Shacknews put up an interview (and new screen shots!) with project lead Tim Jones and producer Paul Mackman for the upcoming Aliens vs. Predator game the other day, and it's really got me excited.  Seems like Rebellion's newest effort is going to be a lot like their original classic.

I'm particularly interested because of the described use of environmental effects.  Shacknews' hands-on with the game focused on the use of "smoke, light and shadow."  Moreover, Rebellion is committed to emergent game play rather than choreographed sequences to keep gamers' adrenaline pumping during tense play sessions.

In the new AVP, Giger's nightmares understand what shadow is, and will intelligently use it to their advantage. During one assault, three aliens rapidly closed in on the Marine and his NPC buddies. After taking down two of the beasts, the third quietly disappeared near the end of the battle. Sensing a trap, the Marine slowly moved toward a doorway, only to notice that the last Alien had been creeping along the wall, hiding in the black, hoping the player would let down his guard.

Color me intrigued.  The aliens make use of shadows?  They intelligently retreat if they're losing?  They stalk the player to gain an advantage?  I feel like this is the alien game I've been waiting for!

Jones and Mackman go into more detail during the interview:

Shack: The Aliens themselves were really the most frightening part of the original. You never really know where they'd spawn, and they moved incredibly fast. Is that unpredictable nature something you're trying to recreate here?

Tim Jones: That's absolutely key to it. Gamers expect a certain level of choreography these days than we were able to do back then, to get a cross the narrative. But within the key beats of the narrative, the gameplay itself is very much emergent. The Aliens in particular, and Predators, they do their own thing.

Paul Mackman: As you saw from the gameplay there, three Aliens spawn in that room, and they can kind of do whatever they want.

Tim Jones: Darting in and out of darkness and the shadow.. it does have emergent gameplay that keeps you on your toes, and it is different each time.

Paul Mackman: You'll see something similar to that if you watch a couple of playthroughs of the Predator demo. I challenge you to see the same playthrough twice, because the AI do their own thing. They do something slightly different every time.

Tim Jones: I'm less attracted to choreographed scares than the ones that are genuinely different every time, because as soon as someone returns to a checkpoint and they get the same scare again, it diminishes it. But if they return to checkpoint, and I don't know where this guy is going to be, and then you start looking up there, and then there's the blip of the motion tracker, where's he coming from? And you get that sense of anticipation, but knowing how it's going to play out. And that's what keeps it interesting, and interesting for us as developers as well. 

Sounds to me like Rebellion's newest Aliens vs. Predator will make use of AI features similar to those described by Gearbox for Aliens: Colonial Marines, and I couldn't be happier.  I'm tempted to re-install the original in order to quell my anticipation to a managable level -- 2010 is a long ways away!