Yeah, I would sometimes play online, and I really wanted to get more into it, but it always had horrible lag, sometimes totally unplayable. On a LAN it would be amazing.
Aliens: Colonial Marines Due Q1 2009
- Thread starter Dark Pulse
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Yeah, I would sometimes play online, and I really wanted to get more into it, but it always had horrible lag, sometimes totally unplayable. On a LAN it would be amazing.
Sorry, I didn't know you guys outsourced the MP. Things make a lot more sence now.
Thinking again about the new AVP, I think you guys won't stand a chance anyway. You have got to beat the really good memories from a lot of people, which is kind of the hardest thing to do in your industry.
AvP2 was a completely different game to AvP1 in my opinion.
The first game had free-roaming AI that could attack at any moment and hunt you wherever you hid, and was basically a series of interconnected skirmishes with very little narrative thread (in fact according to legend Fox Interactive only gave the order to throw in something that would pass for a story when the game was close to completion, after the success of Half-Life - hence its tacked-on nature). It was usually very frightening and unrelentingly hardcore.
Also, like you said, the dismemberment mechanism was fantastic.
I felt that the second game owed more to Half-Life than to AvP1. Gone was the relatively freeform gameplay and sheer terror it brought, instead we had a very tightly-scripted, story-based game. It was actually a decent story, but for the most part I felt the game had been dumbed down.
It also bought an end to the specialisation - in the first game every race had very clear sets of advantages and disadvantages, but the second game blurred these lines by adding a pounce feature for the xenos and a sniper rifle for the humans (among other things). Add a heavy dose of powerful aimbot weapons and the one-touch-kill flamethrower, and the resultant gameplay balance was pretty dreadful.
[With all that said, I still thought AvP2 was a decent, entertaining game at the end of the day, and particularly liked the considerable improvements made to the Predator experience.]
Personally I've always felt that if this decade's shooters had followed AvP1's conventions of replayability, free-roaming AI and solid gameplay, rather than Half-Life's convention of interactive cinematic, the genre would be in a much healthier state today. Prey, Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal 2 and many other quality titles have failed to fulfill their potential because they've opted for the latter route.
On topic though, since Left 4 Dead came out I've been wishing that the zombies were aliens. If Colonial Marines can make good on the co-op premise then I'll be an instant fan.
Anyone played the AJL mod for AvP2? It makes great strides in making the game far more movie-faithful. The two human sides have four classes, and only one class (the leader) has the motion tracker, which cannot be used when firing a weapon and whose "ping" sound can be heard in 3D, so you're enemies can hear it. The alien's "night" vision is revamped to not suck. If you don't believe me, play the map Massacre for AvP1 with all lights already destroyed, and the aliens will do considerably worse than either humans or preds because of their crappy alternate vision. The smartgun physically tracks (like it did in AvP1) and will only automatically track humans and uncloaked predators; aliens and cloaked preds must be moving for the smartgun to pick them up. There are three different plasmacasters modeled after the three kinds seen in the movies, there's a shuriken modeled after the one you see in the AvP movie, different predator vision mode sweeps modeled after the different ones you see in the movies, and loads of other goodies. The alien's acid is also very deadly to humans; point-blank with a shotgun will kill an unarmored human, and the alien gets the kill for deaths caused by his acid.
One of the biggest problems I had with AvP2 (and one AJL had trouble trying to fix) was that the Lithtech engine has such crappy netcode. AvP1 had its own problems, of course; a high ping was actually desirable and there were programs created to artificially increase your ping. The textures looked a little too cartoony (fixed by many skin mods) and Harris' eyes always seem to be looking in opposite directions. I really hope they don't screw this game up. Not the least because I'm a big fan of the series, but because it would be nice to have a gritty, realistic sci-fi action/horror game. The last two AvP movies (along with Resurrection) have done much to kill the chances of any decent movie coming out for the franchise, so our last bastions of hope lie in games and novels. I hope the devs spent time reading the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual, as there's gobs of stuff contained thereine that could be put to use in the game, from equipment to tactics. The book is also a great source for more "realistic" look at how space combat might work in the future, with ACTUAL BVR COMBAT taken into consideration, though it doesn't present any new aerospace vehicles, like fighters, bombers (the UD-4 Cheyanne is a transport with secondary attack capabilities) or space equivalents to destroyers and cruisers. Remember, the USCM is mainly geared with fighting other humans and sometimes hostile wildlife (not the same kind as the Xenomorph, of course), so their equipment reflects that. Heck, I think it would have been cool if the game started you fighting another human force, not unlike the small-scale "peacekeeping" operations our military does today, before running into the aliens.
If this were an AvP game, a great introduction for the Predators would be that they "seeded" the planet with a few aliens eggs so that they could come back later to hunt the resulting aliens, oblivious to the fact that humans had decided to make that planet a battlefield of their own. I haven't been following the development too closesly for fear of getting myself overhyped about it (which seems to have been a moot point since so little information has been released), so I don't know anything about the story in Colonial Marines. Perhaps an expansion, if the game does successfully enough to warrant one, will introduce Predators, but I'm actually looking forward to some human versus human action that I found so fun in AvP2.
In case anyone was wondering, here's some links to the AJL mod, plus his site.
http://aliensvspredator2.filefront.com/file/AJL_Modification;41508
http://aliensvspredator2.filefront.com/file/AJL_Modification_Patch;44548
http://www.ajlforums.com/
One of the biggest problems I had with AvP2 (and one AJL had trouble trying to fix) was that the Lithtech engine has such crappy netcode. AvP1 had its own problems, of course; a high ping was actually desirable and there were programs created to artificially increase your ping. The textures looked a little too cartoony (fixed by many skin mods) and Harris' eyes always seem to be looking in opposite directions. I really hope they don't screw this game up. Not the least because I'm a big fan of the series, but because it would be nice to have a gritty, realistic sci-fi action/horror game. The last two AvP movies (along with Resurrection) have done much to kill the chances of any decent movie coming out for the franchise, so our last bastions of hope lie in games and novels. I hope the devs spent time reading the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical Manual, as there's gobs of stuff contained thereine that could be put to use in the game, from equipment to tactics. The book is also a great source for more "realistic" look at how space combat might work in the future, with ACTUAL BVR COMBAT taken into consideration, though it doesn't present any new aerospace vehicles, like fighters, bombers (the UD-4 Cheyanne is a transport with secondary attack capabilities) or space equivalents to destroyers and cruisers. Remember, the USCM is mainly geared with fighting other humans and sometimes hostile wildlife (not the same kind as the Xenomorph, of course), so their equipment reflects that. Heck, I think it would have been cool if the game started you fighting another human force, not unlike the small-scale "peacekeeping" operations our military does today, before running into the aliens.
If this were an AvP game, a great introduction for the Predators would be that they "seeded" the planet with a few aliens eggs so that they could come back later to hunt the resulting aliens, oblivious to the fact that humans had decided to make that planet a battlefield of their own. I haven't been following the development too closesly for fear of getting myself overhyped about it (which seems to have been a moot point since so little information has been released), so I don't know anything about the story in Colonial Marines. Perhaps an expansion, if the game does successfully enough to warrant one, will introduce Predators, but I'm actually looking forward to some human versus human action that I found so fun in AvP2.
In case anyone was wondering, here's some links to the AJL mod, plus his site.
http://aliensvspredator2.filefront.com/file/AJL_Modification;41508
http://aliensvspredator2.filefront.com/file/AJL_Modification_Patch;44548
http://www.ajlforums.com/
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@siryawnalot: Huh, never knew that about AVP1 as I never played it. I went straight to AVP2 well after the game was released.
Yeah, Yawn's got a point. AvP2 was more of a half-life style experience, and while I certainly enjoyed the greatly improved predator experience in it, the marine and alien games were toned down considerably.
AvP1 was doom on crack. You get dropped in a level, you know there's an exit and probably some switches you have to flip to get there. Start hoofing it. Oh yeah, the monsters now spawn infinitely and can come from anywhere, and tend to kill you in two hits.
The game was hard, but it was tons of fun, and really felt like the movies. Of course, given that lots of the levels were based on locations in the movies, that helped a ton too. And the AI was like nothing else -- the basic gist was that the AIs were all initially spawned as bodiless entities that had the goal of navigating to the player, and would move along all the ducts and passages trying to find it. Once they got within a certain distance, they spawned physical bodies/models and went into attack mode. Facehugger eggs would be intentionally placed by level design, but alien warriors would just roam the level looking for the player, it made each level different every time you played it.
The really, really depressing thing is that it can't be played anymore. It just doesn't render on newer video drivers (at least NVidia ones), all you get is a black screen, the hud, and light coronas, and everything leaves a permanent afterimage when you move your view.
AvP1 was doom on crack. You get dropped in a level, you know there's an exit and probably some switches you have to flip to get there. Start hoofing it. Oh yeah, the monsters now spawn infinitely and can come from anywhere, and tend to kill you in two hits.
The game was hard, but it was tons of fun, and really felt like the movies. Of course, given that lots of the levels were based on locations in the movies, that helped a ton too. And the AI was like nothing else -- the basic gist was that the AIs were all initially spawned as bodiless entities that had the goal of navigating to the player, and would move along all the ducts and passages trying to find it. Once they got within a certain distance, they spawned physical bodies/models and went into attack mode. Facehugger eggs would be intentionally placed by level design, but alien warriors would just roam the level looking for the player, it made each level different every time you played it.
The really, really depressing thing is that it can't be played anymore. It just doesn't render on newer video drivers (at least NVidia ones), all you get is a black screen, the hud, and light coronas, and everything leaves a permanent afterimage when you move your view.
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