To illustrate my point more bluntly: I spent a while under the impression all three campaigns were intended to be occurring roughly concurrently, partly due to how every campaign opens up with the same cinematic of Bishop Weyland (The android head/owner of the Weyland-Yutani corporation from Aliens canon) at a Predator temple that culminates in the temple shooting out a giant blue-white beam. AvP 2010 just expects you to work it out on your own with nearly no context. If it's been three weeks from the start of The Incident in one sequence and four weeks in another sequence, the second sequence came second. AvP 2, by contrast, will periodically have an informational bit appear on the left side of the screen that provides explicit times and is even kind enough to include a 'time since The Incident' framework so you don't have to manually pay attention to numbers to work out what happened when, relative to other things. This removes the game's ability to signal elements of timing with this mechanic: the Predator campaign has a portion of the power nodes mandatory to drain, and the game could have used this to signal in the Alien and Marine campaigns whether the Predator is supposed to have already passed through an area or not by making the mandatory drains be, in fact, drained if the Predator is supposed to have already been through the area.Īnother part is that the game doesn't rely on any more explicit mechanics/framing devices to convey time and order. (When the game expects you to destroy a power node to open a door or the like) While there's occasionally overlap between the positions, in most cases a power node that can be found in one campaign is simply absent from the other two. Part of this has to do with gameplay choices whose potential story impact is ignored: for example, power nodes litter the Predator's maps, but only occasionally show up in the Marine's campaign (When the game expects you to power it up yourself) and same for the Alien's campaign. The plot is somewhat strange to talk about, in part because the game expects you to infer a fair amount and yet doesn't really put in the effort to make sure what you're seeing is consistent with the expected inference.
It's relatively light on plot in real terms, and there's not really any major twists or something of the sort.ĪvP 2010 has essentially a single plot that happens to be told from three different perspectives, and so I'm going to be covering all three campaigns in this one post. Though honestly there's not a lot to spoil about the game.