In an interview published by the Official Playstation Magazine UK, Creative Assembly’s lead artist Jude Bond explained that they wanted an unpredictable alien that can show up at any point in the game:

“We wanted this unpredictable alien that can turn up at any point in the game. It’s just as much about the alien not being there as the alien being there. It could be a shadow in the corner, we don’t know, you don’t know, but you have to go and see what is in the corner.”

Since gamers are not predictable, this influenced the decision to make the alien itself a more worthy adversary. Creative Assembly’s leader designer Gary Napper explained:

“So we’ve got an alien that can act in a nice way and support that.”

Bond echoed the original statement that the alien in Isolation is unpredictable, and elaborated on how the game itself embraces that:

“I think going back to the systemic alien, he is unpredictable. There’s a lot of elements of the game that are systemic and it’s not scripted. Very early on we realised that a horror game with checkpoints that’s scripted just isn’t going to be scary.”

Awesome stuff – I’m definitely down for a more organic horror experience, none of the cookie cutter set pieces we’ve been seeing some of the larger, more iterated franchises adopt recently. What do you guys think?