Back atcha Mr Morton
in the same fashion of course

_________________
SSgt Kris "Bloodsucker" Kobus, VAS.
A09/TQ2.0.12136E1

I probably can't say too much about it without seeming to bad-mouth the parties involved, as well as refusing to because I rather liked AvP... but our earlier A:CM threads are full of the news about cancellation and rumours around it, during which AvP suddenly appeared.
Rumours are that Rebellion had better tech at the time and could do more in 6 weeks that Gearbox had in 6 months. Cue new, faster-turnout contract, put the older one on hold to avoid release conflicts.
Fast forward a year or two, resurrect old contract, add new demands, new specs, require newer tech and there ya go.

Notice how both are SEGA games... Notice how different games from different studios both seem kinda rushed and like someone higher up kept changing their minds, or making impossible demands.
Not everyone fully understands what it takes to make a decent game, even publishers - Watch the 35 minute credits on the Assassin's Creed series and see just how many people it takes to make a top shelf game like that!!

Problem is anything to do with contracts is strictly speculation since the people who are in a position to know exactly what the contracts stipulated and what happened with them would be easy to identify if they spilled the beans and could probably have legal action taken against them due to the confidential nature of contracts. What you said seems like it could be plausible, but nothing when it comes to A:CM really seems to make any sense. Cue James "Video Game Nerd" Rolf saying "What were they thinking?!"

I swear if I won a mega lottery jackpot, I'd snatch up the license from Sega and make a real game worthy of the IP's name.

Then go by what was officially announced:
A:CM was put on hold. It might have been officially cancelled, but I'd have to check the threads.
AvP contract was then awarded and the game was produced.
A:CM was then put back into action.

That much is definite and at least a contributing factor, along with the obvious fact that Gearbox would have had to re-do everything to meet all the newer tech and specs that had become available since the original project.

Well spoken!

_________________
Chaplain Sgt Hohenkerk,
Executive officer - 69th Regt. 1st Batt. Homer’s Heroes

Does not help,
Does not clean,
Will have sex with anything!

If you guys don't want to engage in a discussion where somebody talks about the flaws of the game, that's cool. It seems like to me though it threatens some people's world view or something.

Not at all just your repeating yourself, also we get it your pissed, unless you build a time machine the facts wont change and there is nothing you can do apart from build a bridge

_________________
SSgt Kris "Bloodsucker" Kobus, VAS.
A09/TQ2.0.12136E1

In my opinion points have been made and discussed for a while now, just feels like we are going over the same things

_________________
Chaplain Sgt Hohenkerk,
Executive officer - 69th Regt. 1st Batt. Homer’s Heroes

Does not help,
Does not clean,
Will have sex with anything!

If it doesn't threaten your world view then why do you have an issue with me discussing it? I do not keep repeating the same things and I like to think I articulate my points rather well. If you tire of them then don't read or respond to them. Somebody made a comment expressing an opinion on an issue. I responded to it expressing my viewpoint. It's a discussion forum. You discuss things on them.

Sorry must be my mistake as I was sure you used a similar home owner/buyer analogy before, ergo repeating yourself.

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SSgt Kris "Bloodsucker" Kobus, VAS.
A09/TQ2.0.12136E1

Yes I used the analogy on here before. It's not like I copy and pasted the post though. It's an analogy that works well to convey an idea about the situation though. Am I supposed to use it once and lock it away in a vault never to be used again?

If you don't like my posts and feel using the same analogy twice in a huge thread is so detrimental, don't read and respond to my posts. If you disagree with my assessment feel free to articulate your opinion/viewpoint/position instead of just pointing out I used the same analogy more than once and making snide remarks.

Not snide mate but you keep on bashing and making allegations if it makes you feel better

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SSgt Kris "Bloodsucker" Kobus, VAS.
A09/TQ2.0.12136E1

Again, if you want to engage me in an actual discussion, feel free to do so. If you have a problem with my posts, feel free to ignore them and go on with life.

bored now, have a good day

_________________
SSgt Kris "Bloodsucker" Kobus, VAS.
A09/TQ2.0.12136E1

Barring the lack of quality control, yes. Go back in the mists of time, at the beginning of this thread. The A:CM then was focused on co-op gameplay, working within a squad, securing areas, setting up bulkheads and chokepoints. Anyway, this is going to be a long one. Gearbox and A:CM, a history

April 2005 Work on Borderlands began with a simple concept: "Halo meets Diablo." Gearbox had finished the PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved three years prior and wanted to combine that sort of intense first-person action with "a game that had loot coming out of every orifice," as Neumann put it.

October 2005 Work on Borderlands ramped up , with the team increasing in size to fashion a prototype. Once that was green-lit a year later, development began in earnest in order to fashion a demo for the 2007 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany. Then work really got under way, with demos at E3 2008 and Leipzig 2008 and a pre-alpha build.
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/behind-bord ... ge-6253257

Dec 11, 2006 Sega announced they had purchased the electronic rights to the Alien franchise from 20th Century Fox.
Dec 15, 2006 Gearbox Software and Sega announced that they were working on a completely new game based on the franchise

Feb 2008 - Aliens:CM gets a cover and feature in Game Informer
http://kotaku.com/356321/new-aliens-red ... christened

Sept 23, 2008 Brothers in Arms - Hell’s Highway (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) Released

Oct 2008 Gearbox knew it had a problem (with Borderlands). Internal reviews by the "Gearbox Truth Team"--a group of testers with psychology backgrounds--concluded that people found that the game's art style was too similar to that of the then freshly minted hit Fallout 3. The game was also drawing comparisons to another postapocalyptic game from id Software. "We didn't want to be considered a poor man's Rage," said Martel.

With 2K on board, Martel said that Gearbox had a collective "Oh s***!" moment when they realized they now had to finish overhauling Borderlands in a very short amount of time. However, the enthusiasm for the new direction was so great internally that people working on other projects were clamoring to help out on Borderlands during their spare time. Martel said he also teamed together a comic book artist with Gearbox's lead character designer, resulting in the game's stylized but not overly cartoonish character models.
http://uk.gamespot.com/news/behind-bord ... ge-6253257

Nov 24th 2008 - 25 staff made redundant at Gearbox, Statement made that Aliens:CM is still in production (http://www.develop-online.net/news/3086 ... ee-layoffs)

Jan 2009 - A:CM due in 6 months (http://kotaku.com/5125946/aliens-coloni ... efore-july)
Previews still very much of the squad-based game, 6 chapters, each with a different marine, cover mechanic (http://www.gamesradar.com/aliens-colonial-marines-10/)

Oct 20, 2009 Borderlands released - PlayStation 3 & Xbox 360

Oct 26th 2009 - Obsidian’s Aliens RPG is cancelled

(http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/obsid ... 1100-1492/)

From what I hear from several sources is that this was when A:CM - the Brothers in Arms style squad based game died

Feb 2010 - Gearbox say A:CM is back to being top priority after Borderlands surprise success (http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/aliens-c ... resurfaces)

April 2011 - Timegate hiring for concept artists (environments) for A:CM
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90728

June 2011 - Gearbox tweat that A:CM will ship spring 2012 (http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/content/view/649/33/)
Teaser trailer appears - http://youtu.be/8cFMMQie5RU

July 2011 - Footage and screenshots appear from the vertical slice demo http://youtu.be/-EOlzCrVFvs

Oct 2011 - Job postings for TimeGate for level designers for A:CM http://www.gamerzines.com/xbox/news-xbo ... egate.html

May 2012 - Suspense trailer released, this shows single player footage as it is in the final release. A:CM is pushed back to February 2013 http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/content/view/876/33/

And breathe



Never said cancelled early in development. First showing in Game Informer is after 1 year of development, and still looking like happening in January 2009 when we last saw it in it's squad based form. Now, something happened in 2009. Sega was losing money hard http://www.edge-online.com/news/sega-sa ... -net-loss/ . I theorise Sega saw the sales figures of Brothers in Arms and felt that A:CM was going to do the same. Meanwhile, the whole industry is getting green-eyed at the numbers Call of Duty many iterations are doing.



You know when quality control happens in game production? When the game is complete. I don't mean finished. I mean complete, as in playable all the way through, all features in place, gameplay working as intended? It is only at that point that you can actually sit down and dial in the gameplay experience, get it just right. Do you know how hard it is to get to this point if game design changes continue to come in, new feature requests because some marketeer has seen something another game is doing and thinks it is a must-have feature? Batman: Arkham City was content complete a whole year before release, and Rockstready still crunched through the last few months to get that done. Game production is not a mechanical process, it is an art and it is people. You are dealing with mechanics that have a feel, very hard to dial in, and every change can upset that. When you want to bring in Wey-Yu soldiers so your game has more of a Call of Duty feel, then that upsets the balance of the game, you are back trying to make it all work, all the time a deadline is approaching, and wait, now we need to add female Marines for multiplayer, right, time to work out what we need to lose in the environments to make them fit into memory.

Very hard to paint neat lines on a moving target.



Now, I'm not going to argue against the point that A:CM is bad. It's a 2 star game, rising to a 3 with the patches. But you seem intent that this is all Gearbox's fault. It isn't. A:CM is the result of a developer and a publisher working against each other. I believe Pitchford fought to resurrect A:CM when it was cancelled/put on hold. He had already had to lay off staff a year earlier, and Borderlands was on the cusp of being released, an unknown quantity. Gearbox needed money to survive, and the A:CM contract was a means to that end.

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A11/TQ1.0.32150E1 Murphy, J - Covert recording headcam. There is no flashing red light when you are on Kona-Cam
Weyland-Yutani: Their projects are intentionally full of bugs. Avoid!

Damn Kona, if better documentation of the timeline exists for A:CM I'd be surprised. Well done

_________________

http://www.tentaclechris.com

I don't mean to argue semantics, but you said the game was canceled in 2009. Considering the game's development started in 2006 and released in early 2013, I'd say that's early to mid way through development for the game since it wasn't at the half way mark yet.

Anyway, if this article is to believed (they claim to be in contact with a Gearbox employee), Gearbox is reprehensible and their business practices are outright fraudulent . If what this article says is true, they are chiefly responsible for the utterly amateur product packaged and sold as A:CM.

http://www.destructoid.com/developer-gearbox-lied-to-sega-2k-over-colonial-marines-245986.phtml

However that article does corroborate what you said about the game being canceled.

Sega does share a lot of blame because they were responsible for giving Gearbox direction and had a responsibility to make sure their money wasn't being misappropriated and mismanaged. They should have had better people in charge of oversight and development. It'll be a hard lesson for them, as well as Gearbox. If that article is to believed, they were naive for not suing Gearbox for fraud when they found out what was really happening.

And quality control is a process that should happen throughout production. It's part of oversight. You don't want to have to start over from scratch to fix stuff that could have easily been fixed during production.

I appreciate you piecing the timeline together.

I believe you are assuming game production is a linear progression, where the reality is a much more wibbly wobble, timey whimey thing.

The game A:CM was to be was killed, when the new gameplay direction was started, the game A:CM was to be ceased to exist. So what I said is true, from a certain point of view. The engine would have been switched at this point, so all assets would have to be re-done. It is effectively starting from scratch.

I'll stop playing sandwich in the geek quote now.

I wouldn't be quick to paint Sega as an innocent party in this, or competent in many respects (this is a publisher that can't get it's flagship mascot's games right in recent years). I know from conversations with a studio head who has worked with them on several projects how meddling, penny-pinching and sometime batshit insane they can be to work with. I can theorise a situation where Sega has been pushing against the original design of A:CM, being late or quibbling on milestone payments. In that situation, I can imagine Gearbox being more inclined to shift resources to the project which is being shown support by the publisher. Unless the whistleblower in that article has the information from legal, the directors etc, then they don't know what the full story is. Suffice to say, I don't expect Sega and Gearbox to work together again any time soon.

And with Gearbox, prior Borderlands success they were only really a solid developer, not outstanding, not setting the charts alight. Borderlands success may have lead becoming over-confident in knowing what makes a good game. Whilst Duke Nukem wasn't their game, it did tarnish that reputation, but they were quick to defend it, again bolstered by the success of Borderlands 2. A time of smelling their own farts, maybe.

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A11/TQ1.0.32150E1 Murphy, J - Covert recording headcam. There is no flashing red light when you are on Kona-Cam
Weyland-Yutani: Their projects are intentionally full of bugs. Avoid!

You've articulated your point several times already.


NOOOOOOOO - Every time you do it, you earn +50 beer points!!!

I can't figure out if this is hyperbole, rhetoric or just opinion, but whatever it is, it is a glorious attempt at it

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A Scot, a Predator and an Alien walk into a bar....hilarity ensues



Read it here!

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6120506/1/Aliens-Heart-of-Darkness

I actually do hate to keep bashing the game but you're calling me on this, so I'll just posit this question. How many other big name titles by a big name publisher/developer have had such a backlash from the userbase and critics? Can you show me one? Probably not hence my comment. It is anything but opinion/rhetoric/hyperbole. It's reality.

The only game that I can think of that you can try and liken to this kind of backlash is Mass Effect 3 because of the ending. The game itself was good and most people will admit to that, mostly complaining about the ridiculous ending after the time/emotional investment many fans made into the series. There have been a few disappointing big name titles out there, but I've never seen the sheer amount of negativity from players and critics alike as I have with Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Anyway, you can love the game all you want, and that's fine if you do, but you're in denial if you can't see the reality of the situation. Even Randy Pitchford has said there's going to be an "investigation" (whatever that means) into how the game turned out the way it did.

People have been posting like this for almost two months now, forcing you to flagellate yourself in the name of truth and correct opinion. Feel for ya, bro.

I'm serious though: being able to maintain negativity like this for so long (and not just letting it pass) shows you have incredible emotional strength. I would have had to turn my back on the whole thing or it would've eaten me up.

To keep the repetitive aspect of the conversation going for you, I'll mention "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial", "Sonic the Hedgehog" for Xbox 360, and SimCity (2013).

I'm so disappointed that I'm completely serious that if I ever won a massive jackpot (fantasy land I know), I'd purchase the license to and fund development of a real Aliens game that I have control of. I don't mean I'd pull an amateur George Lucas and screw everything up. I'd hire professional writers, modelers, etc, but with my oversight, when something is stupid and makes no sense, I'd make sure it got made right and the final product would be amazing. I wouldn't be trying to retcon and shoehorn in crap. It'd be a fresh and mapped out/logical story in the Aliens universe with one hell of a single player/co-op campaign that would be worth the price of admission.

We all know the game flopped. It's a bit better with the patches...I think we are all comfy with those two facts.

I am not one one second claiming I love the game, that it was great or that it was the game people it expected it to be - it clearly wasn't. However, I'm constantly entertained by this view that it was the worst game ever - also, clearly not.
It was just a sub-par game that was made slightly better by a patch and DLC. Nothing to write home about, either positively or negatively.

_________________
A Scot, a Predator and an Alien walk into a bar....hilarity ensues



Read it here!

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6120506/1/Aliens-Heart-of-Darkness