The next video game in the world of Aliens will star the daughter of superstar space officer Ellen Ripley, according to a Kotaku source. The game is called Alien: Isolation, and we hear it will be on both current-gen and next-gen consoles next year.
Isolation is developed by the British studio Creative Assembly (Total War); it’s a first-person shooter that uses both stealth and horror elements; and it’s inspired by games like Dishonored and Bioshock, according to our source, a person familiar with goings-on at Sega, who spoke under condition of anonymity in the interest of protecting their job.
Perhaps most importantly, our source says that Sega took the critical reception to Aliens: Colonial Marines very seriously, and that the publisher put together a postmortem following the near-unanimously negative reactions to their last Aliens game, which was developed by the studios Gearbox and TimeGate. They want to make sure Isolation is a better game, and according to our source, it’s already been delayed at least once — Sega originally planned to announce the game at E3 of 2013.
I first heard about Alien: Isolation earlier this year, not long after reporting on the disastrous story of Colonial Marines. I couldn’t confirm what I’d heard, and I figured that with the game early in development, some of these details would be fluid, so I sat on the info.
But today, news came out that Sega has trademarked the name Alien: Isolation. With the title corroborated, I feel comfortable sharing everything I’ve heard.
According to our source, the protagonist of Alien: Isolation is Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley, the character that made Sigourney Weaver famous and kicked off the ubiquitous sci-fi franchise over 30 years ago. Amanda, who is mentioned in the special edition of Aliens as having died while Ellen was frozen in space, has not yet been the focus of any books, movies, or games in the Alien extended universe.
You, as Amanda, spend most if not all of the game on a single space station, according to our source. There’s only one alien for “most” of the game, our source said; you’ll mostly be shooting through “clones and soldiers.” Vents, lockers, and melee weapons are a big part of Isolation, our source said, and the game is heavily inspired by the first Alien movie.
Keep in mind much of this information is from six months ago; details may have changed over the course of development, as they sometimes do. However, our source re-confirmed many of these details today.
In 2011, Sega announced that Creative Assembly was working on an Alien game, but details have been sparse. Creative Assembly’s most recent game, Total War: Rome II, was quite buggy at launch, but Luke revisited the game last week and gave it a positive review.
Sega declined to comment for this story.
Comments
32 responses to “Rumour: The Next Aliens Game Stars Ellen Ripley’s Daughter”
Any potential interest I had just vanished. There’s no need to have a forced connection like this.
Especially considering she was confirmed to have died of old age in ALIENS…
Yeah but why stop with that plot hole when Michael Bien was magically shoehorned into the last game
Noooooooo! It wasn’t magic! A Weyland-Yutani merc was fighting a random colonist who just-so-happened to be all bandaged up just like Hick when he put down his Pulse rifle, gently tipped the guy in a cryotube and pressed all the buttons to put him to sleep… All in the middle of a fire fight.
It was in the DLC that I tragically played…and never finished.
Considering there’s no mention in the article of when in the canon’s timeline the game takes place, don’t you think it’s a possibility that the game might be set…you know…BEFORE she died of old age?
What would be the point of that? She dies on earth, happily of old age with a family. Takes away any chance of any tension with the character, will she live or die etc. It’s just a case of uselessly trying to keep Ripley relevant. Time to move on people and leave Ripley in the past, she was a good character but ties like this reek of 80s dtvhs movie sequels with ‘Oh its his long lost twin brother!’ syndrome.
This is why I have largely given up caring about any new Alien IP. This is flogging a dead horse at its finest.
There is so much great content in the comics and books to be used (yes, even in the AvP universe), but they keep shovelling up this shit. FFS just let Ripley’s daughter remain the non-entity she is meant to be.
The same could be said about MGS3, we knew that Naked Snake survived and became Big Boss, only to be cloned into Solid,Liquid, Solidus Snake(s).
I liked how if you died instead of saying ‘game over’ it would say ‘time paradox’, as it meant your inability to play the game properly and not die has now ruined the entire MGS storyline after that point, talk about pressure!
Yep that was indeed fantastic how it did that lol. However I just don’t see anyone behind the Aliens IP at this point having that level of creativity…
That, and there’s zero reason to have ‘Ripleys daughter’ in it.
By the logic of having her daughter, who only knew her when she was a space trucker, there’s as much reason to have ‘Ripleys hairdresser’ as well.
“Steffan, Alien Hunter”
In Space, no one can hear you blow wave.
By god I’m now interested in this… lol
Look, this is an emotional moment for all of us, okay? I know that.
But, let’s not make snap judgments, please. This is clearly-clearly an
important franchise we’re dealing with and I don’t think that you or I, or
anybody, has the right to arbitrarily exterminate it.
If people didn’t make bad snap decisions, Colonial Marinese would never have been made!
you… you didn’t see what I did there, did you?
While I agree with you about the forced connection, it’s not enough to kill my interest.
No, that comes a paragraph later.
“Well that sounds like an intriguing concept, I wonder how it will work out.”
“I’m out.”
Seriously, killing clones and soldiers is an alien game is like making a game where you go back in time to the dinosaur era, and the only enemy you fight is humans.
How can you miss the point this bad!? Nobody plays Alien games to shoot humans!
I agree with you on that one – The alien is unknown all the way until Ripley actually reports it.
Although, considering Predators and Aliens already visited earth before (AVP 1 and 2), if they play the cards well, then the plot could make sense.
But killing clones and soldiers just to shoot an alien after 12 hours of FPS’ing is just wrong.
I don’t mind a good FPS, hell, I’ve played way too many of them. But declaring it an Alien game with the parameters above… might as well call it something else and replace that alien by a rabid dog.
I look forward to playing as Amanda Ripley. marrying a guy never having kids then dying at age 65.
They’re giving the job to creative assembly? The Total War guys who sort of botched Rome: Total War II? Have they ever made an FPS? Are Sega giving them the job since they’re the one semi-competent Western Studio they have a hold over?
I think this is going to end very poorly….
Man – I can’t think of an IP that’s been utterly gutted more than this one. There’s more terrible movies in the franchise that good ones by a ratio of 2:1, a bunch of terrible games. A sort of, not really, prequel that I can’t even place in the cannon. And now they are going to focus a game on the main characters daughter, even though that daughter never made it on screen and whose contribution to the films was a passing reference to what an uneventful life they led before dying of old age.
Actually – Frankenstein got a pretty bad run too. Probably a worse one than even Aliens.
Creative Assembly have had issues with unfinished products being pushed out the door by publisher expectations, and that’s around Total War games that they have the experience and expertise to do. I can’t say I’m too confident about this developer and this publisher producing a licenced FPS – past history suggests it’ll be a buggy, incomplete, under delivered mess. Definitely worth waiting for reviews and post launch impressions.
Not liking how they’ve forced Ripley’s daughter into doing pretty much the same thing as Ripley. I always figured she just lived a normal life, normal job, family etc…Unless they mean she mothered another Alien/human hybrid like in Resurrection and we’d be playing that instead. That’d be a much more interesting game. As it is, it sound like a generic space shooter with one xenomorph in. Sounds a bit like FEAR really with Alma replaced by man-in-rubber-xenomorph costume
I wonder if SEGA will listen to this criticism
I’d Rather have a game based off the books where the Aliens have reached earth.
A cup of cold coffee that has spilled on the floor would be more fun than Aliens: Colonial Marines, so as long as there is zero connection to everyone who had anything to do with that game it should be all good.
Just get G/Box to make it, what could go wrong??
I was a huge aliens fan boy but after the latest string of awful games and films that are tied in I think I will just pretend it all ended back in ’92.
If they want to draw on the first Alien movie for inspiration for a video game, then perhaps Amnesia would be a a strong template for game play rather than FPSs.
I was thinking exactly this. Get rid of all other humans, just have one trying to move around a spaceship with no weapons and 3 or 4 aliens hunting her. Also, no reason for it to be Ripley’s daughter.
^ This. I can kinda see a Riddick type game, only a few close-range weapons, and a stealthy/action hybrid. Imagine getting a hold of a motion tracker, and crawling through all the vents, flipping switches, powering on stuff while avoiding the aliens (and killing one or two every now and then in a close-range boss battle) Sounds a little like the Aliens game on the SNES (welding, hacking etc.)
I also like the Aliens on Earth idea. Yes, it would be something akin to Half life or Halo, but to me Aliens was the first, and should surely do it right.
Loved the AVP games, and all it’s glitches. (A glitch stopped me from playing as the Alien in the recent reboot on steam, but enjoyed the update). Although I did skip the Colonial Marines, even though I was planning on checking it out one day.
*sigh, this really upsets me.. but I said it over and over. It’s hard to revive a IP when so many hands have molested it. Sega obviously didn’t listen to one of the biggest complaints which was the large bulk of the game spent fighting dull, stupid & pointless humans.
Also great spoiler for us knowing that this Alien and his mate will be the focus of the game, and likely not die until the end.
with Ellen Page all over recent video games, I actually misread that title as “The Next Aliens Game Stars Ellen Page’s Daughter” which is a very very confusing rumor if true.
I really REALLY think they would benefit greatly from a detailed online survey for us to respond to, it would be an olive branch you never see from big business.
Gee, I didn’t realise that Ripley’s daughter was the in-law of Dr Clemens’ second-cousin whose evil brother (separated-from-birth) is actually Burke who happens to be the great-great-great-great uncle of the creepy doctor from Alien 4 and that being an arsehole is genetically pre-determined across multiple generations! How clever!
Long story short, Hicks and Ripley are actually brother and sister and that explains why they didn’t get stuck into each other on the way to pick up Newt at the atmosphere processor. You see Hicks used the genealogy app on his motion tracker and figured out what was up. They had the good sense to realise that any more incest would risk creating a George Lucas anomaly and in all likelihood, destroy the known universe. Then Gearbox came along disrupted the space-time continuum. It was as if millions of projected sales suddenly cried out in terror and were inexplicably ignored. Spooky.