One of the major attractions of making Aliens Versus Predator was the multiplayer opportunities it afforded us, due to the variety of characters involved. However, this was something of a double-edged sword…
Jason Kingsley

Typically, any game which offers a choice of characters balances the gameplay by making one type heavy, slow and powerful and pitting them against an opponent with less firepower but more speed and agility. This usually works, but was too simple an equation to fit our needs.

Our dilemma stemmed from the fact that all three characters arrived at our game in more-or-less complete form. The Alien is a naturally powerful creature, but doesn’t possess any weaponry (and therefore has to get ‘up close and personal’ with its intended victim); the Colonial Marine is as vulnerable as any human being, but compensates for this by carrying a complex array of armaments, and the Predator is massive, powerful, ‘armed for bear’ and can become invisible at a moment’s notice. It’s not too difficult to put a pecking order to that list, is it?

The traditional way to solve this problem would be to either strengthen the weaker characters (allow the Marines to become invisible or create a range of Alien weaponry) or handicap the strongest (make the Predator walk on his knees perhaps?), but there was no way that we could do this without compromising some of the characters’ hard-earned credibility.

Our solution, therefore, was to institute a ‘handicap’ system. A simplistic, but useful, way to explain this is to use the age-old children’s game of ‘scissors, paper, stone’ as an analogy. The Alien can easily beat the Marine if it gets to hand-to-hand combat, just as the Predator can usually beat all comers by using his superior strength and mobility.