AvP Cross-Comparison: Marine
The Marine is the most difficult to pin down of the three species, in all three games. It's fairly evident each game is shooting for an emotional experience -that of the player being frightened and tense- over having a coherent game design goal, and is then borrowing from current FPS trends to give some guidance on the gameplay end of things. Thus, the 2010 game has the Marine have to deal with carrying around only a couple of non-Pistol weapons as a hard limit, swapping around weapons as they go, while the prior two games have the Marine use the then-typical approach of the player character being able to carry literally everything he finds and freely swap between it, apparently storing all his weapons in hammerspace. Because those were how shooters of their respective times tend to work, simple as that.
This makes it a bit more complicated to cross-compare the games, and I'll be breaking this post up into two sections. First is...
Emotional Experience
All three games want the player to be scared. They want the player wandering around in the dark, jumping every time the Motion Tracker pings something, scared that any second now an Alien will burst from the shadows and rip their face off. In this regard, the 1999 game is king.
Just as the Predator in the 1999 game has to deal with an unlimited stream of Aliens anytime he has to deal with Aliens at all, the 1999 Marine has to deal with an unlimited stream of Aliens basically all the time. The Motion Tracker's range is short, Aliens are fast, and while they shriek erratically they're utterly silent aside from their intermittent cries. The Aliens can climb on walls, fall out of vents, or just come scrambling from behind you. Any damage you take is permanent: there are armor and health pickups on the map, but only so many of them, and 'wasting' one by restoring a mere 20 points of damage may mean you die later.
The overall result is you need to be paranoid and on high alert, because your gear provides inadequate information, danger is literally everywhere, and there's no such thing as consequence-less damage.
Just as the AvP 2 Predator gets explicit warning of incoming Alien attack waves, the AvP 2 Marine generally can assume no Aliens are in an area until either the combat music kicks in and/or a scripted events tries to scare them. (Aliens working on breaking their way in through doors, for example) These scripted spawns are always one-time events, so as long as you're not moving into a new area/toward a new objective, you're actually in no danger, which makes it a lot less tense to be digging around for supplies in a room. If nothing's spawned yet, you're safe, and if you're not safe you'll still get forewarning. Aliens mostly don't come out of vents or from behind you; they usually spawn directly in front of you. You spend an alarming portion of the game getting into firefights with human forces, and these sequences don't really even try to go for a horror vibe. Health and armor pickups no longer waste overflow values, ensuring you're not balancing durability now against durability later: just poke the health kit and maybe come back later if you need it, whatever you didn't actually need will still be there.
It's not quite as stark a difference as the Alien and Predator campaigns, and some of the important mechanics remain intact like all damage being permanent, but there's still a fairly dramatic loss here. The 1999 game is scary. AvP 2 is not scary, or more generously is occasionally scary instead of constantly scary.
The 2010 game is better in some ways, even worse in others. Aliens are now almost completely silent and blend into the dark better than ever, but they're also far slower and I've already been over how they mostly tend to spawn in a manner where you're explicitly forewarned before there's any actual danger. While health Stims are superficially similar to the old medikit/armor model, the fact is that you have a partially regenerating health meter: a single hit in the 2010 game will often have no lasting consequences. The 2010 game instead relies on making it so death comes swiftly when it comes at all, and while that does induce a kind of tension -especially if you try to pull off a Nightmare difficulty run- it actually doesn't do much to make you afraid. Certainly, being an inch away from death is frightening in real life, but in a video game it's instead frustrating: dying is not the end, and in fact it just means 'losing' some time, because you'll just go back to the last checkpoint or the beginning of the level.
The Motion Tracker has also been given far more range and even works partially behind you, making it a far more reliable tool. In conjunction with the aforementioned approach to spawn mechanics, it's pretty rare for an enemy to get the jump on you, reducing the overall need for paranoia. Worse, Aliens only use venting systems as part of one-off scripted moments, which means even though 2010 Aliens are prone to clambering on walls and the ceiling to an extent that 1999 Aliens generally only did if it was actually necessary to reach your current location, in practice 2010 Aliens are still overall more constricted. 1999 Aliens demanded you maintain a 3-dimensional awareness of your environment to avoid being jumped, which is not humanly possible. 2010 Aliens just require you to look up a bit more often than you would in a more typical shooter game.
Even their tails have been reduced in scariness! In the 1999 game, the Alien's tail is their primary damage dealer, and you can see and hear it in action. Letting them hit you with the tail is ill-advised, and you end up with a fairly visceral response to the sound after a while. In the 2010 game, AI Aliens never use their tail for anything outside of scripted scenes that don't mean anything gameplay-wise, and instead their extraordinarily long tail serves to undermine their stealth. 2010 Aliens will frequently leap into the player, deliver a hit this way, and then try to circle around behind you, which is almost invariably foiled as a 'where is it WHERE IS IT??' moment by the fact that their tail almost always ends up still in your view and can be naturally followed to find their current location.
The 2010 game does a few clever things to catch the player off-guard and make them paranoid in Alien hive sequences, and just the fact that it doesn't use music to automatically forewarn the player every single time Aliens spawn to attack places it ahead of AvP 2, but it's still far behind the 1999 game at inducing fear and paranoia.
Moving on to....
Gameplay
The 1999 game is kind of a generic missing-the-point stock shooter, as far as the Marine's mechanics go. It has health and armor, but unlike the relatively early games to have health and armor there's basically no difference between the two other than the irritation at finding a medkit when your armor is almost gone but your health is still fine. You acquire guns and ammo by collecting pickups that are explicitly defined by the developers, letting them control your weapon access and skew what weapons you should use most and what ones least. The campaign is fairly prone to only giving you the Pulse Rifle, probably Pistols, and maybe one other weapon in a given mission, and unlike some classic shooters like Doom there's no carry-over of your weapons so hoarding everything is purposeless: just finish the mission as fast as you can, and only pick up what you need or what's pretty much on your way. (eg there's one mission where there's a series of rooms that mostly contain nothing, but one of them has Pistols and another has Facehuggers. Pistols are so bad it's not really worth searching these rooms unless you've got the Pistol location perfectly memorized)
The Motion Tracker itself is basically a mediocre version of typical shooter 'radar', with the critical difference that false positives can throw you off. (Because fires, moving elevators, doors opening and closing, and so on will ping just as well as an Alien) Perhaps the most substantially interesting choice here is that the player has no fallback weapon: you can't punch enemies. You don't get a knife. You don't have unlimited ammo on your garbage-y Pistols. If you run out of ammo, you're dead if you can't find more or can't complete the level without having to collect anymore ammo.
One cool thing is that targeting different body parts on Aliens has different effects. An Alien whose legs are destroyed slows down, forced to crawl. An Alien whose head is removed dies. An Alien whose arms are removed... doesn't really matter that I could tell, unfortunately, as they just switch over to animating with inner-mouth-based attacks with no loss in melee performance that I've noticed. It's one of the more unique elements of the game, even if the execution doesn't reach the heights of depth one might hope for.
I'm honestly not sure what the 1999 game is shooting for when it comes to gameplay, and I'm not sure the developers really know what they were going for either. The health+armor where the difference doesn't mean anything choice is particularly suggestive to me that the Marine is patterned after other FPS games because that's just the obvious format to copy when one of your playable species is 'humans who use guns'. Many of the elements that manage to be divergent from then-current FPS trends seem to be minor nods to the Aliens canon, and they often are more weird or annoying than influential, such as how the Pulse Rifle can randomly jam and require you to stop trying to fire for a moment before you can go back to shooting Aliens. There's also the light-enhancer vision mode, but if you're good with flare-tossing (You can have 4 out at a time and you never run out in the campaign) there's rarely any reason to bother with it. Either way, there's a minor attempt to simultaneously have darkness be a notable mechanic and yet still give the player some imperfect tools for fighting against the shadows, which is honestly the only element of the 1999 game's Marine that seems purposeful instead of 'this is how FPS games work, right?'
As such, there's not really anything to criticize about AvP 2's approach. It copies the first game, introduces the Knife as an infinite-use backup melee weapon, adds some new weapon ideas and rebalances the old ones... the light mechanics are the main area where it diverges in a more meaningful way, as it makes flares a technically-limited resource you reload through flare pickups (But then it gives you so many flares that it barely matters) and introduces a battery mechanic. Said battery drains extremely quickly if you use the light-enhancer vision mode, and drains very slowly if you're running your flashlight. It also recharges reasonably quickly if you're not using either. This has the potential to incorporate a Predator-style resource management minigame into the Marine's campaign, but in actual practice it doesn't really matter due to how bright the game is overall and how your default state is to be safe. Just wander around with your flashlight on, occasionally stop to turn it off -you'll periodically be made to hack a door or otherwise do something where having your light on contributes nothing anyway- and toss flares in darker environments when enemies are coming, and you're set without ever really engaging with the supposed limits of your resources.
The other big difference I'm not sure what to make of it is that where equipment carry-over wasn't a thing in the 1999 game, it absolutely is in AvP 2, encouraging you to scour the levels to keep your ammo at max and maybe even get a weapon 'early'. In older FPSes, this tied into a bunch of design assumptions I'll not be getting into to to ensure it was meaningful. In AvP 2 it... is a thing? It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a good thing either. It changes the gamespace in murky ways, and I don't have much else to say about it.
AvP 2010, as I alluded to earlier, switches over to more modern FPS conceits. Cover shooter partially regenerating health. Weapon-swapping-based limited weapon carrying capacity. Much heavier scripting of levels, with levels themselves making more of an attempt to look like they aren't linear corridors while actually being far more linear than older shooters ever were. The semi-common 'Pistol as unlimited-ammo backup weapon that sucks otherwise'.
More notable is the return of Flares and a flashlight. Now you get one Flare at a time, but still unlimited Flares overall like in the first game, while the flashlight functionally replaces the light-enhancing vision mode. I feel the flashlight is an improvement -the light-enhancing vision mode sucked a lot of the threat out of darkness when it applied, and the 1999 game mostly tried to 'fix' this by frequently arranging for you to be in tunnels that had flashing lights that were painfully/blindingly bright with the enhancer on, but still too dark to actually see anything with it off. The Flares I almost completely ignored in the 2010 game, where they're a staple of my play in the 1999 game, but that's less the fault of the Flare design and more the fault of other elements of the 2010 game's design, such as how you almost always get explicit warning of Aliens and so don't need to be constantly putting an effort into maintaining awareness of your environment.
Alien limb destruction comes back, and it's actually more detailed than ever, with you able to eg shoot off the 'dorsal tubes', individual bullets producing brief sprays of acid blood from the impacted location, etc, but the primary difference here is the part where destroying their legs is eventually lethal in addition to immediately crippling instead of just crippling. It's notable given how modern shooters almost never have any kind of dynamic damage, not even as a purely aesthetic thing.
Still, much like the 1999 game I'm not sure what the developers are really shooting for on the gameplay end of things, beyond aping general shooter design. It's playable enough, but there's not a clear focal point to set it apart. The new Sprint mechanic, for example, is actually moderately interesting in the context of fighting Aliens and all, but I still can't help but suspect this is more of a happy accident than a key piece of a targeted design goal, as this approach to a sprint mechanic shows up in myriad other shooters that were recent when AvP 2010 came along.
Ultimately, the most interesting aspect of comparing the three approaches to the Marine is noting how none of the games seems to have a clear idea of what the Marine's gameplay is about, as opposed to any given one being more successful than any given other one.
Probably my biggest disappointment with the 2010 game is that the devs were clearly just as fuzzy on the Marine's concept as with the 1999 game, and if anything had maybe unlearned some lessons -the 1999 game's campaign strongly encourages you to be on the move, feeling time pressured, engaging Aliens only as much as absolutely necessary because otherwise you'll die, and this contributes a lot to the experience of feeling hunted and pursued and scared. The 2010 game does the usual video game thing of expecting you to kill just about literally everything that moves, which ends up being a step backwards as far as the game trying to have the player scared.
Next time, I talk a bit about some interesting elements of the AvP franchise as a concept, which will probably be the end of AvP stuff for a bit.
This makes it a bit more complicated to cross-compare the games, and I'll be breaking this post up into two sections. First is...
Emotional Experience
All three games want the player to be scared. They want the player wandering around in the dark, jumping every time the Motion Tracker pings something, scared that any second now an Alien will burst from the shadows and rip their face off. In this regard, the 1999 game is king.
Just as the Predator in the 1999 game has to deal with an unlimited stream of Aliens anytime he has to deal with Aliens at all, the 1999 Marine has to deal with an unlimited stream of Aliens basically all the time. The Motion Tracker's range is short, Aliens are fast, and while they shriek erratically they're utterly silent aside from their intermittent cries. The Aliens can climb on walls, fall out of vents, or just come scrambling from behind you. Any damage you take is permanent: there are armor and health pickups on the map, but only so many of them, and 'wasting' one by restoring a mere 20 points of damage may mean you die later.
The overall result is you need to be paranoid and on high alert, because your gear provides inadequate information, danger is literally everywhere, and there's no such thing as consequence-less damage.
Just as the AvP 2 Predator gets explicit warning of incoming Alien attack waves, the AvP 2 Marine generally can assume no Aliens are in an area until either the combat music kicks in and/or a scripted events tries to scare them. (Aliens working on breaking their way in through doors, for example) These scripted spawns are always one-time events, so as long as you're not moving into a new area/toward a new objective, you're actually in no danger, which makes it a lot less tense to be digging around for supplies in a room. If nothing's spawned yet, you're safe, and if you're not safe you'll still get forewarning. Aliens mostly don't come out of vents or from behind you; they usually spawn directly in front of you. You spend an alarming portion of the game getting into firefights with human forces, and these sequences don't really even try to go for a horror vibe. Health and armor pickups no longer waste overflow values, ensuring you're not balancing durability now against durability later: just poke the health kit and maybe come back later if you need it, whatever you didn't actually need will still be there.
It's not quite as stark a difference as the Alien and Predator campaigns, and some of the important mechanics remain intact like all damage being permanent, but there's still a fairly dramatic loss here. The 1999 game is scary. AvP 2 is not scary, or more generously is occasionally scary instead of constantly scary.
The 2010 game is better in some ways, even worse in others. Aliens are now almost completely silent and blend into the dark better than ever, but they're also far slower and I've already been over how they mostly tend to spawn in a manner where you're explicitly forewarned before there's any actual danger. While health Stims are superficially similar to the old medikit/armor model, the fact is that you have a partially regenerating health meter: a single hit in the 2010 game will often have no lasting consequences. The 2010 game instead relies on making it so death comes swiftly when it comes at all, and while that does induce a kind of tension -especially if you try to pull off a Nightmare difficulty run- it actually doesn't do much to make you afraid. Certainly, being an inch away from death is frightening in real life, but in a video game it's instead frustrating: dying is not the end, and in fact it just means 'losing' some time, because you'll just go back to the last checkpoint or the beginning of the level.
The Motion Tracker has also been given far more range and even works partially behind you, making it a far more reliable tool. In conjunction with the aforementioned approach to spawn mechanics, it's pretty rare for an enemy to get the jump on you, reducing the overall need for paranoia. Worse, Aliens only use venting systems as part of one-off scripted moments, which means even though 2010 Aliens are prone to clambering on walls and the ceiling to an extent that 1999 Aliens generally only did if it was actually necessary to reach your current location, in practice 2010 Aliens are still overall more constricted. 1999 Aliens demanded you maintain a 3-dimensional awareness of your environment to avoid being jumped, which is not humanly possible. 2010 Aliens just require you to look up a bit more often than you would in a more typical shooter game.
Even their tails have been reduced in scariness! In the 1999 game, the Alien's tail is their primary damage dealer, and you can see and hear it in action. Letting them hit you with the tail is ill-advised, and you end up with a fairly visceral response to the sound after a while. In the 2010 game, AI Aliens never use their tail for anything outside of scripted scenes that don't mean anything gameplay-wise, and instead their extraordinarily long tail serves to undermine their stealth. 2010 Aliens will frequently leap into the player, deliver a hit this way, and then try to circle around behind you, which is almost invariably foiled as a 'where is it WHERE IS IT??' moment by the fact that their tail almost always ends up still in your view and can be naturally followed to find their current location.
The 2010 game does a few clever things to catch the player off-guard and make them paranoid in Alien hive sequences, and just the fact that it doesn't use music to automatically forewarn the player every single time Aliens spawn to attack places it ahead of AvP 2, but it's still far behind the 1999 game at inducing fear and paranoia.
Moving on to....
Gameplay
The 1999 game is kind of a generic missing-the-point stock shooter, as far as the Marine's mechanics go. It has health and armor, but unlike the relatively early games to have health and armor there's basically no difference between the two other than the irritation at finding a medkit when your armor is almost gone but your health is still fine. You acquire guns and ammo by collecting pickups that are explicitly defined by the developers, letting them control your weapon access and skew what weapons you should use most and what ones least. The campaign is fairly prone to only giving you the Pulse Rifle, probably Pistols, and maybe one other weapon in a given mission, and unlike some classic shooters like Doom there's no carry-over of your weapons so hoarding everything is purposeless: just finish the mission as fast as you can, and only pick up what you need or what's pretty much on your way. (eg there's one mission where there's a series of rooms that mostly contain nothing, but one of them has Pistols and another has Facehuggers. Pistols are so bad it's not really worth searching these rooms unless you've got the Pistol location perfectly memorized)
The Motion Tracker itself is basically a mediocre version of typical shooter 'radar', with the critical difference that false positives can throw you off. (Because fires, moving elevators, doors opening and closing, and so on will ping just as well as an Alien) Perhaps the most substantially interesting choice here is that the player has no fallback weapon: you can't punch enemies. You don't get a knife. You don't have unlimited ammo on your garbage-y Pistols. If you run out of ammo, you're dead if you can't find more or can't complete the level without having to collect anymore ammo.
One cool thing is that targeting different body parts on Aliens has different effects. An Alien whose legs are destroyed slows down, forced to crawl. An Alien whose head is removed dies. An Alien whose arms are removed... doesn't really matter that I could tell, unfortunately, as they just switch over to animating with inner-mouth-based attacks with no loss in melee performance that I've noticed. It's one of the more unique elements of the game, even if the execution doesn't reach the heights of depth one might hope for.
I'm honestly not sure what the 1999 game is shooting for when it comes to gameplay, and I'm not sure the developers really know what they were going for either. The health+armor where the difference doesn't mean anything choice is particularly suggestive to me that the Marine is patterned after other FPS games because that's just the obvious format to copy when one of your playable species is 'humans who use guns'. Many of the elements that manage to be divergent from then-current FPS trends seem to be minor nods to the Aliens canon, and they often are more weird or annoying than influential, such as how the Pulse Rifle can randomly jam and require you to stop trying to fire for a moment before you can go back to shooting Aliens. There's also the light-enhancer vision mode, but if you're good with flare-tossing (You can have 4 out at a time and you never run out in the campaign) there's rarely any reason to bother with it. Either way, there's a minor attempt to simultaneously have darkness be a notable mechanic and yet still give the player some imperfect tools for fighting against the shadows, which is honestly the only element of the 1999 game's Marine that seems purposeful instead of 'this is how FPS games work, right?'
As such, there's not really anything to criticize about AvP 2's approach. It copies the first game, introduces the Knife as an infinite-use backup melee weapon, adds some new weapon ideas and rebalances the old ones... the light mechanics are the main area where it diverges in a more meaningful way, as it makes flares a technically-limited resource you reload through flare pickups (But then it gives you so many flares that it barely matters) and introduces a battery mechanic. Said battery drains extremely quickly if you use the light-enhancer vision mode, and drains very slowly if you're running your flashlight. It also recharges reasonably quickly if you're not using either. This has the potential to incorporate a Predator-style resource management minigame into the Marine's campaign, but in actual practice it doesn't really matter due to how bright the game is overall and how your default state is to be safe. Just wander around with your flashlight on, occasionally stop to turn it off -you'll periodically be made to hack a door or otherwise do something where having your light on contributes nothing anyway- and toss flares in darker environments when enemies are coming, and you're set without ever really engaging with the supposed limits of your resources.
The other big difference I'm not sure what to make of it is that where equipment carry-over wasn't a thing in the 1999 game, it absolutely is in AvP 2, encouraging you to scour the levels to keep your ammo at max and maybe even get a weapon 'early'. In older FPSes, this tied into a bunch of design assumptions I'll not be getting into to to ensure it was meaningful. In AvP 2 it... is a thing? It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not necessarily a good thing either. It changes the gamespace in murky ways, and I don't have much else to say about it.
AvP 2010, as I alluded to earlier, switches over to more modern FPS conceits. Cover shooter partially regenerating health. Weapon-swapping-based limited weapon carrying capacity. Much heavier scripting of levels, with levels themselves making more of an attempt to look like they aren't linear corridors while actually being far more linear than older shooters ever were. The semi-common 'Pistol as unlimited-ammo backup weapon that sucks otherwise'.
More notable is the return of Flares and a flashlight. Now you get one Flare at a time, but still unlimited Flares overall like in the first game, while the flashlight functionally replaces the light-enhancing vision mode. I feel the flashlight is an improvement -the light-enhancing vision mode sucked a lot of the threat out of darkness when it applied, and the 1999 game mostly tried to 'fix' this by frequently arranging for you to be in tunnels that had flashing lights that were painfully/blindingly bright with the enhancer on, but still too dark to actually see anything with it off. The Flares I almost completely ignored in the 2010 game, where they're a staple of my play in the 1999 game, but that's less the fault of the Flare design and more the fault of other elements of the 2010 game's design, such as how you almost always get explicit warning of Aliens and so don't need to be constantly putting an effort into maintaining awareness of your environment.
Alien limb destruction comes back, and it's actually more detailed than ever, with you able to eg shoot off the 'dorsal tubes', individual bullets producing brief sprays of acid blood from the impacted location, etc, but the primary difference here is the part where destroying their legs is eventually lethal in addition to immediately crippling instead of just crippling. It's notable given how modern shooters almost never have any kind of dynamic damage, not even as a purely aesthetic thing.
Still, much like the 1999 game I'm not sure what the developers are really shooting for on the gameplay end of things, beyond aping general shooter design. It's playable enough, but there's not a clear focal point to set it apart. The new Sprint mechanic, for example, is actually moderately interesting in the context of fighting Aliens and all, but I still can't help but suspect this is more of a happy accident than a key piece of a targeted design goal, as this approach to a sprint mechanic shows up in myriad other shooters that were recent when AvP 2010 came along.
Ultimately, the most interesting aspect of comparing the three approaches to the Marine is noting how none of the games seems to have a clear idea of what the Marine's gameplay is about, as opposed to any given one being more successful than any given other one.
Probably my biggest disappointment with the 2010 game is that the devs were clearly just as fuzzy on the Marine's concept as with the 1999 game, and if anything had maybe unlearned some lessons -the 1999 game's campaign strongly encourages you to be on the move, feeling time pressured, engaging Aliens only as much as absolutely necessary because otherwise you'll die, and this contributes a lot to the experience of feeling hunted and pursued and scared. The 2010 game does the usual video game thing of expecting you to kill just about literally everything that moves, which ends up being a step backwards as far as the game trying to have the player scared.
Next time, I talk a bit about some interesting elements of the AvP franchise as a concept, which will probably be the end of AvP stuff for a bit.
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