

[@Sherudons]

Much as I like a good horror game I cannot enjoy a panic and run away ones, I'm the sort to pull out a knife and kill a leviathan in subnautica, granted I know it would remove all the horror if you managed to drive a hunk of wood into the brain or heart of the monster and it just died.. but I still want the option to be able to stand and fight over flee from the immortal horror or "drive it off" in a sad attempt. Of what I've seen from it being played, it's more amusing... well due to it being people like soviet womble freaking out all the time.

[@The_Crimson_Fucker]

A horror game through and through for the players _and_ the developers.

[@Titanscreaming]

Correction: Our first true piece of technology has had to be water xD.

[@ulture]

huh? how did we make water?

[@ricomuerte]

Best horror i ever played, it was really scary.

[@space4ace582]

Are you sure you're not mixing this up with Aliens Colonial Marines, because that last one was horrible for everyone involved.

[@Volound]

answered in video quite explicitly.

[@doltBmB]

Oh it was a game set on a moonbase? More confirmation that it was a blatant Routine (the first steam greenlight game) ripoff lmao.

[@ruvanefriebus-cv6td]

Ooooiii hey!!!!!! This game was good tbh no sequel so I dropped a dislike on steam

[@78endriago]

if you are an american from the mid west, play the video at 125% to 150% speed and the entire video becomes an entirely different language. @Volound, i love your accent, but holy crap, that is hard to understand at times :D

[@Mitch93]

Hey, meng!

[@Volound]

te que pasa meng

[@Mitch93]

​@@Volound Muy bien, meng!

[@MBP1918]

🤯

[@doltBmB]

A lot of people conflate "crunch" with worker abuse. And while crunch has been abused to simply extract more labour, crunch in and of itself is not bad. The reality is that video game development is extremely hard, so hard that much of what is done simply wouldn't be possible otherwise. If you don't have people giving 200% it can't be done. If you hired another team of the same size and gave them twice the development time they probably still couldn't do what is done in crunch. It's necessary, in the words of Peter Molyneux, crunch is energy, it's energy and time to do the impossible, you can't do it without. While well intentioned, this unionization talk and talk of abolishing crunch, simply will lead to the further downfall of video games as quality continues to dwindle, you will just not have great games if that happens, but more half finished ones.

[@Volound]

this is some of the most grotesquely dumb shit ive ever read.

[@Alelip1000]

fool. compare new AAA games and the recent span of wonderful indie titles, and modpacks. unionization could maybe spell the end of videogames as content to be sold, but games as an art form will not cease to exist; we will wait for good games to come out, knowing that something made with coerced labour will forever be inferior to something made with passion.

[@doltBmB]

@@Alelip1000 how do you think indies make great games? they dedicate 100% of their lives to it, an indie dev does not go home at 5 and or take a 2 week vacation. art requires dedication, and treating it like any ordinary 9-5 tech job does not give any dedication. the studios that adopt this "office" mentality are also the ones that consistently pump out the most unfinished load of ass.

[@MasonDixonAutistic]

Yes, this is why Blizzard got so much better at making games when Bobby Kotick became the ultimate boss and Blizz stopped giving the ETA on the next game as 'when it's done'.

[@phantomjoker5]

oooooof

[@F_Yale]

At this point, CA just needs to go. Unsalvagable garbage studio.