“Thro’ the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-moon’d abysses of night,
I have liv’d o’er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.”
Oops! What we meant to say was…
“Welcome to Moonlight Trailer Park, your Outdoor Escape Destination!”
https://youtu.be/A-n5Yik9x74
Greetings Illuminators! This massive Halloween update for Alone in the Dark: Illumination brings a completely brand new, horrific location and a pulse-pounding new way to play. Paired with a ton of animation and visual refinements, AITD has never been more terrifying! Read on for additional details and our full build notes.
New Environment: Moonlight Trailer Park
Navigate the dilapidated Moonlight Trailer Park as you dodge the Old One’s ever-pursuing minions. This unique, huge map offers an open-ended play experience, with multiple routes and tactics to escape the treacherous hordes of eldritch creatures. Scrawled notes and clues are hidden throughout the Park, illuminating the eerie backstory of the park. Can you survive the darkness? Or will the Moonlight claim another victim?
New Game Mode: Escape
A new play mode exclusive to the Moonlight Trailer Park map, Escape tasks the players with surviving the Trailer Park in one of three unique ways. As the adventurers search the map for clues and ways forward, enemy spawns will become more difficult and the darkness will close in. A brand-new energy consumption mechanic means that players will constantly be balancing risk and reward as they press on. Light means safety, but the longer you wait, the more monsters will pour out of the abyss. A random allocation of vital items gives the mode endless replay value, as players will never know where to find the elusive tools they need to free themselves from the darkness. Escape, before it’s too late!
Happy Halloween!
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Build Notes:
• New Game Mode: Escape
• New Environment: Moonlight Trailer Park
• Improved Enemy Spawning
• "Multiple choice" objective system - multiple objectives active at once
• New "light grid" system - switches that turn on / off entire arrays of lights, that correspond to specific level sections
• Energy Consumption system - power source that hooks up to one or more switches and slowly empties as long as a switch is on
• Player Pickups - Health packs now offer Stamina Boost
• Enhanced Visuals - Fog, dust FX, lighting, additional visual improvements
• Modified Vehicle Models for objectives
• Adjusted Level Geometry / Layout
• Added Ambient Level Audio - Audio Occlusion Mapping
Summer 2016 Update is Here!
Greetings Illuminators! From the darkest shadows, the Alone in the Dark: Illumination team has summoned forth a terrifying new content update! Check out the new TRAILER and PATCH NOTES for all the details!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXIYtWhsOk
Overhauled Advancement System: New skill tree progression, new ability enhancements, and a smoother pace to level advancement.
Improved Player Abilities: From a new fireball for the Witch to a revised weapon loadout for the Hunter, each class gets some meaningful changes.
Streamlined Missions and Objectives: More variety and improved monster spawning AI should make objectives feel challenging, rewarding and more engaging.
New Monster Types and Behaviors: From a tougher Goblin Brute to new type of Shapes, tons of tweaks to monster behavior, animations and much more.
Updated Narrative: Refined narrative delivery and added voiceover.
Let us know what you think! If you like what we're doing, please leave a review. There is more all new content coming soon, keep your eyes peeled for teasers on the Alone in the Dark: Illumination Steam Page. Thanks again for your ongoing support, we hope you enjoy the changes!
Summer 2016 Update - SNEAK PEEK!
Okay Illuminators!
As promised, we have a HUGE new update for Alone in the Dark: Illumination! Think of this as a “sneak peek” before we announce to the wider Steam community next week.
We’ve put a big emphasis on player progression and gameplay pacing. The “big ticket” items include:
Overhauled Advancement System: New skill tree progression, new ability enhancements, and a smoother pace to level advancement.
Improved Player Abilities: From a new fireball for the Witch to a revised weapon loadout for the Hunter, each class gets some meaningful changes.
Streamlined Missions and Objectives: More variety and improved monster spawning AI should make objectives feel challenging, rewarding and more engaging.
New Monster Types and Behaviors: From a tougher Goblin Brute to new type of Shapes, tons of tweaks to monster behavior, animations and much more.
Updated Narrative: Refined narrative delivery and added voiceover.
So have a look, see how it plays, and leave your comments below! If you haven’t already, feel free to leave a review if you think we’ve hit the mark with this patch. There is more to come in the town of Lorwich, so keep a light on, and as always, thank you for your support!
There's Something in the Darkness....
Greetings AitD Fans! It’s been a little while, but we’ve been continuing work on Alone in the Dark: Illumination, and have made some awesome improvements in the past few months that are just about ready for release.
We are super excited to get this new content into players’ hands, and we hope you’ll love it too! Keep your eyes peeled for more updates in the coming days, in the meantime, check out the attached screenshot for a little taste of what is coming.
Update 7/17 - New Powers!
Greetings Illuminators!
As you may have noticed, we launched a patch last week addressing various audio issues. And we have another exciting patch coming later today! This brand new patch adds in two new devastating powers, the Witch's "Arc Pulse"...
And the Priest's "Judgement"!
In our previous patch, we focused on audio tweaks throughout the game. In addition to a wide-reaching look at individual sounds, we took a deep dive into the overall audio system, and found some great opportunities for improvement! To put it simply, while we’ve seen some very nice improvements to sounds across the board, the biggest discovery has been some awesome memory savings in the way audio is handled. This memory savings directly leads to improved performance in the overall gameplay experience.
While sound tweaks were the focus, we also managed to squeeze in some additional fixes to the Campaign 1 boss fight, as well as a general stability pass on multiplayer.
Our full list of fixes for both patches is below:
PATCH NOTES FOR 07/11/15
- Hunter's Primary Assault Rifle reload audio rebalanced.
- Engineer's Shotgun and Pistol audio rebalanced.
- Normalized music soundtrack for the entire game.
- Audio memory usage optimized for less memory usage and load times.
- Sound FX for the Priest's Holy Light Skill works as intended now.
- Witch breathing sound not working as intended has been fixed.
- Over 200 audio fixes and optimizations.
- All known random Multiplayer crashes have been fixed.
- Obelisk disappearing intermittently in Campaign 1 has been fixed.
PATCH NOTES FOR 07/17/15
- New ability for the Witch: “Arc Pulse.” Activated by pressing the “E” key. An expanding pulse wave that damages enemies within a certain radius and activates lights within the same radius.
- New ability for the Priest: “Judgement.” Activated by Pressing the “Q” key. Now when the Priest bashes, his bashes are imbued with fire, igniting enemies as they get knocked down, and dealing fire damage over time.
We’re just about at the bottom of our list of launch bugs, so are now able to dedicate our energies towards filling in more content and optimizing some of the larger systems. Stay tuned for more tweaks, and keep the lights on!
- The AITD Team
Update 6/26!
Hello Illuminators!
We hope you're enjoying, and surviving, your trip into the blasted wastes of Lorwich. We've just released a new build, featuring a number of gameplay and technical enhancements. In particular, our devs worked out some new audio optimizations that should increase game performance across the board. Our full list of changes is below:
- Adjusted boulder behavior in campaign 1
- Adjusted damage on Hunter’s assault rifles
- Adjusted spawn logic in campaign 3 safe room area
- Revised the lighting solution in the Saferoom Railroad area of Campaign 3.
- Adjusted menu UI to avoid blocking “Back” button
- Adjusted objective randomization in Campaign 3.
- Adjusted blocking volume inside of the processing facility of Campaign 3
- Numerous small crash fixes, optimizations and tweaks!
We'd also like to point your attention to this fantastic and hilarious Alienware Twitch Stream showing off AITD, featuring members of the Alienware Team!
Again, we're grateful to everyone who's played AITD: Illumination and left us feedback in the forums. Keep 'em coming. We'll be in touch again soon with our next round of updates. Until then - beware the Darkness!
The AITD Team
Updates!
Greetings AITD: Illuminati!
After a very busy launch week, we want to stop by and THANK YOU for your ongoing support for Alone in the Dark: Illumination! By now you will know that we launched the game June 11, just in time for E3! We had a great showing at E3, and have already seen some positive feedback from the folks we met with, and expect to see more stories hitting over the coming days.
We hope everyone has had a chance to pick up a copy of the game. As you may have noticed, we’ve been steadily working to quickly fix any bugs that may have slipped through to launch.
- Fixes for elevator logic in multiplayer
- Lightning Strike mana cost reduced
- Witch's pistol damage increased
- Priest’s pistols damage increased
- Multiple tweaks to the boss fights including boss health, attacks, and difficulty scaling
- Multiple localization language tweaks across all supported languages
We’re listening to folks here on the forums, and continue to address outstanding bugs, tweak balancing and optimize the gameplay. Our commitment is to deliver a great game with lots of replay value in both single and co-op modes, and we definitely appreciate all the feedback (especially the helpful kind :D ). We're working on another patch for release later this week, it includes a few more small tweaks that we think will continue to improve on the gameplay experience.
- Tripod light not activating in 2-3
- Ghost Train not applying damage to monsters and players consistently
- Animation tweaks to “goo hatch” gate in 4-3
- Multiple fixes to occasional light switch/fire barrel issues.
- Additional tuning to boss fights
The “easy” stuff will be rolling out first, but rest assured that we are continually evaluating the bigger systems in the background and expect to be able to report on this soon. If you're continuing to experience any gameplay issues with AITD: Illumination, please let us know below, and we'll look into them asap!
Thanks! And keep the lights on.
The AITD Team
Illumination: Release Date - Game is Live!
UPDATE: The game is live! Download today!
The time is nigh! Ancient evil arises from below, and only you can stave off the forces of this vile darkness.
We've worked long and hard on this next chapter in the AITD universe, and can't wait to finally get the finished game out to you all. Your comments, criticisms, and suggestions throughout our Beta weekends have been invaluable in crafting the game we have now.
Be on the lookout for more info upon release!
- The AITD Team
Illumination: Let There Be Light
Of all the resources available to you in AitD: Illumination, light is the most abundant and yet the most precious. The monsters that infest Lorwich are nearly invincible in the dark, but light removes their thick carapace and leaves them vulnerable to your attacks. Fortunately, there are a number of light sources available to players throughout the game.
Each player is equipped with a flashlight that when shined on monsters will momentarily stun them, make their skin crack with blue light, and most importantly, make them partially vulnerable to gunfire. When playing cooperatively, as more players shine their lights on any one monster the effect is multiplied until the monster is left defenseless. Communication is imperative to survival, and players will benefit from focusing their fire on single enemies.
Additionally, there are strong light sources scattered across the maps, including fire barrels, lamps, and overhead lights. These light sources remove 100% of nearby monsters’ defenses, and cause their skin to crack with gold light. In this state, even small arms can quickly take down an otherwise unmanageable foe. While these light sources are invaluable, they can be extinguished by monsters - and once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. The only exception is electrical light sources, which can be repaired by the Engineer. While formidable on her own, this passive skill can be her most important contribution in cooperative play.
Players will often find themselves alone and outnumbered with no strong light sources available. While the flashlight works in a pinch, you’ll expend too much ammo to make it your primary strategy for survival. Fortunately, each character has at least one special ability, which creates its own light source and always deals 100% damage. The Hunter has a flamethrower, the Priest has the Wrath of God, the Witch has Chain Lightning, and the Engineer has the Tesla Wall.
Use these skills wisely and sparingly to ensure your survival, as you make your way, Alone in the Dark.
Illumination: Gameplay
As we talked about in our last update, “Illumination: The Same But Different” , Alone in the Dark: Illumination explores the classic themes of the AitD universe, while branching out with new stories and gameplay mechanics. One of the key innovations we’ve made is the inclusion of multiple character perspectives, and Co-Op gameplay.
Alone in the Dark: Illumination takes you through the blasted landscape of Lorwich and deep into the mines below. At launch, the game will feature three sprawling campaigns of four levels each. Each campaign explores a unique environment, from the Mines of Lorwich to the Factory of Fear, and Beneath the Graves in the Lorwich Cemetary. As you explore this cursed town, your character will develop their powers and grow increasingly effective at holding back the darkness. You’ll gain experience points after each level and be able to spend them on unlocking new character abilities or buffing your existing stats, and in order to make your way down into the depths of Lorwich it’s imperative to level up your characters skills and abilities.
About SINGLE PLAYER mode: While in single player mode your primary focus will be on quick reflexes, tactical planning, and management of your health and abilities. A combination of support skills, powerful attacks, and a strong sense of when to flee and when to stand and fight will keep you alive. Even at lower difficulties it’s necessary to spend your XP wisely if you hope to keep Cthulhu at bay – and since you have no one there to protect you, when your last light source dies you will be truly Alone in the Dark.
In the MULTIPLAYER mode, you can team up with between one and three friends for an entirely different experience. In this mode, communication and coordination are key to your survival. While you can have up to four times the firepower, the game won’t be four times easier. Monsters scale in difficulty to accommodate extra players, and should a player die,the difficulty remains for the survivors. Each character’s unique abilities combine and complement the others for a dynamic gameplay experience. For example, the Engineer can repair broken light sources, giving the Hunter greater opportunity to mow down the forces of evil with his arsenal of weapons.
In the chance you find yourself cutting down Cthulhu’s minions with ease, you can always increase the game’s difficulty for a greater challenge. Alone in the Dark: Illumination has four difficulty settings, but we recommend everyone start out on easy or medium. Even on lower difficulty, if you’re not careful in your use of powers and available light sources, monsters can quickly overwhelm you. It takes steady aim, careful planning, and nerves of steel to survive Alone in the Dark.
Full product release is coming very soon, stay tuned for more info and an official launch date!
