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/