Aliens: Fireteam Elite is out today on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. As our review states, it’s a solid co-op shooter with some thrills for Aliens fans.
Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese recently sat down with Chief Creative Officer Matt Highison and CEO Craig Zinkievich to speak about this newly recently title and touched on topics from the game’s replayability to Easter eggs to Highison’s second favorite Aliens film.
Tyler Treese: This game is very uniquely structured because there’s a campaign and there’s a story, but it’s definitely meant to be replayed. You have the challenge cards and all that. What kind of design decisions went into making sure the campaign was replayable and you could go back to it over and over again?
Matt Highison: We’re kind of in a unique situation because we made a co-op survival shooter that does have a cohesive narrative, not only across each campaign, but across the game as a whole. And there’s a few different core things that we use for replayability. One is just the amount of sheer customization and deep RPG-like mechanics that are in the game. There’s a lot of people that will love simply leveling up their characters, leveling up their guns, adjusting all those configurations, and jumping back in and seeing how well they do. There are multiple difficulty levels which go from being able to enjoy the story with friends to being a very, very, very hardcore survival shooter where acid does a lot of damage, friendly fire is turned on, there are stronger enemies, fewer resources scattered around, and where you’re not able to continually go down and get lifted back up again. That provides a lot of chance for replayability.
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One of our favorite ones is the challenge card system. So there’s variance in the spawns and how you go through the maps every time anyway, but the challenge cards are consumable items that you can collect and then play before you start a mission that puts you into a, “What if?” scenario? So like what if all the runner aliens were replaced with bursters and exploded into acid pools every time you hit them? Or what if you only had your sidearm? And that gives a mutator to the entire gameplay experience and a challenge that we’re able to give you even more rewards for.
We have so many to collect. Craig and I still go through and we’re like, “Well, maybe we could put this one that you’re always losing health and bleeding out, but you only stop that bleed out timer if you kill an enemy.” Maybe if we play that only using smart guns and put it on extreme difficulty, how far can we go? Oh, only three rooms in. That’ll be fun to find the first streamer that is able to make it all the way through.
The challenge cards are so interesting because there has to be different permutations that even surprise you as a developer. Are there any of the challenge cards that particularly stand out as some of your favorites?
Craig Zinkievich: Oh, sure. I guess I’m a masochist when it comes to the challenge cards myself. Obviously, each one of them gives you extra rewards if you complete the mission with them so some of them are a little bit painful. There’s a challenge card where your gun jams every once in a while, and you have to reload to fix your gun and when that happens right at the top pitch of an encounter, that can be a very memorable experience. There’s another one where your motion detector malfunctions as well. And so when xenomorphs are surrounding you, that’s a pretty key piece of equipment. I like the ones that add that extra wrench in that is so key to the franchise.
Highison: There’s plenty that, when we made them, people on our team said, “Oh, that’s just too mean.” And we’re like, “Oh, but it’s, it’s so perfectly mean for this universe.”
Zinkievich: It ends up being tons of fun.
Aliens, what a masterpiece. James Cameron just knocked it out. It’s such a unique film compared to the original. It was a shift in tone, but it’s still just as good in a different way. How did that film influence the feel of this game? The intensity’s there and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed at times. You see all these xenomorphs coming at you. That is one part that the game really just nailed. It’s very Aliens in that way, but how else has that great film inspired this game?
Highison: You nailed it. Aliens as a universe is so broad and it’s great that it can cover the survival horror of the first film where it’s essentially Ripley against the xenomorph in close quarters. And then you have Aliens and like you said, it knocked it out of the park and just ratcheted up that tension further and further and further, and took this badass group of Marines and pushed them to the very, very edge and let viewers see how far they could go before they go over.
And that was the first emotion that we really wanted to pull out in Fireteam Elite; that moment where you’ve planned and you’re on the deck of your hangar and customizing your loadouts and you think you and your group of friends or a bunch of badasses and ready to go in and three or four rooms into the mission, you realize that it might be a little bit tough and we kind of have to stop talking and actually pay attention. And then by the end encounter, you’re just screwed and everything falls apart if somebody makes a mistake. That kind of fantasy is exactly where we started from.
It can really fall apart at the end of a mission. What was the choice to not have checkpoints for the individual stages where if you all die, you have to redo the whole thing?
Zinkievich: It is a co-op survival shooter, right? That’s what it is at its heart. And so it’s not a campaign or a story game with checkpoints. Although there are those elements in there, right? There’s a huge narrative. There is advancement within the game, but it is a survival game.
It’s about getting to the end and maybe within the genre, that’s where we took the cue from where it’s pushing your luck. It’s not planning for the next minute of gameplay until I can get to a checkpoint and just get across that line. It’s taking that whole mission, trying to think about what you need to do to make sure that you can survive from the beginning all the way to the end of it knowing that it’s going to ramp up, knowing that it’s going to get more difficult. Do I use that turret that I picked up in this room right now? Or do I hold onto it because I know it’s just gonna get harder? I think that if we had checkpoints a lot of that longer term strategy of “How do I get to the end of this thing?” would have been lost.
We’ve mentioned the narrative a few times. The player gets to decide how much they want to engage with it. If it’s your first time around, you can go through it. And if you’re big into the Aliens and you want to sink and all that lore, you can. But if maybe you just want to be in this game and shoot some aliens, you can kind of leave it to the side. What are the challenges of a narrative that is built to be replayed? Because most players probably don’t want to go through these set pieces constantly or hear the same dialogue 30 times.
Highison: Yeah. That is a challenge. And that’s something we thought about. There are the parts on the ship, the UAS Endeavor, and characters that you meet there and you can talk to them and learn a lot about our backstory and touchpoints into the rest of the universe. We have a bunch of intel collectibles that you can hunt down through exploring the different campaigns. And when you bring those back, those also unlock more lore. But it’s also a video game and we know that it’s meant to be replayable so you can just jump straight into action if you want to. Making all of that optional is pretty key to having a smooth multiplayer experience, too, where different people are at different stages of experiencing the game. Some are going to want to go through all the narrative stuff and really, really dig into it as a group. And others are just gonna want to just do the mission objective and push really, really hard immediately.
There are a ton of different types of enemies. From a gameplay perspective, how do you decide when to deploy them?
Zinkievich: That is the art that, right? That’s the art of game design: to make sure that those things are paced out well and it feels good and it’s not overwhelming the player, but also pressing the player forward and challenging them as well. It’s also making sure that those things are a little bit random. It’s another one of the things that add to the replayability.
There’s variation in there that you’re not always going to see the drone around that corner and they show up here, it may show up there. There are a lot of runners, the smaller weaker xenomorphs that you’ll be dispatching, but when one of the elites come in, whether or not it’s a drone, a warrior, a praetorian, you’re going to have to focus. You’re going to have to worry about them because they each come with their own behaviors and different strategies, AI, and abilities.
Matt, what’s your favorite Aliens film? I know it’s hard to decide. They’re so different in tone, but I’m going to press for an answer.
Highison: It’s Aliens, of course. All my friends know that I collect way too much media, physical media, specifically. I think Aliens is probably the film that I have owned on the most formats as possible. I know we have basically every version of it and I’ve watched it maybe every year of my life. Aliens, absolutely.
For second place, it’s going to be controversial and everybody’s going to give me a bunch of shit about it, but I’m going to put Prometheus as my second favorite purely because of the visual mastery there. I don’t think it’s fair to even put Alien in the realm of any of these things, because it’s such a classic that it just deserves to stand on its own as something else.
Good answer. I’m sure our readers will give you some shit.
Highison: They’re going to hate me for the Prometheus pick. You cannot say that that movie doesn’t look absolutely fantastic!
Zinkievich: The art direction in Prometheus is just amazing.
Fully agree. Auston Wintory does a fantastic job with the score here. How was it like working with him?
Zinkievich: We were so lucky. I’ll let Matt talk a little bit about this as well, but we were so lucky to get into contact with him. When he heard that we were working on a new Aliens game, he reached out to us. He’s such a huge fan and we were so proud to be able to work with a composer of his background, his ability and and quite frankly, the most important thing for us, which his love for franchise enough to do it justice. And we’re so proud of the work that he’s done and what it ends up feeling like. But Matt got to work with Austin a whole lot closer than I did.
Highison: In terms of storied film franchises, Aliens has a storied soundtrack. The first two films are so iconic for action, horror, sci-fi and everything kind of flows from those afterwards that we knew we needed a soundtrack to our game that wasn’t just background noise and could really elevate the experience and help ratchet up tension that we wanted to get. I’m a big fan of Journey. His work on Journey took that game from a 10 out of 10 game to an 11 out of 10 where it didn’t just underline or accentuate the emotions that were in there, but it added nuance to them and took it to a place where just the visuals couldn’t go by themselves.
So when we knew we wanted to have a soundtrack that wasn’t just background noise and we wanted to have somebody that could actually do something with it, we talked to Austin. The way this works is you ask for a demo from people and Austin made this crazy demo for us with clips from our game, and clips from the movies with music that he basically composed in a weekend over the top of it. And then him talking and telling us about his love of the franchise, we got a little bit scared because he loved it so much.
We got to talk to him more thoroughly and we got on the phone with him and he’s got Aliens stuff in his office and was clearly as much of an enthusiastic as everybody at Cold Iron. And we started talking about game design and it turns out he’s a big gamer and a great game developer in his own right. He just a really good match with how we work at Cold Iron. I’m super, super excited that we have a game where I’ve enjoyed listening to the soundtrack for thousands of hours.
It’s a spectacular soundtrack and definitely lives up to the pedigree of the franchise. And, speaking of the franchise, what sort of Easter eggs and homages to the films can fans expect to find in this?
Highison: Oh, man, it depends on how deep you want to go. Like if you’re somebody that has read all the comics back to the Dark Horse days and reads the novels and starts to recognize some of like the equipment that’s in there, you’ll see that like some of the 30 or so guns that we have are direct descendants from manufacturing lines featured in comics or in the tabletop RPG that were mentioned offhand. And we’ve kind of like expanded and brought to life in the game. There are tiny little touchpoints like that pretty much across the entire game.
Zinkievich: We really got to open up the archives and bring all our comics in, bring all the video games and novels in and we tried to really sprinkle throughout the game as many references to the extended universe, not just the movies, not just what is really, really well known, but to make sure that even the hardcore fans would get into the game and realize how much we love the franchise and that, in a lot of ways, this is our love letter to it.
So many different types of players are going to be coming into this game. What type of tips do you have for new players that maybe aren’t the most hardcore gamers, but want to experience the atmosphere and this Aliens game?
Zinkievich: We have multiple levels of difficulty so if you go in on standard, which is fairly challenging, and that doesn’t really work out well for you, you can always drop down the casual and get through and feel the story and get all the narrative there. That being said, if you really want to play standard, if you want to crank that up to intense, which is really where everybody here at Cold Iron plays, players can quickly team up and make sure that they’re trying out different builds.
We made it so that the RPG elements are very, very deep allow you to customize and also let you swap between things so that you can try out different things and there’s not a lot of penalty. And the final little bit of tip for me is, go fast, but go careful. You want to make sure that you’re getting to the end as fast as you can, but there’s going to be stuff right around the corner that you have to be careful. You’ve got to kind of balance that explorer in you, knowing that there’s xenomorphs all over the place.
