When publisher Sega released Aliens: Colonial Marines in February, many gamers wondered what happened to the promising game they saw in previews. The final product looked generic and ugly even set to “Ultra” on a powerful PC.
Today, Sega and developer Gearbox Software are releasing a massive 3.8 GB update for the first-person Xenomorph shooter. The patch directly addresses the visual performance and numerous bugs.
In the video below, you can see a lot of particle effects and better-looking textures. Overall, it looks better than the launch game, but it better after making 4 gigs worth of changes.
Check out Colonial Marines running on PC with the new patch installed:
Here’s the full list of tweaks from Sega:
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 Xenomorph death animation was not properly calculating momentum of the killing blow.
- Smart Gun animation now properly tracks targets.
- Addressed some instances where Xenomorphs 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 A.I. to be more aggressive and responsive.
- Modified campaign difficulty to account for improved A.I. 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.