Alien Isolation prototype third person gameplay revealed in GDC video

Alien Isolation was nearly a third person horror game, as revealed by video footage shown off by developers Creative Assembly.

The footage captured by Destructoid was shown during a panel at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. You can watch it below...

During the panel creative lead Alistair Hope said the game was originally looking to emulate genre greats such as Resident Evil 4, Dead Space and Silent Hill 2 – which were all third person – but after experimentation they decided a first person perspective was much better.

The footage is quite poor quality but you get the idea. It shows a surprisingly finished looking slice of third person gameplay indicating that the game was pretty far along before the change of perspective was made.

What we see certainly looks good and its contemporaries suggest it could well have been just as great a game in third person.

First person was definitely the right idea though. With third person players are able to see things the character they're playing as cannot, so reducing that field of vision – particularly when hiding – certainly makes things much more terrifying.

Being leapt upon by a hungry alien is also far more likely to make you empty your bowels if you have no idea it's coming, as you do in third person.