I did a quick review of Aliens: Colonial Marines a couple years back to see if it was as bad as people said it was. I didn't thik it was, but it did have some problems. Read more here: https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/posts/1538/aliens-colonial-marines-is-it-really-that-bad
That review wasn't a deep dive, nor was it meant to, but the biggest issue I still had with it was the buggy enemy AI. At least it felt buggy. The Xenomorphs just seemed to run around like morons. The embedded gfycat video above is an example.
Well, jamesdickinson963, a modder working on an unofficial patch for the game, may have found a very simple answer. As it turns out, that seems to be caused by a typo in the game's settings file (PecanEngine.ini). The game shipped with an ini that had the word "tether" misspelled in a crucial line, and it seems that this prevented the enemy AI to change to new patrol locations even if it saw you, so they would keep running in their previous areas trying to find a way to you but couldn't.
Gearbox has released quite a few patches over the years to fix things, including a massive 5gb patch that cleaned up quite a few issues. But oddly, this was never addressed.
Fanatical currently has the game for $2.99 if you want to try it out for yourself.
Here's the original post about this discovery on moddb: https://www.moddb.com/mods/templargfxs-acm-overhaul/news/the-biggest-bug-in-the-game-is-just-one-letter-long
And PC Gamer's coverage: https://www.pcgamer.com/all-this-time-aliens-colonial-marines-stupid-ai-may-have-been-caused-by-a-single-typo/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0
That review wasn't a deep dive, nor was it meant to, but the biggest issue I still had with it was the buggy enemy AI. At least it felt buggy. The Xenomorphs just seemed to run around like morons. The embedded gfycat video above is an example.
Well, jamesdickinson963, a modder working on an unofficial patch for the game, may have found a very simple answer. As it turns out, that seems to be caused by a typo in the game's settings file (PecanEngine.ini). The game shipped with an ini that had the word "tether" misspelled in a crucial line, and it seems that this prevented the enemy AI to change to new patrol locations even if it saw you, so they would keep running in their previous areas trying to find a way to you but couldn't.
Gearbox has released quite a few patches over the years to fix things, including a massive 5gb patch that cleaned up quite a few issues. But oddly, this was never addressed.
Fanatical currently has the game for $2.99 if you want to try it out for yourself.
Here's the original post about this discovery on moddb: https://www.moddb.com/mods/templargfxs-acm-overhaul/news/the-biggest-bug-in-the-game-is-just-one-letter-long
And PC Gamer's coverage: https://www.pcgamer.com/all-this-time-aliens-colonial-marines-stupid-ai-may-have-been-caused-by-a-single-typo/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0
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Whomp, whomp. Sad, but I get why this happened. Mistakes like this get pushed out and seems like no one noticed when they were testing the game. Glad it was found, I wonder if Gearbox will issue a patch to fix it but at least if you know you can tweak it.