If you’re still playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, you may be excited to hear its latest 4GB patch is now available for download. Fixes include myriad visual tweaks, repaired audio glitches and basically just a really, really long list of things that tackle faults the game was released at retail with built-in.
I guess if you’ve hung in there this long this’ll be right up your street, but for the rest of us it’s just another sad example of a world in which products are released unfinished to try the patience of devoted fans too quick to part with their money. “Too quick?”, you might balk. “Such cynicism”. Look what happened. Right here. Look at this exact article. The game was released unfinished a month ago after five years of development.
The full list of updates is presented below for the sake of the masochistic:
General
- Improved texture resolution.
- Various visual improvements.
- Added mouse smoothing to options menu.
- Fixed crashes tied to launch and motion tracker.
- Added additional safeguards to better protect save data.
- Resolved an issue where a player’s level could sometimes appear incorrect when backing out of a party.
- Addressed several scenarios under which players could spawn without a weapon.
- Changes to better prevent audio from sometimes cutting out during end of mission cinematics.
- Fixed issue where Xeno death animation was not properly calculating momentum of the killing blow.
- Smart Gun animation now properly tracks targets.
- Addressed some instances where Xenos would display erratic animations.
- Increased light radius for player’s shoulder lamp.
- Adjusted aim assist to better reflect player input.
- Addressed an issue that could sometimes cause co-op player revival to not work under certain circumstances.
- Addressed issues with players not spawning into a level properly.
- Fixed a marine player invincibility exploit.
- Resolved several instances where players could walk or fall outside of maps.
- Addressed an issue where Ripley’s Flamethrower (bonus content) would sometimes fire continuously without player input.
- Fixed an issue that could cause localized text to sometimes display incorrectly.
- Addressed an issue where weapon ammunition was not always highlighted properly.
- General user interface improvements.
- Miscellaneous bug fixes.
Campaign
- Tweaked enemy and friendly AI to be more aggressive and responsive.
- Modified campaign difficulty to account for improved AI responsiveness.
- Improved enemy collision detection regarding doors and Power Loader.
- Addressed some issues that could cause improper warping for co-op players.
- Various tweaks to address instances where NPC characters would not always properly navigate to objectives.
- Players will no longer bleed out immediately when downed in a Power Loader.
Versus
- Fixed issues that could cause clients to report inaccurate results and statistics.
- Addressed instances where a map would appear to “pop in” when loading into a new match.
- New Xeno appearance customization added.
- Multiplayer teams should now correctly auto-balance between rounds.
- Increased duration of Lurker Pounce Challenge “Cat-Like Reflexes” from 10 to 20 seconds.
- Fixed issue where certain multiplayer challenges would not unlock properly for all characters.
- Crusher pick-ups now correctly appear as highlighted for clients.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is available now, as is the actual movie Aliens, which you might want to just watch instead while running around your home with a spud gun held directly in front of your eyes.
