13 replies to this topic

[Uncle Ben]

http://www.ign.com/a...olonial-marines

SEGA and Gearbox have been sued over "False Advertisements" due to "differences from demo to actual gameplay" citing that some parts of the game that was shown apart of demos never made it into the game

[ILOVEVHS]

Really? Dude, things are guaranteed to change when devolving a game.

[Uncle Ben]

No kidding.

[RedAuthar]

Does that mean we can sue Capcom over Mega Man Legends 3? How about ABC for Cancelling SatAM?

[ILOVEVHS]

No. False advertising laws only work to an extent.

[furrykef]

It's not quite as black and white as "games change during the development process; get over it". Game developers know that what they show off at trade shows will be factored into a consumer's purchasing decision, and so they must be at least a bona fide attempt at conveying what the game is actually like. For example, one of the complaints was that the AI appears smarter in the trade show demo. (I don't know anything about the game or the demos, so I'm making wild guesses that may not have much to do with reality; this is an example.) Now, there could be multiple reasons for this. One could be that the AI was indeed smarter but they made it dumber later in the development process, possibly on purpose because it ran too slow or something. I'd consider that legit. But another possibility is that there wasn't any real AI at all and they faked it by preprogramming the AI to behave a certain way that makes perfect sense if the human player cooperates and acts a certain way, but makes no sense at all if the player does something different. In this case, the developer's idea of "actual gameplay footage" and the consumer's would be rather different, and that's cheating.

Or another way to cheat would be to present "actual gameplay footage" of the game running at 10 FPS (to get better graphics and whatnot than would be possible on a contemporary machine), then playing it back at 60 FPS. It's actual gameplay footage in the sense that it was produced by simply playing the game, but it won't match the final product.

This Penny Arcade strip illustrates the sort of thing I'm getting at here.

Now, whether there actually was any chicanery going on or not, I can't say. I'm just saying that, yeah, there is such a thing.

[Prime]

Oklay, let me clear up what this is all about, since I have been following the developement of this game since I first heard about it... Back in 2007.

SEGA gets itself the videogame license to the Aliens franchise and hire Gearbox Software to develop a game for them. For the next few years, little bits of news about the game get released but nothing major. At one point the game was cancelled. We didn't know why at the time but it's been "revealed" that Gearbox was using the money SEGA was giving them to develop Aliens: Colonial Marines and putting it into other games as well as cutting the number of staff working on it and lying to SEGA about it's continued development. When SEGA found out, they cancelled it. Maybe they should have kept it that way, but they decided to give Gearbox another chance.

Around 2011, we start getting our first proper look at the game and nearly everyone who saw the 2011 E3 demo were really impressed with it, especially when Randy fuckin' Pitchford was boasting about the "advanced" enemy AI, the visuals, the this and that. Then around 2012 we start seeing more trailers with game play footage which boasted "In Game Footage" which looked really impressive. A lot of people were pretty pumped for the game.

And then the game FINALLY dropped.

And it was a bag of wank.

What we got was an insanely broken, unfinished game that people waited for the best part of 6 to 7 years and looked terribly dated, like it was a 360 and PS3 launch title. It was like they had this game actually finished when it was first announced and they kept it locked away for 6 years.

Wanna know why it took so long? Because Gearbox kept requesting SEGA to postpone it's release day, mainly so they could work on other games, like their Borderland series while STILL collecting paychecks from SEGA for this game. They put very little work into the game itself and then eventually handed it over to another studio so they could complete it. Funny how during the development and all the press and promotion, this other studio, TimeGate was not even mentioned, as far as we all knew, this was solely a Gearbox game. And then it turns out another TWO studios were brought in to finish the game, bringing the total to FOUR studios, yet Gearbox still made no mention of these others guys.

Hey, remember that 2011 E3 demo I mentioned? Yeah, well pretty much 90% of what was in that video didn't even make it to the final game. The location did, that was about it and even then a chunk of that was changed. It's been said that Gearbox just decided to cut out huge chunks of what was planned, even stuff that had been finished for the game. It's been said there was a mission which took place on Fury161 (the setting of Alien3) which never made it to the game, as well as a bunch of other stuff.

As as for the 2012 demos? Well they looked stunning with dramtic lighting, shadows, character animation and so forth. Finished game? Forget all that shit. It's only PC gamers who are at least getting a game which looks like the demos and trailers and not because that's how it was released, but because people are modding it to look better. Console players are out of luck there.

What Gearbox did was hand over everything they had done for the game (6 YEARS worth) to Timegate Studios and then Timegate had to rework it all, and what they were given wasn't a lot. Gearbox planned to get the game back from Timegate and do a little touch up work. The funny thing? Timegate isn't exactly a major studio which skilled programmers and when Gearbox got the game back, it was broken as all shit. They tried getting SEGA to postpone the game AGAIN but SEGA had finally had enough of Gearbox's constant requests to push it back and so they had like 6 months to take what they had and turn it into a somewhat playable game, and in that six months, they cut so much stuff from the game.

We were promised so much from Randy rapist glasses Pitchford.

And what we got was a pile of shit that looked NOTHING like we had been shown, or had been promised.

So yeah, considering what we were all promised and we didn't get what was advertised, I'm not surprised it's come to this.

[Uncle Ben]

So Prime you're saying its more GearBox's fault than Sega's?

[furrykef]

*adds Gearbox to the list of game developers he should never work for*

[Uncle Ben]

*adds Gearbox to the list of game developers he should never work for*

I wouldnt count them out. Look at how successful Boarderland and Boarderlands 2 are

[furrykef]

I'm not going to risk getting involved in over-the-top drama in the speculative hope that I might get to work on the game of the year -- especially considering that working on the game of the year probably doesn't pay very much more than working on some random project nobody cares about.

[Uncle Ben]

I would try to find a small company and work your way up.

[Prime]

So Prime you're saying its more GearBox's fault than Sega's?

More or less, yes I am. The reason the Boarderlands games are so well received for being great games is because Gearbox put all their time and effort into making those games when they were contracted to make a game for SEGA. A huge chunk of the development money SEGA was giving them to go towards Aliens: Colonial Marines went into the two Boarderlands games as well as other projects. It's pretty much the video game equivalent to Canon Films when they made Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. Warner Bros. gave Canon Films $39million to make Superman IV with, Canon took $22million of it and put it into other movies they were making and made Superman IV with the $17million left over.

While SEGA deserves some of the blame for A:CM, like not keeping a better eye over Gearbox, it was mostly Gearbox who fucked this game up.

[Uncle Ben]

Makes sense, explains why Borderlands and Borderlands 2 were so throughly deveopled