2021's Aliens: Fireteam Elite gives players the chance to step into the boots of a Colonial Marine and, alongside their friends, face endless hordes of Xenomorphs. Developed by Cold Iron Studios, the horror-action video game is now available to play on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Series S, and Microsoft Windows. The developers behind this latest Alien-based video game are huge fans of the horror/sci-fi franchise and were delighted in bringing the Xenomorphs to life for a new generation of gaming fans.
Ahead of the game's release, CBR spoke with Cold Iron Co-Founders Craig Zinkievich and Matt Highison about what went into creating this AAA game. Zinkievich and Highison discussed what elements of the Alien franchise made it into the game, balancing the Xenomorphs within the gameplay, and teased the future of the game's co-op experience.
CBR: As fans of the franchise and what it means for the sci-fi fans, horror fans -- what is it like to fully have that Alien sandbox completely open to play with?
Craig Zinkievich: It's been awesome. When we started on the project, 20th Century wanted to make sure that we were telling a unique new story in the universe. That's one of the reasons why we put it in 2202, right, moved it a couple of decades after Aliens and Alien 3. We're huge fans of the franchise and there was just no way of stopping us from digging through not just the movies, but the RPGs, the other video games, the comics, the novels, and trying to pull out all those things that we're big, huge fans of and making sure that we like kind of sprinkled those Easter eggs all throughout. So obviously people who are fans of the movies are going to get in and get that Colonial Marines to feel in this game. But for the real hardcore fan, there are all these little references all throughout.
CBR: Is there any particular corner of the Aliens franchise that you were especially excited to feature in the game?
Matt Highison: We wanted to expand upon parts of the Aliens franchise that weren't just the first three films. The third campaign really delves into the Engineers from Prometheus. And we wanted to put people on the juggernaut, fighting new enemies and really pulling out a lot of this stuff that I wanted to see in another sequel of Prometheus that we haven't gotten yet. You get a chance to experience that in the game. Inside the juggernaut, having that different type of atmosphere than being inside an industrial rotting for finery, really is something that pulls the universe towards the edges of what's available for us.
And it doesn't stay super, super narrow. The Aliens universe is so, so, so giant that it was pretty hard for us to narrow in on what exactly we wanted to do. And that's sort of where we started with. We have four campaigns. We want to take you to four different places and really blow each one of those out, rather than focusing a whole game on one singular space. It's an Aliens game that Craig, myself, and the rest of our team wanted to play, and that's where we started from and that's what we built.
CBR: One of the inherent challenges of featuring something like the Xenomorph in an action game like this must be the difficult balancing act between keeping the Xenomorphs a frightening creature, while still having them be engaging enemies to confront in combat. What was that like to refine?
Zinkievich: It comes down to a lot of testing, right? It is not the mano-a-mano single Xenomorph experience. You are fighting the hoards. You're near the hive. There's a huge population. It's like the Colonial Marines and Aliens, right? One of the ways we kind of tackled the fact that the Xenomorphs are the apex predator and have to be terrifying... There's a whole spread of Xenomorphs, depending on what they just stayed in. They come out in different ways, right? The runners in Alien 3 that came out of the dog were not as strong as the drone and the warrior that you see in the earlier films, right? So we kind of leaned into that a little bit. You see a lot of runners who kind of just stayed the local fauna of LV-895, but you still run into some of the really big, scary enemies who are difficult.
I think for us, the tension that we were going for, the pressure that we were going for was not the, "Oh my God, is he going to show up? Is it going to get me?" It's exactly what the Colonial Marines in Aliens felt. "We're badasses. Okay, we got this." And we wanted to make sure that as many fights as possible, you're like, "Yeah, we got this, this is easy." And then all of a sudden, there is just a wave and it's like, "Oh no, we don't have this." So it's really kind of leaning into the false security that being an ultimate bad-ass Colonial Marine gives you, and then kind of pulling the rug out from under you.
Highison: Anything could go wrong basically at any time. There are harder difficulties as well. And Craig touched on it a little bit, but we were able to get that kind of balance by choosing some of the Xenomorphs to be more of our special priority targets, like the drone and the Praetorian and the Crusher, and have them be foes that when they make an appearance, you really, really have to change up your tactics and focus on them and know that they're going to take you down a lot faster than a runner will, so we're able to get that kind of balance of, yeah, you can plow through hoards of the lower level Xenos, but the big, scary ones are still a true threat.
CBR: Many squad-based games tend to utilize four-player teams, whereas Aliens: Fireteam Elite embraces three-person parties. What led you to make that decision?
Zinkievich: When we started working on the game, we tested a lot of different things. We tested one player, two-player, three-player, four-player. I think one of the core things of the franchise is being able to move through narrow, claustrophobic, dark, scary passages, and to have combat in those spaces too. And what we ended up finding is as much as this is a love letter to the franchise and all the Easter eggs that we put in it, at its core, it's most important that this is a really fun gaming experience.
We wanted to make sure that we had that atmosphere of fear, we had those closed, dark corridors, but that the combat was super fun and you were in there with enough enemies to make it feel awesome, that you weren't stumbling all over your friends when the friendly fire's on with the higher difficulties. We just found that with four players, in order to kind of get the feeling that we wanted in the gameplay, we needed gameplay spaces that just didn't really feel right for the franchise. And so it really came down to trying to marry the awesome survival horror and co-op survival shooter gameplay that we wanted with the franchise.
CBR: So much of the storytelling in Aliens: Fireteam Elite is ingrained within its gameplay. What was that like to incorporate into the game on such a deep level?
Highison: Each campaign flows together as an individual standalone unit of the story, but then all four of them tell a cohesive story across the entire gameplay experience. Even stuff like hoard mode, which you get with the day one patch, has a little bit of a narrative thing where it takes place at a certain time. All the gameplay modes that are coming out later in later seasons, they're also going to have some sort of narrative component. I don't think it would fit within the Aliens franchise as a whole if it didn't have some strong narrative thread through. Also, we come from RPG backgrounds. So, I mean, there are two parts in that, right? There's the narrative part. And then there's the [creative part, where you can] customize your own character and story. And we put a ton of RPG elements into it as well. So it wouldn't be fair for us to not put the same amount of love into the storyline.
CBR: What has you the most excited for players to dive into?
Highison: One of the reasons why we're so excited to launch this game is, and it's a co-op game, it's 40 bucks. I'm biased. Obviously, we're going to try to sell the game, but it's 40 bucks for this whole cooperative campaign experience. And we're coming out with seasons over the next year, additional gameplay content. It's all free. The first season is September 8th.. with a new class called Phalanx, the shield-wielding character. So it has a pop-up shield that comes out in front of it. We have single-handed weapons that you can fire while moving. It's going to be really great for holding off Xenomorphs, obviously, but especially against synthetics and all their range attacks. You can still move without being in cover, and it comes with a whole bunch of new free rewards and cosmetics too.
That's just a couple of weeks away. And then along with the seasons, the deluxe edition has DLC packs that will come... The cosmetics in those DLC packs are exclusive to those DLC packs. Those release for sale at the same time as the free seasons. So there's a lot coming up over the next year... There's more content right around the corner a couple of weeks after.