In an effort to get to the bottom of what went wrong in Colonial Marines, Kotaku reached out to various unnamed industry sources and what they found out was quite surprising. While things from an outside perspective seemed to be fine before the release of Aliens: Colonial marines there was quite a different picture being painted on the other side of the canvas.
TimeGate was supposedly working on the game on a higher end PC. Sources claim that they were given the go ahead to try and make the best looking game possible. In the meantime script writers were trying to hammer down the details and finalize the events that would take place in the game. However, when push came to shove the project became a disaster.
We were told many times through demo production, ‘Don’t worry about performance, just make it awesome. There was a reason [the demos] were never playable.
Release time was nearing and they had a good looking game that simply could not run on consoles. Entire scenarios were cut out and the script seemed to have been botched together. Furthermore, Gearbox themselves were supposedly hesitant to ask for an extension to a game that they were given 6 years to develop. As a result, Gearbox had to rush and redo textures, shaders, and design choices.
[Gearbox made] big changes to lighting, texture and shader complexity. Design elements were altered or redone entirely. It looks like a lot of [TimeGate’s] assets remained intact, with the exception of lower-res textures and faster-performing shaders.
Now this isn’t to say that consoles were completely responsible for the graphics. It is more likely that the team did not have the proper amount of time to make a decent version for consoles. Most of us can attest to better looking games on both the Xbox360 and PS3 than Aliens: Colonial Marines. What we have here is a situation that seems like more of a mad dash to strip the game just to get it running on the other platforms with less of a regard to how it was accomplished and how this affected the look of the game.
This is also where we are all in for a bit of a shock. Timegate layoffs started to roll out and one source claimed that the game took 9 months to scrap together.
The game feels like it was made in nine months, and that’s because it was.
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I blame the casuals and consoles. Fuck this could’ve been an awesome game. Ooh well, whats done is done.
Well, there is a difference between quickly scrapping content and taking the time to try and optimize certain effects for each platform. I think with the proper amount of time Gearbox could have made the game look similar to the demos on all platforms. So, I think the real culprit is time management combined with all of the communication and development headaches that ensued between Gearbox and Timegate.
That’s bull. If that was the problem, sega would have pushed the game back a year and released it for the ps4 and next xbox.
If they absolutely wanted to make the best looking game ever and also have it run on this gen of consoles, the team that was making the damn thing would have also made it modular, meaning, whole parts of the level would be missing (visually) and the graphics scaling would be there. We’re talking about a game that took ages to make so all this was possible.
Instead you get… well this… lol