Aliens: Colonial Marines Update Sept. 2 2011

Just a few observations from all the recent media I have seen. Please bare in mind though that the game does have an iterative design process, and its very possible that anything they have talked about recently could end up not making it into the game when it ships next year.

All this has been confirmed by gearbox Staff or By the media.


Encounter Types
- Survival Horror - These slower paced sections will be much closer to the original film, in that players will often find themselves separated from their squad, hunted and alone with limited armaments. They are allegedly tense affairs in which a single alien can be a threat.

- Last Stand - These are scripted set-piece encounters which require players to setup sentry guns and weld shut entry points and then defend against a horde of xenomorphs as they swarm in from every conceivable direction.

- Gauntlet Run - These are heavily scripted get from point A to B affairs that force the players to run for their lives through a gauntlet of xenos.

- Close Encounters - The CE’s are similar to Quick-Time Events, they are tightly scripted events that appear during the course of the game and play out from the players first person perspective.


Gameplay Features / Mechanics
- HUD can be switched off
- Recharging health
- Acid blood temporarily obscures view, rather than melting flesh
- Dynamic alien A.I. (Random spawns, creates diversions, use vents to move around, self survivability)
- Real-time dynamic lighting
- Character customisation
- Weapon customisation (Add sights, scopes, alt. ammo types, shotguns, GL's.)
- Customisable loadouts (Equip different weapons and equipment.)
- Earn experience points
- Unlock perks
- Hacking mini-game
- Coop difficulty scaling dependent on # of players and difficulty setting
- Partially destructible environments. (Doors buckling, Acid decals etc.)
- Aim Down the Sights - “The game will ship with sights if the weapon calls for it.” - zafford20
- Crouching - “We did demonstrate crouching in the e3 demo.” - zafford20
- Sprinting - “Sprinting was demonstrated in the e3 demo.” - zafford20


Armaments
- Armat M41A Pulse Rifle & PN 30mm underslung grenade launcher
- M56A2 Smart Gun & Self-aiming stabilised mount harness
- M240A1 Flamethrower
- H&K VP70 Pistol (Seen in old media)
- M4A3 Pistol - From the ACMTM - Standard USCM sidearm (Seen in OPM screen)
- Semi-auto Shotgun (Looks like a Benelli M4)
- UA 571-C Remote Sentry Weapons System
More variations on weapons not talked about yet, including pulse rifle variants. Also, more than likely, I am guessing a few from the Aliens Colonial Marines Technical manual.


Equipment
- M3 Armor & M10 Ballistic Helmet
- Halogen Shoulder Lamp
- Miniature Hand Welder
- Motion Tracker (Can be used offhand with a pistol and can be heard beeping when off screen.)
- Hacking Kit
Brian Martel said ACM would introduce new gadgets into the Aliens universe.


Vehicles
- M577 Armoured Personnel Carrier ‘APC’ – Possibility to drive and man weapons systems, including: rocket pod, hood mounted 20mm gatling cannons and rail mounted 20mW boyars PARS 150 phased plasma cannon.
- UD-4L 'Cheyenne' Utility Dropship
- Caterpillar P-5000 Power Loader (Possibly drivable)
- Daihotai Tractor (Making an appearance, but unknown if its drivable)


Locations
- U.S.S Sulaco (Conestoga class)
- Remains of Hadley’s Hope
- Surface / Sub-terrain of LV-426 (Possibly colony mines?)
- Derelict Alien Space Craft

Characters
- Winter (Player Character - Silent protagonist)
- Rook – Synthetic (Lance Henriksen)
- Cmdr. T. Shannon (William Hope)
- Sgt. Cruz - Marine with the prosthetic leg
- Sgt. O'Neal (Bryan Massey)
- Bella (Farah White)
- Reid
- Monday
- Weirzbowski (Josh Ridgway)
- Gen. Pryz (Gene Pyrz)
- Cpt. McLofflenn (Bill Huggins)
- Private Rashaad


Alien Types Confirmed
- Queen
- Face Hugger
- Warrior (Ridged Cameron Design - Hive mentality)
- Crusher (Mutated from radiation - Head is impervious to standard gunfire)

Hinted at
- Scout (Smooth domed head Giger design - Said to be the most sneaky alien that stalks alone) Originally talked about in 2008 Game Informer preview, but still hinted at in many of the recent E3 and Gamescon interviews.

- Queen’s Guard (Hinted at in VG247 article that interviews Brian Martel at Gamescon.)

Quote:
”Then there’s the idea of the hive. Who is guarding the queen, what else is inside the hive – you’ve gotta have that sort of thing in your game or else it’ll be repetitive.”

- Dog “like” Alien (Hinted at by Brian Cozzens in the PSM magazine article.)

- Drone - With special egg carrying carapace (Hinted at in the old 2008 Game Informer preview.) On the Aliens Quadrilogy, the Drone is described as a smaller Albino worker / hive builder caste that Cameron cut from his initial film script.


Story (Possible Spoilers)

The story actually picks up a few months before the game proper begins, right after the events of Alien 3, when W-Y discover the Sulaco drifting in orbit around Fiorina ‘Fury’ 161, just after Ripley’s sacrifice. They find eggs or evidence of eggs on-board, likely from the same batch as the ones that mysteriously appeared at the start of Alien 3.

In search of the source, W-Y heads straight to LV-426 with the Sulaco in toe. What happens next isn’t clear, but from what I gather, its that W-Y setup some kind of research operation down on LV-426’s surface (possibly to study the Derelict). It looks like that process somehow leads them to repopulating the diminished xenomorph ranks.

Jumping forward 11 months, we play as the 17 day Colonial Marine rescue team eluded to in the second film, sent to investigate the whereabouts of U.S.S Sulaco. In the OPM interview, Randy mentions something about the rescue team being diverted or interrupted, implying some W-Y subterfuge as the cause. Due to this, our ship the U.S.S Sephora, arrives late on the scene at LV-426, and discovers that somebody blew up the Atmosphere Processor station and also find the seemingly abandoned Sulaco drifting in orbit. As we see in the Teaser trailer, they remotely access the ships logs and quickly determine that the ships crew is missing and that there are unregistered life forms on board.

They receive new orders through to investigate and board the vessel. From the E3 Demo Previews we know that they are met with a xenomorph infestation. At some point during or after the Op, something goes horribly wrong and our marines end up crashing down onto the moons surface.

Once down on the surface, they see the remains of the Hadley’s Hope colony, which has only been partially destroyed due to the explosion being a sub-surface detonation that sent most of the blast energy up vertically like a funnel. It seems that Bishops calculations were off, or something occurred that he couldn’t anticipate. (Due to Randy’s post on throwing doubt onto Bishop's reliability as an android, I can only assume that this will be answered in more detail in the game.)

Anyway, Winter <(player character) blacks-out during the crash and wakes-up on the surface of LV-426, near to the Colony. He and a bunch of fellow marines fight there way through the ruined colony and crashed Sulaco, fighting the newly reinforced xeno numbers until finally the Queen makes an appearance.

And that’s about as much as they have told us. Accept for the fact that we do go to the Derelict in Act 3.


Additional Campaign Plot Points

- The campaign will be split up into self contained missions with an overarching plot. The first three acts will take us, in order.. to 1. the Sulaco, then 2. the surface of LV-426 and remains of Hadley’s Hope, and then 3. onto the Derelict. Where or IF we go anywhere else from there, GBX haven’t talked about yet.

- A whole battalion of marines is sent to LV-426 this time. Most of them will be cannon fodder, but we can keep some of them alive for extra firepower.

- There will be recurring NPC characters that we will be able to form bonds with, similar to those in the movie.

- Exploration of the Space Jockey mystery re-confirmed.

- Many of the characters from the movie will be referenced in various ways. For example, the aftermath of Vasquez and Gorman’s grenade, where Hudson got taken to, and the fate of Burke. They wont be magically resurrected from death though.

- Gearbox have taken the opportunity to attempt to fix some of the plot holes in the movies, like where the eggs came from at the start of Alien 3.

Aliens Colonial marines is developed by Gearbox Software and Published by Sega.

Due for release in Spring 2012!!!!