Enemy Without

How modders are removing enemies to create stress-free experiences

- Sam Greer

Mods for games are usually additive. New features, forgotten content… mods are usually about putting more into a game. Yet in recent years we’ve seen the rise of a particular kind of mod that takes things away. Specifically, taking away a game’s enemies or threats. We previously covered a mod which removed all danger from first-person sci-fihorror Soma – it later become an official game mode – but there are plenty more games out there getting mods that do the same and they’re equally fascinating.

The nerve-shredding Alien: Isolation seems like an obvious candidate for the no-enemy treatment and Paul Huwe, senior scientific software developer at NASA, took it upon himself to create that experience. “I did find a ‘no alien’ mod, it didn’t remove the alien, but rather spawned it as an inert NPC,” he explains.

“In addition to being very jarring, it prevented the alien from performing scripted events which I found both insufficient and experience-destroying. Given all this, I decided to try to make my own mod which would have the alien act like normal, except that it would ignore Amanda. In that way I could explore the station in a far more enjoyable fashion.”

It was a task which didn’t prove too tricky for Paul. “I started with another modder’s (MattFiler) Alien: Isolation modding guide and scripting tools,” he says. “After using these tools to extract the configuration files, the mod simply required editing long XML files.”