Aliens Colonial Marines Dumb AI Could Have Been down to a Typo!?

It’s no secret that when Aliens: Colonial Marines released in 2013, it was a disaster.  Not only did it get passed around between multiple development studios, it also suffered multiple release date delays that would last years, lawsuits were filed for being a misleading product, the list could go on.  In terms of the game itself, one of the many aspects that were poor from a gameplay perspective was the dumb AI of the Xenomorphs.  These ‘should-be’ terrifying aliens would wonder aimlessly, jitter all over the place; get stuck in loops and more.  It really was a joke to say the least.

However, five years on, a modder might have solved the AI problem and it seems that it would have all be resolved if a typo was noticed before the game was released.  Thanks to the modder jamesdickinson963, he had posted on ModDB revealing that a line of code hidden within the games files may be the seed to the AI problem that has plagued Aliens: Colonial Marines since 2013, as investigated by JigglesBunny on resetera.

In the line of code, all that was apparently needed was the ‘a’ removed from ‘Teather’ and the Xenomorph AI would have improved quite drastically.  In the line of code, the word ‘tether’ is used twice, one being correctly spelt and the other incorrectly.  The line of code used in the initial release of Aliens: Colonial Marines reads:

ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather

So with these findings, Austin Wood of PCGamer decided to look into the coding problem himself and after correcting the typo, he confirmed the issue to be true and posted some small clips highlighting the Xenomorph AI in their original state and also with the typo corrected within the line of code, as seen below.  The top clips being clips with the typo and the bottom clips being the corrections:

 

After the typo was corrected, the Xenomorph AI is by no means perfect, but they clearly appear to be more aggressive, manoeuvre more realistically and they track the player far better than before.  This typo error really is the latest in the long-line of blunders associated with Aliens: Colonial Marines, even after all these years and it will be interesting to see if someone at Gearbox Software corrects this issue with a patch.

Will you be giving Aliens: Colonial Marines a second chance if you correct this typo on PC or in the unlikely event that the developers fix it with a patch across all formats?  Let us know across our social media channels.