Holding breath gets me killed anyway

[Doing gens, you?]

I'm on Nightmare diffuculty, and when I hide in lockers I can hold my breath and lean back from the alien in time, but Ripley always ends up having to gasp for air and causing the alien to kill me anyway. Do I need to release my breath before the red markers?

[-|Nur|-]

Well if you release it before the red markers and the alien is sniffing then you'll die. The lockers are a gamble, which is why you shouldn't be using them in the first place, especially on Nightmare where health is hard to come by.

[Zero]

yeah, i havent played long but i do know the lockers tend to be deathtraps. had better luck hiding under desks, beds, and stuff.

[burivuh]

don't use lockers on nightmare

[I'm Ant]

On hardest the alien knows your around there somewhere so sometimes it will do a random check inside a locker. Don't expell your air too soon let it walk away first and don't hold breath too soon otherwise you will loose control too soon.

[Jeo Nugu]

It has NEVER worked for me, regardless of difficulty. Countless numbers of attempts, and it has failed every time! I do what it says on the screen, holding S (lean back) and I keep the RMB button held down, but Ripley has the lung capacity of a f*cking gopher and releases her breath on her own after only 5 seconds WHILE the alien is still there. Seriously, that's just stupid. Who can't hold thier breath for more than 5 seconds? It would be better to just have the game roll a random chance that the alien finds you rather than this ignorant "hold your breath" BS.

[Max Headshot]

Originally posted by Gamezalot:

It has NEVER worked for me, regardless of difficulty. Countless numbers of attempts, and it has failed every time! I do what it says on the screen, holding S (lean back) and I keep the RMB button held down, but Ripley has the lung capacity of a f*cking gopher and releases her breath on her own after only 5 seconds WHILE the alien is still there. Seriously, that's just stupid. Who can't hold thier breath for more than 5 seconds? It would be better to just have the game roll a random chance that the alien finds you rather than this ignorant "hold your breath" BS.

What's wrong about this feature ? The game gives you a last chance to survive. Lockers should be anyway avoided and only used when there is nothing else to hide. By the way the pulling-out-of-lockers-animations are awesome, especially out of the small one I found some variations. :-)
Some day I will make a vid about all Alien-caused death animations I found, there are easily more than ten. I like cinematic stuff like this.

[Paladestar]

Holding your breath damages your health, even more so on hard and nightmare. The game won't let you kill yourself by running out of health while holding your breath, so if you're about to run out of health, it automatically forces you to stop holding you breath and start breathing again. So if you go into a locker on low health (which is less than about 40% health on hard or nightmare), you're not gonna survive if the alien forces you to hold your breath.

As others have already pointed out, in general, hiding in lockers is a bad idea.

[Finarfin]

Then where should you hide? It seems that I can't move 5 feet before the alien is nearby again. It's basically becoming a frustrating game of load, move 5 feet, try to hide, get caught, die, reload, try again.

And, until reading this, I didn't realize that holding your breath affected your health. I now have only a sliver of health and no medkits.

[Max Headshot]

Originally posted by Jeff George:

Then where should you hide? It seems that I can't move 5 feet before the alien is nearby again. It's basically becoming a frustrating game of load, move 5 feet, try to hide, get caught, die, reload, try again.

And, until reading this, I didn't realize that holding your breath affected your health. I now have only a sliver of health and no medkits.

Hide under or behind tables, beds, boxes. Hide in a dynamic way, move at the same time the Alien moves around keeping something between you and the Alien, be smart and try some tactics, use a noisemaker, flash bang or a flare as a distraction, notice possible hiding points when entering a room and stay near to them when the Alien is near, notice the Alien's position by using your tracker, secure your backside by using pipebombs or molotovs as mines, you can take them again. There are so many ways, but you MUST take risks. Just this makes the thrill of the game.

[Dayve]

I played half way through the game on nightmare mode (then lost the game after upgrading to Windows 10 so didn't continue) and let me say first of all that lockers are the absolute worst hiding place on nightmare mode. Literally anything else is better.

If you hide in a locker on nightmare there's a 99.9% chance the alien will sniff it, causing you to hold your breath and lose health. If you're not at 100% health when this happens then you're going to die. If you are at full health then you're going to lose around 50% of your health bar (maybe more) because that's how much it takes to hold your breath long enough for the alien to go away. It's kind of a timing thing - you just have to get used to timing it right.

But yeah, lockers are the worst hiding places on nightmare.

[Umbrella Corporation]

Alien can hear everything if they nearly.. its suck lol

[Danyboychan]

as someone going through the game again on Nightmare in the year 2021, lockers are a bad idea if they aren't your last option. Hiding under tables usually works best for me, just hope the tail physics dont come near you haha.

[Vzzdak]

Though an old thread, it sounds people were on chapter 5, sneaking around medical.

The problem is that this chapter has an unique mechanic, with a “tether” that keeps the xenomorph close to you, and the longer you take, the shorter the tether gets.

So if you’ve saved your gave after the xenomorph has become intimate with you, then restart the level, with the objective of being faster.

[Punished Jeremy]

Originally posted by Vzzdak:

Though an old thread, it sounds people were on chapter 5, sneaking around medical.

The problem is that this chapter has an unique mechanic, with a “tether” that keeps the xenomorph close to you, and the longer you take, the shorter the tether gets.

So if you’ve saved your gave after the xenomorph has become intimate with you, then restart the level, with the objective of being faster.

You always have the tether. It’s not a unique mechanic. It’s how this game works

[Nathan]

in the chr_info/attributes/defaults.bml file there's at the bottom hiding section this line:
<hiding_max_QTE_selection_weighting>15</hiding_max_QTE_selection_weighting>
Which I've never actually modded, but seems relevant to the breath holding mechanic.

BTW, a thing I noted back in the early days of my modding (I think I mentioned it in the guide), which most people might not know, is that the game is extremely unfair by default on enemies checking lockers and such, because right under that QTE line is this:
<chance_hiding_not_chosen>0.1</chance_hiding_not_chosen>
That's only a 10% chance that an enemy WON'T check in your hiding spot!
(I usually mod that to be higher, 10% just seems harsh and a bit unrealistic)

So yes, open desks and boxes etc are just better, those aren't "coded", specific hiding spots, just obstacles to line of sight, and that automatically makes it more fair because in the game anything assigned to be a dedicated hiding spot (i.e. lockers, with a special QTE) will have that value tied to it.