Aliens : Colonial Marines

Spear

Beefy78 wrote: »

Have you had a chance to try multiplayer yet?

No, but I probably will, if for nothing more than to get some attempt at value out of it.

Sarky

gizmo wrote: »

For **** sake. Can you imagine trying that in the original AvP games? You'd have your face ripped off within bloody seconds.

Note this video was taken on the Hardened difficulty level.

Source.

Jesus, I feel ill after watching that. Ill, and very sad.

pixelburp

Worth watching this comparison video to see just how much the game devolved, between the demo version shown to press a while back, and the final product released to retail. The difference is fairly stark (though the video mixed up the tags for demo/final half-way through, you can clearly see which version is which)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z2qVebxlUo

Captain Chaos

Think you mean how much it got worse. All that good stuff is gone and replaced with an N64 game.

pixelburp

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Think you mean how much it got worse. All that good stuff is gone and replaced with an N64 game.

Yeah, that's what I said - 'devolved'

Captain Chaos

pixelburp wrote: »

Yeah, that's what I said - 'devolved'

Must have been a ninja edit.

pixelburp

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Must have been a ninja edit.

Nope, no edits, you just read it wrong
Anyways, a fairly stark difference I think we can all agree; and it just creates more questions as to what precisely happened this game. How did it go from looking that good, to looking so awful?

Ridley

pixelburp wrote: »

Anyways, a fairly stark difference I think we can all agree; and it just creates more questions as to what precisely happened this game. How did it go from looking that good, to looking so awful?

There's still time for some press release to say that all the effort went into making the Wii U version the best.

BlitzKrieg

on a side note just in general about the alien franchise, there seem to have been a very distinct shift in how the movement of the alien has been designed over the years.

I know Alien 3 introduced the runner alien which ran on all four legs, but prior to that, when not climbing walls, aliens tend to stand on 2 most of the time in the films and the early AVP games replicated this. I know they tended to hunch a lot in the 2nd film, but even after alien 3 with resurrection the aliens still varied a lot between standing and only being on all fours when climbing and in size were still pretty big (I think aliens states they are roughly six feet tall)

The games varied abit more with avp 2 having possibly the smallest aliens in the series (until now) but they didnt crawl on all fours all the time.

But around the time the godawful AVP movie hit there started a shift where suddenly the aliens were smaller almost always walked on all four legs and this has continued into a lot of the alien material that has followed. the 2nd avp film was particularly bad for this (and was just outright bad overall) and when I see footage of this game, it really is the movement of the alien that sticks out to me as being the most blatantly wrong aspect of the game, they all look far too small, like attack dog creatures you'd encounter in older fps games. They also have this awful pre attack animation from what I can see that makes it very easy to dodge when they are attacking.

bleh.

muppetkiller

Playing it here on the PC on the hardest difficulty and it's embarrassingly bad.
I mean to sum up the Game.... The Aliens Hide for gods sake ? In plain sight in too, not seeking cover just sitting on the ground.
Even at the highest detail levels the textures are bland and without detail. It really does look like it's 6 years old.

Also the Audio of the game is terrible too. Music is great but the Aliens sound like a bag of cats when they are hit, and the weapon sounds have no uummp to them ... terrible.

Not The Real Scarecrow

muppetkiller wrote: »

Playing it here on the PC on the hardest difficulty and it's embarrassingly bad.
I mean to sum up the Game.... The Aliens Hide for gods sake ? In plain sight in too, not seeking cover just sitting on the ground.
Even at the highest detail levels the textures are bland and without detail. It really does look like it's 6 years old.

Also the Audio of the game is terrible too. Music is great but the Aliens sound like a bag of cats when they are hit, and the weapon sounds have no uummp to them ... terrible.

Same here, played about 2 hours earlier and its truely as bad as the reviews make out.
Pissed myself laughing when I saw one hiding behind a desk but its head was slightly over it. Its a fcking mess of a game.It's beyond me why they didn't even add damage from Alien blood.

Gunmonkey

That comparison vid is quite shocking, how can they go from the demo build looking so damn good to the atrocious mess the release was? Only rational explanation is that they needed to crank it down for one of the consoles.....possibly the WiiU, devs werent up to speed on it and it was one of the big hallmark "look, we has 3rd party games" for Nintendo so it had a lot of pressure to focus on it?

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

on a side note just in general about the alien franchise, there seem to have been a very distinct shift in how the movement of the alien has been designed over the years.

I know Alien 3 introduced the runner alien which ran on all four legs, but prior to that, when not climbing walls, aliens tend to stand on 2 most of the time in the films and the early AVP games replicated this. I know they tended to hunch a lot in the 2nd film, but even after alien 3 with resurrection the aliens still varied a lot between standing and only being on all fours when climbing and in size were still pretty big (I think aliens states they are roughly six feet tall)

Could it have been the shift from guy in a suit to CGI, and the wishes of the film-makers to portray the Alien as more bestial and not "just a guy in a suit with a big helmet on"? Plus, I think the Aliens appear a bit thinner in more recent films when CGI is used, could it look better if its on all fours then? Not watched the films in ages, really should to try purge the sheer notion of this gamefrom my mind and what Aliens is really like.

Retr0gamer

The WiiU version is being handled by a different team and it doesn't explain why these details were left out of the PC version.

pixelburp

Gunmonkey wrote: »

That comparison vid is quite shocking, how can they go from the demo build looking so damn good to the atrocious mess the release was? Only rational explanation is that they needed to crank it down for one of the consoles.....possibly the WiiU, devs werent up to speed on it and it was one of the big hallmark "look, we has 3rd party games" for Nintendo so it had a lot of pressure to focus on it?

A Kotaku article, trying to piece together the rumours and innuendo, seems to point towards the game being taken away from Gearbox after a number of delays. It was handed over to TimeGate by Sega, and this new dev apparently shelved much of what Gearbox had built to date, which would explain the worsening of the graphics for a start. Gearbox focused on bordelands 2 instead, while Colonial Marines was rushed to release even thiugh it was clearly a half-assed rebuild & nowhere near finished.

Nodin

Sarky wrote: »

Jesus, I feel ill after watching that. Ill, and very sad.

These are words which could be dropped from a plane as a terror/sadness weapon....

You can play through whole sections of Aliens: Colonial Marines without killing aliens or firing your gun

In a sort of related note, has steam been acting up on anyone over the last two days?

BlitzKrieg

It was handed over to TimeGate by Sega, and this new dev apparently shelved much of what Gearbox had built to date

Must be reading a different article to me, cause it said that Gearbox outsourced the timegate, not sega.

According to one person familiar with the project who spoke to Kotaku under condition of anonymity, Gearbox outsourced the bulk of Colonial Marines (codenamed Pecan) to a studio called TimeGate, most recently responsible for the shooter Section 8 and its sequel.

I'm surprised they handed it to timegate, their last 2 games were more focused on the multiplayer then single player and before that they were known more for add on packs to fear that got cut out of that franchise's canon when the sequel got made (funnily enough by the developers who made AVP 2 Monolith games)

Its a shame warner bros bought up monolith, if there was anyone gearbox should have outsourced to, it's them, they make quality single player campaigns.

Spear

This has appeared at Reddit, which would explain much:

http://www.reddit.com/r/LV426/comments/18ewf4/a_lot_of_you_are_rightfully_upset_at_the_final/

krudler

BlitzKrieg wrote: »

on a side note just in general about the alien franchise, there seem to have been a very distinct shift in how the movement of the alien has been designed over the years.

I know Alien 3 introduced the runner alien which ran on all four legs, but prior to that, when not climbing walls, aliens tend to stand on 2 most of the time in the films and the early AVP games replicated this. I know they tended to hunch a lot in the 2nd film, but even after alien 3 with resurrection the aliens still varied a lot between standing and only being on all fours when climbing and in size were still pretty big (I think aliens states they are roughly six feet tall)

The games varied abit more with avp 2 having possibly the smallest aliens in the series (until now) but they didnt crawl on all fours all the time.

But around the time the godawful AVP movie hit there started a shift where suddenly the aliens were smaller almost always walked on all four legs and this has continued into a lot of the alien material that has followed. the 2nd avp film was particularly bad for this (and was just outright bad overall) and when I see footage of this game, it really is the movement of the alien that sticks out to me as being the most blatantly wrong aspect of the game, they all look far too small, like attack dog creatures you'd encounter in older fps games. They also have this awful pre attack animation from what I can see that makes it very easy to dodge when they are attacking.

bleh.

Well in the movies it was hinted at that the xenomorphs would inherit some genetic characteristics from whatever creature hosted them. Thats why the aliens in the first two movies are more humanoid compared to the one in Alien 3, as that bursts out of a dog (in the theatrical version, in the workprint/extended version its an ox the chestbuster emerges from). They moved from a guy in a suit to a animatronic puppet on rods for a lot of the shots in Alien 3, its a continuity nightmare in that regard as it looks dog like and spindly legged in some scenes and clearly a guy in a suit in others and much different looking, the size of the thing jumps around constantly throughout the film. They even had a dog wear an alien suit at one point during effects testing but it freaked out when they put the alien head on it so it was abandoned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7aQ8f7oyw

Duggy747

This official trailer from last year shows that something really fecked up along development:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWwyDrcywyE

COYVB

SirLemonhead wrote: »

Eh no - maybe I just care less about "ooh shiny shiny" than some people

You're saying the graphics aren't bad on one hand, then saying you don't care if they're bad on the other. Which is it?

Personally graphics don't matter a damn for me, game play is king, but this game looks genuinely awful

That doesn't make it any worse as a game though, it's merely an observation on its aesthetics

The fact that it's an awful game makes it an awful game

BlitzKrieg

krudler wrote: »

Well in the movies it was hinted at that the xenomorphs would inherit some genetic characteristics from whatever creature hosted them. Thats why the aliens in the first two movies are more humanoid compared to the one in Alien 3, as that bursts out of a dog (in the theatrical version, in the workprint/extended version its an ox the chestbuster emerges from). They moved from a guy in a suit to a animatronic puppet on rods for a lot of the shots in Alien 3, its a continuity nightmare in that regard as it looks dog like and spindly legged in some scenes and clearly a guy in a suit in others and much different looking, the size of the thing jumps around constantly throughout the film. They even had a dog wear an alien suit at one point during effects testing but it freaked out when they put the alien head on it so it was abandoned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7aQ8f7oyw

You must have been so excited to deliver a nugget of trivia right?

BizzyC

The switch by Sega to timegate is making sense now.

Playing Borderlands, it's hard to see how gearbox would mess up an FPS this badly.

Gbear

Saw this on another site:

Chairman Meow

Retr0gamer wrote: »

The WiiU version is being handled by a different team and it doesn't explain why these details were left out of the PC version.

Apparently the Wii U version has now been 'postponed indefinitely' a.k.a ****canned.

This is genuinely one of the worst games ive played in years. Gearbox should be ashamed of this crap. Even worse how theyre trying to throw timegate under the bus saying 'i-i-t was them! w-w-we jsut did the multi!', when theres reports coming out now that Gearbox totally ****ed up Timegate by firing some of their best employees/diverting funds to Blunderlands 2/forcing constant reqrites of the game on TG so they can rewrite the awesome story to be more 'Canon' etc

um7y1h83ge06nx

Chairman Meow wrote: »

Apparently the Wii U version has now been 'postponed indefinitely' a.k.a ****canned.

This is genuinely one of the worst games ive played in years. Gearbox should be ashamed of this crap. Even worse how theyre trying to throw timegate under the bus saying 'i-i-t was them! w-w-we jsut did the multi!', when theres reports coming out now that Gearbox totally ****ed up Timegate by firing some of their best employees/diverting funds to Blunderlands 2/forcing constant reqrites of the game on TG so they can rewrite the awesome story to be more 'Canon' etc

Yeah, Gearbox look extremely bad here. Sega must be furious with them. A lot of publishers will now be more wary when dealing with them.

Gbear

Dunno has this been posted yet but it's a comparison of the graphics between the Demo and the final product:

http://www.videogamer.com/videos/aliens_colonial_marines_what_the_hell_happened_to_aliens_colonial_marines_2.html

The differences are stark.

ShadowHearth

The review i was waiting for lol!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGX2WE4QUw8

Mickeroo

So this has turned out to be pants then? I've been waiting for this game for the better part of a decade

BizzyC

I'm inclined to believe that timegate messed it up.
The demo by gearbox looks so much better than the release by timegate.

Now that doesn't admonish gearbox, someone was managing the project, made the decision to outsource to timegate and allowed the them to produce something well below par. Whoever that was should be sacked.

Retr0gamer

BizzyC wrote: »

I'm inclined to believe that timegate messed it up.
The demo by gearbox looks so much better than the release by timegate.

Now that doesn't admonish gearbox, someone was managing the project, made the decision to outsource to timegate and allowed the them to produce something well below par. Whoever that was should be sacked.

If they outsourced to TimeGate why didn't Gearbox give them their assets that were already completed. I'm pretty sure that they just used a target render for the trailer.

Also I just read the twist in the story. Whoever thought that was a good idea should be nuked from orbit.