Aliens: Court Marines - "I say we take Sega's money and Nuke the entire IP from orbit..."

[Badnik Mechanic]

He's at it again! Try not to hit your head too hard on the desk at just how bad this guy is.

Eurogamer: In the case of Aliens, you must accept it's not as good as Borderlands. Surely you accept that.

Randy Pitchford: It depends on what criteria you're using to define good. It did not sell as much. It didn't receive nearly the scores. It wasn't even close. Borderlands has sold maybe 15 times as many units. And the scores are very clear. Aliens got destroyed by the critics.

Eurogamer: Did you not feel that was fair?

Randy Pitchford: I probably lost somewhere between maybe $10-$15m on Aliens, whereas I made a ridiculous amount of money on Borderlands.

Eurogamer: I absolutely accept that, and the footage was marked as work in progress and that's fair. What I'm curious about is why did this game change in the way it did?

Randy Pitchford: Which way do you want to talk about? Pick a way it changed. Do you have a specific example of something that changed?

Eurogamer: Yes! If we look at the E3 2011 gameplay demo for Aliens, there were certain graphical effects we didn't see in the launch version.

Randy Pitchford: We need a laptop. We can't do this.

Eurogamer: Oh come on. You must know what I'm talking about.

Randy Pitchford: I can't remember every effect. I can't possibly remember.

Eurogamer: Okay, but the general point is that it didn't look as good when it launched as it did in those videos.

Randy Pitchford: I think that's subjective. There was one demo that was done, there was basically the same environment that was the first map of the game, and they were trying to show, oh look how it changed. It was kind of hilarious because, the first thing was, you're walking down the umbilical chord and then there's a jolt and a shake and you look up and a body of a marine smashes against the glass and the glass shatters and there's blood and then the first-person player falls down and there's blood on the ground and then he pushes his hand off of it and stands up and you can see blood on his hand, and then he readies his gun and moves forward.

And then they showed, like, here's the final version. In the final version, the thing shakes, he looks up, the body hits the glass but it doesn't shatter. There's no shattering effect. And then when he falls there's no blood on the ground and he doesn't do the thing where he looks at the blood on his hand. And that's a scandal. Like, that is a scandal.

It's apparently subjective that the game is bad, look he got an email from someone who said it was good! And it was a work in progress of course!

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-23-an-hour-with-randy-pitchford 

 

Edited July 24, 2015 by Hogfather

[Graystripe2000]

He's at it again! Try not to hit your head too hard on the desk at just how bad this guy is.

It's apparently subjective that the game is bad, look he got an email from someone who said it was good! And it was a work in progress of course!

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-23-an-hour-with-randy-pitchford 

 

He clearly doesn't seem to remember that the game had a SIGNIFICANT GRAPHICAL DOWNGRADE FROM E3.

[Milo]

It's almost as if the PR team got so fed up with his buffalo chips antics they decided to quit the company, and he took their job. And he's doing as great as job on that aspect as well as Donald Trump is.

[Tornado]

Pitchford is doing a better job pointing out that this whole thing is a bit of a joke than the people who keep insisting it to be a legitimate scandal. The issue with what Gearbox did was that they allegedly misappropriated funds that Sega gave them to develop a game towards a game that they (correctly) guessed would be a huge hit. Questions about that are important. Questions about whether they did the bare minimum to meet Sega's contract are important. Questions about whether they actually met Sega's contract with Gearbox are important. Questions about what this no name outsourced developer contributed to the game are important.

 

 

Taking a studio head to task because some game they made looked better at E3 than it did when it actually released is so fucking far away from the hardcore investigative journalism that the Eurogamer interview desperately wants to pass itself off as that he might as well be kissing Pitchford's ass asking about what the next Borderlands DLC will have in it.

[Phos]

Many of his statements only make sense if you pretend like the bulk of the game wasn't made by someone else. This interview also unfortunately doesn't seem to have touched on the aliens' lack of any real AI. Ok, sure, it doesn't make that much sense for a military vessel to have its light knocked loose so easily, but where did the AI go, and what happened to the character moments or the auto turret sequences?

[Graystripe2000]

I was looking through old posts on this thread and noticed no one posted this yet. Last year, SEGA agreed to a tentative settlement in the A:CM lawsuit. http://www.tssznews.com/2014/08/12/sega-reaches-tentative-million-dollar-settlement-in-aliens-cm-case/

[Badnik Mechanic]

The ride never ends!

 

So it turns out you can "fix" the Ai in the game.

And by fix I mean, the aliens still charge at you, but they will now us air vents and the environment to try and flank you as well as greatly vary their attack vectors.

How do you do this?

Do you have to rewrite an entire section of code?

Do you need to install a new Ai module?

 

Nope...

 

There is a spelling mistake in the game code... change 1 letter to fix the Ai in the game.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/aliens-colonial-marines-ai-fixed-by-a-single-letter.55247/

What the fix does, it tells the alien which part of the map it's in, this way if the alien changes location then the alien knows which part of the new location the alien is in and can then attack accordingly.

 

Remember this videos which showed players just running past the aliens, this was the likely cause.

 

Oh Gearbox...

[Graystripe2000]

That’s what happens when you rush a game out the door.

[Badnik Mechanic]

17 minutes ago, Operationgamer17 said:

That’s what happens when you rush a game out the door.

Nah this is... something else.

Not going to guess what tools they used to program the game, but let's use visual studio as a standard, that IDE has some form of intellisense.

That means if you name a variable like "Alien_Ai".

If you then try to type "Alien_Ai" again, the IDE will pop up with what it thinks you're trying to type, the idea is that it saves time on coding.

So looking at this variable name, it means whoever coded this particular line not only got the spelling wrong, but also ignored the IDE's own suggestions and likely also ignored the yellow compiler warnings when it said "There is an unassigned variable" when he saved the work.

It would have been fixed in a second had the programmer paid attention to the error warnings in the IDE he was working in.

 

[Milo]

Reminds me of the Sonic 4: Episode II PC locked resolution bug, which Sonic 4 PR said wasn't possible to resolve due to the image "breaking down"; only for someone to change literally just one line of code to properly fix it. (Although Sega actually bothered to release an official patch that included the fix, unlike Gearbox.)

What a mess.

[Blue Wisp]

How braindead must your coder be to fuck something up this big?

And how braindead must your team be to not fix it up or demand a lookover or something. Don't games have a testing phase? Did nobody ever think of this?

Did they just not care about Colonial Marines in the first place?

[KHCast]

had to post this lol

[Blacklightning]

Honestly surprised it took this long to find a fuckup that simple to be honest.

[shdowhunt60]

I'm just really stunned by Gearbox these days. There was a time where Gearbox had actually really good quality games, I mean they cut their teeth with the amazing Half-Life: Opposing Force, and yeah... Randy Pitchford's name was on those good games.

Seriously Gearbox, what the hell happened to you guys?