Gearbox Software fights a losing battle against the bugs in Aliens: Colonial Marines

By Anthony John Agnello March 8, 2013

Aliens-Colonial-Marines — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Part of the problem with Aliens: Colonial Marines is that, in addition to having some serious, fundamental flaws at a conceptual level, the product that actually released for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 is simply broken on a technical level. It is, pardon the pun, riddled with bugs. Spotty artificial intelligence, broken path finding, and terrible net code are just a few of the problems that players have taken to the Internet to complain about in the two weeks since Gearbox Software and Sega foisted their horrifying sequel on an unsuspecting public. It is a losing battle, and arguably a lost cause, but at least Gearbox and Sega are trying to fix the game.

Gearbox released a new Xbox 360 patch for Aliens: Colonial Marines that aims to repair some of the issues that plague the game. In the story mode, the biggest fix is repairing some of the non-player characters path finding abilities, keeping them from wandering off towards the wrong goal or spawning in the wrong places during certain story sections.

Other fixes to both the multiplayer and single-player games show just how broken Colonial Marines was when it shipped in February. One fix was built to repair “issues where multiplayer/co-op clients could see interactive objects displayed in different states.” This problem isn’t marked as “rare” in the patch notes either, meaning that two people playing the game online would regularly each see different parts of the environment.

PC and PlayStation 3 Aliens players will have to wait for this patch. Gearbox didn’t give an estimated release date for either platform.

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Sci-Fi

Anthony John Agnello

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…

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