An Open Heart Felt Letter To Anyone That Tries To Defend Aliens: Colonial Marines
Aliens has finally been released and hot off the heels of the drama I mentioned earlier we now are able to see a larger image of the overall devastation this game is releasing to the public. The general population has spoken, the reviews have been posted, and while a few “ game designers” have decided to defend the work or give it score of an outlandishly high nature, the rest of the choir has in perfect harmony stated,
“THIS GAME SUCKS”
I don’t care if you are a game designer, gamer, usability professional, journalist, or just occasionally purveyor of games you will in some way find at least ONE quantifiable game ruining bug that breaks the experience for you. Whether it be the blurry UI, the pathetic AI of the Xeno-morphs that have this weird tendency to just run towards you, or the fact that everything past the first two minutes looks like a sloppy mess that is now directly connected to at least 4 different high end game studios (one of which is GearBox which has burned us all in the past with the Duke Nukem fiasco). There is no way this “game” can be called a game.
I can’t even believe half the crap I’m seeing on twitter today. We have excellent game designers , creative directors, and other various professionals accusing people of giving poor scores to products based on the fact that they played the game only once and it looked ” alright“. If these people had really played the game themselves then they would have seen issues that no real game professional would ever ignore. These are bugs that any child can recognize and it shows a level of laziness I have a really hard time believing exists within the industry.
Today just to prove a point, I watched someone online play this game and I tweeted out each issue I saw or the player asked questions about. I was eventually twitter jailed about halfway through the game. In the video I heard the player say ” Why is the water not moving?”, “Why is the radar attached to a button while everyone else has it out automatically?”, “Why did I just QTE to place an enemy head humping alien safely back on the ground?”, and I personally believe I heard the leader (in game) ask someone to find him a Rhino ( the animal) when dealing with a serious medical emergency. We have bad bugs, poor game play, terrible narrative, blurry UI, and some of the worst cut scenes I have seen in ages.
Guys, I have got to ask…. what is going on?
This is not the time to try and defend something, this is 2013′s Duke Nukem we are facing right now. Instead of giving more people reason to believe certain sites are somehow being paid off for good reviews we should be asking how in high hell any of these companies thought this was a good “game” that should be sold to be public. I feel as if no testing had taken place on this “game”, that no one bothered to put in their best effort, and that somewhere in the mess of all this garbage we have seen the birth of a poison. A poison that could very well harm the reputation and professional future of every single developer involved with this “hot mess”.
It’s irresponsible dumping of half finished games like this that destroy game companies every year, It’s inappropriate titles like Aliens: Colonial Marines that make people every day question the intelligence of everyone that works in a AAA studio. It’s games like this that explicitly point out that the game industry needs to enact some form of refund policy that is similar to what exists in other countries or else our own government will be forced to do it for us, and to me personally it highlights a point that has been mulling around in my mind lately.
The game industry needs to focus less on scams
and more on quality games
In the next year we will see a lot of really bad games being made as everyone focuses on their new consoles, The dlc start dates, and the obsession with making a billion dollars. We will see developers fall as each new device is announced, cringe over how the new vita hardly has any good games on it, and continually wonder if Used games are going to be silently murdered in the middle of the night. It is a sea of garbage that most gamers cant afford, are barely interested in, and most analysts even state that the consoles are only being released because their creators think “its time”. It isn’t time, and it probably could never be “time”. People are happy with the graphical quality of current games, and the insane costs with higher specs is severely limiting the amount of resources and time it takes to make high quality games. If game companies don’t start paying attention to what they are doing then a whole bunch of games like Aliens will be the only things on the market, and the whole system will just collapse around itself again.
Again, I really hope I’m not seeing any of the studios I just mentioned laid off in the coming months, I don’t want to see good people laid off because guys at the top think the games were safe to sell.
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Where did you get this screenshot? Sorry, the game looks a billion times better on my PS3, I haven't seen any graphics this poor yet, so I'm having trouble falling in line with all the hate.
lmao, i'm sorry but you used off-screen camera phone pictures for this article; i can't take you seriously since you can't even provide legitimate in game screens.
Publishing an "article" (airqiuotes obligatory) with screenshots taken from a camera phone "shows a level of laziness I have a really hard time believing exists within the industry".
Puns aside, I'm sorry to have to break this to you, mate, but liking a game you don't like (and seem to have a rather obvious vendetta against, looking at your previous articles) is not the end of the world.
You'll live. I guarantee that.
Pedantically meandering. Lacking insight. Poorly written. Deceptive screenshot.
What a terrible article. Are you an idiot?
1) The first game image in your article is clearly not from the final game.
2) “Why is the radar attached to a button while everyone else has it out automatically?” – Because you cannot hold a motion tracker and shoot at the same time Not really that complicated.
3) You cannot believe you heard the leader (in game) ask someone to find him a Rhino? Well, DUH! The squads in the game are named Rhino 2-2 and Rhino 2-3, as you didn't seem to know this, did you even play a substantial part of the full game or have the audio on?
it does not appear you are familiar with the game yet decided to write a headline grabbing "heartfelt letter."
Your lack of familiarity with the game shows a level of laziness I have a really hard time believing exists within the velocitygamer.com organization. Good day sir!
After reading your article I’m a little let down this was even allowed to be published on here. I’d expect a little more professionalism from Velocity.
Have you actually even played the game or are you just going off of stuff you hard on the internet. The game isn’t as bad many say. Some people are just expecting to much. It does have it’s problems but it’s still a fun game to play.
Also Duke Nukem did have problems but that wasn’t Gearbox’s fault. That took over the game from 3D Realms who had already been working on the game for 14 yrs. Gearbox did what they could without rebuilding the while game.
Cry some more, you little bitch. And maybe play it on hardware that isn't a decade old.
Or maybe shut your fucking mouth, do your job and stop livetweeting everything instead of looking at the goddamn screen.
Call yourself a journalist? Yeah, right. Looking forward to seeing you defend Modern Warfare 26 next month.
Yeah I agree with a few comments here and was thinking the same thing before reading the comments, where did you get this picture and do you ever set your graphics settings all the way up? Do you have the latest video card drivers in a clean install and do you have a brand new video card or a garbage video card? Because that is what it looks like. Also maybe you have an ATI Radeon video card instead of an Nvidia, some on the game's forum mentioned they had ATI Radeon themselves and couldn't have what the game was made for. Also did you go into the nvidia control panel to make it look better with 32x CSAA anti-aliasing and FXAA? Ooooh maybe you don't have 32x CSAA because your video card is horrible, thus your game will look bad too and you will write a review from it, based upon your own ignorance and denial.
I'm not all about graphics, I do like gameplay as well, a "high quality game" doesn't mean just graphics when you say we are happy with graphical games today, high quality can also mean good gameplay as well. Sorry that you came along when graphics was your only reason for gaming. Although I do like graphics as well but it can't be without good game play. And I like this game, not only that but had you considered that like with all game releases, and an early one at that such as 1.0, that they might just bring out patches? Maybe the DLC or other patches will have the game content added from the demo, who knows?
Be patient and wait for a patch, some of us were around in the AvP 1, 1999 game and know all about game play with or without graphics. Even games before that, and many games have always come out early, and then become gold versions such as some on the nintendo 64, zelda anyone?
Also Aliens vs Predator 1 had a gold version too… Now that I think about it, and so yeah, you can expect anything, and I do believe aliens: colonial marines is still fun to play, even AvP1 from 1999 was faster gameplay but extreme and fun, although people would say the graphics looks bad today, it didn't back then and the game play was really fun.
I have an Nvidia EVGA Geforce GTX 670 FTW Edition worth 409 dollars and I think the game looks incredible, it looks nothing like as bad as your screenshots at all, that looks kind of blury too in some ways, I have yet to see anything this bad in the game and when you change the look of the xenomorph under vs, it looks extreme like directx 11.1 with super shaders, this game also uses the Unreal Engine and I am sure it is the latest version, if you download the udk.com version, you will see the UDK has some pretty darn good graphics with a super video card, even before this one with a generic geforce 210 I had before, the udk looked really graphical even if the frame rates were lower from the video card's performance, now I don't have those issues on my new video card. Have you seen the game Hawken? That is another example of the udk, it uses the Unreal Engine, so if you think this game's graphics are bad, then you must think hawken's fully maxed out is bad too right? Don't believe me about aliens: colonial marines being the Unreal Engine? Then why did it install Unreal Engine files on the games install and why does it have baseengine.ini and other files in the game folder under config the subfolder? And since it uses such an engine, I really doubt it looks that bad, maybe you should stop using the old nintendo to play your new games on.
Nice Try though…
Also check udk.com and the game hawken for the graphics using the unreal engine if you don't believe me, if you think they are bad in graphics, something is very wrong with you. But go into the aleins:colonial marines folder to find unreal engine files. And then wonder about yourself and your video card/pc
I’m guessing you all work for gearbox. the graphics are the worst I have seen in a decade although I suppose you couldn’t tell the difference on a ps3, worst game I have ever played
I know right? This game is awful graphics remind me of 007 on n64