Aliens: Colonial Marines gets DX10 graphics from savvy modder

Guys, lighten up!
Yes, the game is not great to play and hard on the eyes. But remember, they were working on Borderlands 2 at the same time. They were probably over tasked and had to pick one game to throw their time into, and let the other just go.
Demanding that they ditch the staff and start over is overkill. And frankly, us gamers are becoming the most idiotic, self obsessed group I've ever seen.
What happened to the good old days of you buy a game and play it for what it's worth, and just be happy with it! We demand perfection, and go ravenous when we don't get what we want. And demand blood when we get burned.

Nowadays, preordering games is a total gamble. And in the end, you willingly shelled out $60. They did NOT steal from you.

You guys are downright out of the loop on this stuff. It's easy...FAR easier, to mod a game that's come out, than it is while developing it. As a modder, you don't have to worry about the publisher, deadlines, performance, 20 superiors telling you what to do, etc. In the end you do what you have to do, to hit the deadline. Fact is, the work that Timegate did was great. You all saw the early gameplay demos from E3 last year, or Destination Playstation. That was mostly all Timegate. Once Gearbox took the game back, then had to squeeze all of the work down to function on every platform. Most of the incredible lighting that Timegate did, the higher res textures and shaders - all went out the window. The game used a custom deferred lighting engine that used a ton of memory. That gave the levels their great look. but that had to get culled in the end for performance. The art then suffered when those lighting effects were pulled back. Ever see Doom 3 in really bright rooms? Doesn't look so hot, either.

In a twisted way, this might have turned out as good as it possible could have.  How so? (you may ask).  Well, Borderlands 2 turned out to be a huge, ambitious game that was bigger than even the first hugely ambitious Borderlands.... some were theorizing that all the time spent on B2 was why this game was so bare-boned.  Perhaps they knew they didn't have enough hours in the day for whatever deadlines were imposed on them.... so instead of throwing out 2 mediocre games they decided to have one masterpiece and pretty much use a mulligan on the other.  

I'm not saying this is good by any means, I'm just thinking out loud. 

Sigh, this is the sort of thing that should've been in the box in the first place. i'll knock off another point from it's score.

hahahaha!! i pre ordered this!! fact its a load of sh#te, we were lied to by a respected developer, they want shutting down for this. i dont care if they made a decent game, they knew what was riding on this and they had it for years. 

This sounds incredibly suspicious.

Why is it that certain devs are able to create such incredible games with incredible graphics, but when a certain franchise comes along, they fail so spectacularly hard as to score a 4.5 *despite* there being freelancers who can drastically improve a game's graphics in just a few days and a few hundred KB?  Single-handedly doing what a team of trained professionals apparently can't?

Is there some *reason* the devs couldn't do this *simple* tweak themselves?

If not, is there some *reason* these developers can't just hire these people who can?

Time constraints?  I don't think so.  Budget constraints?  Not likely.

I thought Gearbox was at least a decent dev. Wtf did they do to ACM

This is kind of pathetic.

I actually give my regards to the modders, but whoever these devs are need to GTFO with ALL of their current employees and start BRAND SPANKING NEW. To have people pull a Project M on your game in less than 2 weeks of your game being released...wtf type of crap did you smoke while making this? I don't even have the game, yet I can get a good feel of just how bad of a fail this is.

Look at Skyrim. Skyrim out of the box is impressive in some ways and straight down ugly and dumb in other things, mainly due to the consoles limitation I know but still... It's a great game as a standalone but makes you feel "what if it could do this?Or that?" too many times due to its potential.

With mods that improve on what already exists and actually introduce new mechanics and content the game simply becomes a BEAST. Nothing like I ever seen before and each day come new mods, it's insane. My Skyrim now is a visually feast for the eyes which feels and plays like an epic movie through and through, for every limitation I find I go search for a mod that fixes that.

Although they can easily break your game due to poor instalation, it's really worth the trouble of learning how to do it correctly (not simple if you have many mods that require compatibility).

Modders and indie devs know what gamers want because they are true gamers themselves.

Although the gaming industry is a high risk business, I understand why many want to play safe and just make the big bucks. Either taking advantage of a known license or copy pasting other games with another name for their own game. Sometimes this is needed in order for the industry itself can grow because money is a "must" to make the world go around.

On the other hand they slowly degrade gaming quality by over saturating gamers with the same crap all the time. This is where true gamer devs and modders come in, introducing that breath of fresh air most games and genres need. 

If money is not an issue to you, I highly advise donating them some for their efforts as guys like this truly deserve it.

It's always modders and indie devs man... They're the only ones these days who get it right...

You can only polish a turd so much.

here is a adress of a review thats probably done by stoners http://www.egmnow.com/articles/reviews/egm-review-aliens-colonial-marines/

You know I told my friend that, given time, modders can save this game. Not just with bringing the graphics to 2013 but also the gamplay mechanics themselves, like new escape maps, a proper horde mode, AI re formats, etc. Hell if they can manage to put player controlled aliens in the campaign along with the dumb AI ones that could lead to some of the fear that was sourly missing in it. Still that will take time, and time is not what this game has.

i wanted to get this but now i dont i mean you can go through the game without killing any aliens (by running to far ahead) and its not as good looking as the e3 demo

MSI afterburner is telling me the game is still running in DX9 mode. Plus it doesn't look any different. 

Yes, all the file have been copied and replaced the original ones. Is there anything else you're supposed to do?

Oh wow, nice of a modder to add a major improvement in less than 5 minutes versus a dev who had more than 5 years to finish this game!!! 

(They finally fixed the comments? YAY!)

With that out of the way I can say that although I congratulate the modder for doing this, it won't save ACM from sudden death unfortunately.

Sounds like the modders have started doing more work on A:CM than gearbox did.

well done for the modding communitty trying to  make this very medicore game alittle better cause to be hosent i thought gearbox might do something great with this because of BL2 never thought that bl2 would actually hold it back

The sad part is, this game actually does have potential to be good. If they ironed out the glitches, graphics, and storytelling a bit more it would of been a good game at least. I've been playing through it and I've had SOME fun with the campaign, but it's forgettable at best. 

I tried out this mod and I noticed a leap in graphics, but at the end of the day it's still nothing special.

Now all we need is an AI Mod.

One guy improved graphics in just 4 days!! and a whole studio cant do it?? this just shows the state the industry is in and its a joke. The game still sucks anyway.

What is happening in that picture? why is the soldier touching the alien monster? isn't the alien's blood acid? the other soldier will kill the alien AND his fellow soldier because of the acid!

Didn't take long for mods to be made. 

Now if we can just get these mod's for the consoles...