How Aliens: Colonial Marines Fell Apart

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http://officialfan.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=offtopic&action=display&thread=465495

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Aliens: Colonial Marines is a bad game, by most accounts. Reviewers
have almost all trashed it, fans don't seem to like it, and the final
product looks nothing like the impressive demo that developer Gearbox
showed last year.

So how did it happen? Although the full picture isn't quite clear yet,
over the past few days we've heard that the six-year development
process for Aliens: Colonial Marines was tumultuous and divisive, a
product of multiple studios with conflicting visions. And it shows in
the resulting game.

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.

This comes on the heels of a massive Reddit post that's been making
the rounds today from someone claiming to work at Gearbox. Although we
can't confirm that the Reddit post is credible, everything we've heard
from our source matches up.

The Redditor said TimeGate left the single-player campaign in "a
pretty horrid state," and that last September after Borderlands 2
shipped, Gearbox was unhappy with what TimeGate had left them. Sega
was already upset with Gearbox for asking for multiple extensions
since the project launched in 2006, so Gearbox had to buckle down and
release a game they knew wasn't going to be very good, the Redditor
said.

The post on Reddit matches what our source has told us, but there's
more. When TimeGate took over the project, our source said, they threw
out most of what Gearbox had done beforehand. All of the art and
design that Gearbox had produced during the previous four years was
gone.

So from 2010 until late last year, while Gearbox was working on
Borderlands 2 (internally codenamed "Willow 2"), TimeGate handled the
bulk of development on Aliens. A small team at Gearbox helped out with
multiplayer work, as explained by both our source and the Redditor,
but TimeGate built the single-player campaign.

In late 2012, when Gearbox saw what TimeGate had done, most of their
developers weren't interested in taking the game back, our source
said. Gearbox's team was upset that their work had been thrown out,
and they didn't want this to be a repeat of Duke Nukem Forever, a game
that took over a decade to develop until it was finally finished by
Gearbox and released in mid-2011 to tepid response.

But Gearbox had to finish the game, and according to our source, they
had to throw out much of TimeGate's work and start from scratch. This
lines up with what the Redditor claims:



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Campaign didn't make much sense, the boss fights weren't implemented,
PS3 was way over memory, etcetcetc. GBX was pretty unhappy with TG's
work, and some of Campaign maps were just completely redesigned from
scratch. There were some last minute feature requests, most notably
female marines, and the general consensus among GBX devs was that
there was no way this game was going to be good by ship. There just
wasn't enough time.

Considering that SEGA was pretty close to taking legal action against
GBX, asking for an extension wasn't an option, and so Pecan crash-
landed through certification and shipping. Features that were planned
were oversimplified, or shoved in (a good example of this are
challenges, which are in an incredibly illogical order). Issues that
didn't cause 100% blockers were generally ignored, with the exception
of absolutely horrible problems. This isn't because GBX didn't care,
mind you. At a certain point, they couldn't risk changing ANYTHING
that might cause them to fail certification or break some other
system. And so, the product you see is what you get.



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People at Gearbox knew the bad reviews were coming, our source said.
They knew that the game wasn't good.

We've reached out to Gearbox, but they would not comment on the
record. However, in a recent interview with IGN, Gearbox head Randy
Pitchford said that TimeGate handled development "probably about 20 or
25 percent of the total time," and that "if you take preproduction out
of it, their effort's probably equivalent to ours. Now, it's not fair
to take preproduction out of it, but that says a lot about how much
horsepower those guys put into it."

Pitchford's statements also seem to match up with what we've heard.

We reached out to TimeGate this afternoon, but they have yet to get
back to us. We'll continue to update as we hear more.

http://kotaku.com/5984068/how-aliens-colonial-marines-fell-apart