Aliens: Colonial Marines demo vs. final build

shagg_187 said:
Demo was a deception. It should be a common knowledge by now and this proves it. Gearbox fucked up.

Gearbox's ghostin' us, motherfucker. I don't care who they are back in the Borderlands world, they give us a deception like this one more time, I'll bleed them, real quiet. Leave them here. Got that?!
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predmackawesome.gif
 
Wow, after watching the video it's night and day.

The final build has ZERO atmosphere, the lighting is all but gone if not screwed up, and 90% of the "special effects" are nonexistent!

Derp
 
It's going to be interesting to read the post-mortem on this gremlin, if it ever comes out. Or if it's even possible, given the different hands it seems to have passed through over the years.
 
The Mana Legend said:
Why would Sega sue Gearbox? Because they were douches and tried to blame others for the game's failure?
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Sega let development go for over 5 years. In that time Bungie was able to release Halo 3, ODST, Reach, and they are about to show Destiny, while Gearbox ended putting focus toward their own Borderlands series. Sega had banked on this game being a success and should have layed the framework for Alien games coming next generation.
 
Terbinator said:
I don't understand, why did it regress so much?
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This would be assuming the game ever looked like the demo to begin with. I imagine it was just a small section put together by the team and made to look as good as possible, not unheard of but generally the final product does come close to the target.
 
Haunted said:
what the FUCK

The only reasons I can think of to dial down effects like that are

1) if they're broken and you can't get them to work properly or
2) to raise the framerate in a last ditch effort when you have a deadline looming

Seems they had to do this to reach playable framerates for the console versions? And the PC version suffered with it.

what a goddamn mess
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What's interesting is that Duke Forever also had many of the very same performance issues and quirks on consoles as well (right down to 100% tearing on 360 and lower resolutions). I mean, it made sense with Duke being shoehorned onto consoles from a messy PC code base, but the fact that they ran into the very same problems again is surprising.

What's particularly insulting is that even the demo footage doesn't seem particularly out of reach for the consoles. We've seen better on the consoles as it is. The final game runs dreadfully slow yet looks worse than just about every other recent FPS across all platforms. It's really quite ugly.

Natural Select 2 is better than all those games and it was made by like 8 people...friggen pathetic.
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Whoa now, whether you like Dead Space 3 or not you can't deny that it is a well made game. It's technically proficient, looks and runs very well on all platforms, and features fantastic animation and scripting work. It may not be what you want but that doesn't mean it isn't a solid game.
 
From a guy that loves the Alien movies. And was hoping to play a really great cutting edge Aliens game in 2013. This depresses the hell out of me.

I bet SEGA is really pissed off a gearbox now that the review scores are out. I just hope there was a legal clause that gearbox have triggered.

I also hope that gearbox don't get any other port work. Fuck them guys. They had 5 years to craft a fantastic Aliens game. What the hell have they been doing.
 
I'd love to hear from Pitchford on this situation. I mean, he allowed this to be shipped and directly presented bullshit footage to the public. I wonder at which point it became clear that the final product was going to be terrible? I just can't imagine why he would allow this to tarnish Gearbox further. Bad move.
 
From talking to developers using UE3 near the end of this generation, I'd guess that gearbox just collided with RAM limitations. Animation rigging like the original demo takes a fair amount of RAM. That lighting model is incredibly memory-hungry. And I've heard since last year that they couldn't get the alien AI working correctly, in that they didn't know how to get the aliens to navigate the environment believably. I can comprehend how this all happened, but the thing that pisses me off is that they basically have covered it up until we got review code. Every hands-on demo has been a multiplayer demo. Every screenshot has been a total fabrication. If it seemed like lots of reviewers were being more surreptitiously forthcoming than usual about the quality of a non-specified title last week, well. We don't like being conned, and we don't like being a party to something this gross.
 
This is the absolute worst example of developers going out of there way to suck up to the media in order to get positive articles. This sort of consumer deception really can't be tolerated.

Randy Pitchford should be ashamed of himself.
 
They were never going to hit their release date based on what the demo showed, so they had to start cutting many many corners.
 
antitrop said:
Making two Borderlands games, instead.

This is just shameful, and even less explicable than Duke Nukem Forever.
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I do wonder at the oversight by Sega. The SEGA team who were tasked to make sure Gearbox delivered should be fired unless they were lied to by the dev team.
 
fastballspecial said:
I haven't tried it yet and just got a new graphics card and a quad core. Worth checking out for sure then?.
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Natural Selection 2 is a freaking fantastic game, though do be aware it is multiplayer only and completely different to pretty much anything else out there.

Still, the community is great and the gameplay is varied and fun. It's pretty much the only game I've found the time to play since it hit a decent performance level towards the end of the beta.
 
antitrop said:
Making two Borderlands games, instead.

This is just shameful, and even less explicable than Duke Nukem Forever.
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See, I actually thought releasing DNF was a cool move even if the quality was sub-par. Having the opportunity to experience that game was an experience I wouldn't want to have missed (seriously). It was completely fascinating and there was a charm to the hilariously outdated gameplay.

As a "vanity" project, if you will, DNF worked out.

This game, however, is just complete rubbish and has none of those charms. Worse, they fucked people over with bullshit footage of a game that doesn't exist.

From talking to developers using UE3 near the end of this generation, I'd guess that gearbox just collided with RAM limitations. Animation rigging like the original demo takes a fair amount of RAM.
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There's nothing going on in that original demo that we haven't seen done better elsewhere.
 
Seriously, such bullshit.

Gearbox should get fucking sued for false advertisement.

Yea I'm pissed lol. I just don't understand how you go from what they had shown for so many years to what we got...

Randy has some splainin' to do.
 
Holy shit...Everyone needs to see this. I can't believe they would do something like this. This isn't right at all. No wonder this game went kinda stealth mode a few weeks before release.
 
aegies said:
Dude can like whatever he wants. I'm not going into other people's reviews or threads to tell them they're wrong for liking them.
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Well sure, but other people usually don't get paid for publishing something that reads like a bad high school book report.
 
dark10x said:
See, I actually thought releasing DNF was a cool move even if the quality was sub-par. Having the opportunity to experience that game was an experience I wouldn't want to have missed (seriously). It was completely fascinating and there was a charm to the hilariously outdated gameplay.

As a "vanity" project, if you will, DNF worked out.

This game, however, is just complete rubbish and has none of those charms. Worse, they fucked people over with bullshit footage of a game that doesn't exist.


There's nothing going on in that original demo that we haven't seen done better elsewhere.
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I didn't say there weren't better developers out there. But when you've got 8 months left to ship and you suddenly realize your animation system and lighting system won't work on consoles, shit happens.

That's the thing though. They were showing the game like this last june.
 
dark10x said:
See, I actually thought releasing DNF was a cool move even if the quality was sub-par. Having the opportunity to experience that game was an experience I wouldn't want to have missed (seriously). It was completely fascinating and there was a charm to the hilariously outdated gameplay.

As a "vanity" project, if you will, DNF worked out.

This game, however, is just complete rubbish and has none of those charms. Worse, they fucked people over with bullshit footage of a game that doesn't exist.


There's nothing going on in that original demo that we haven't seen done better elsewhere.
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I don't hold Gearbox responsible for Duke Nukem Forever sucking complete ass.

This, however, is all their fault.
 
Alienous said:
lyk8f3c.gif
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"Okay, look. What if the finished game didn't even exist, huh? Did you ever think about that? I didn't know! So now, if I went in and made a major issue out of it, everybody steps in. Sega steps in, and there are no exclusive rights for anybody; nobody wins. So I made a decision and it was... wrong. It was a bad call, Gaf, it was a bad call."
 
So is the general consensus that they had to severely gimp the game to get it work on consoles?
 
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