Look, we all know how much of a dumpster fire Aliens: Colonial Marines turned out to be. Not only did Gearbox farm out the development to other studios while they focused on Duke Nukem Forever (yes, we know) and Borderlands 2 and pulled a bait-and-switch in the graphics with the E3 2012 demo and the retail version, the AI for the Xenomorphs is egregiously stupid. Well, at least for the last point, we can now fix it thanks to the modding community.
An Australian modder named James Dickinson aka TemplarGFX discovered the bug last year while working on his mod that would give the game a much-needed overhaul. Going through the configuration file for Colonial Marines, Dickinson found a line of code that looks like this:
ClassRemapping=PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachXenoToTether -> PecanGame.PecanSeqAct_AttachPawnToTeather
Because that last ‘tether’ is misspelled, this string doesn’t do anything. As a result, this instruction that’s supposed to let enemies know where they’re supposed to be fighting and how, doesn’t actually do its job. As Dickinson explains on his ModDB page for his project, this can be fixed by simply removing the extra ‘a’ that appears in that line of PecanEngine.ini, which by default you can find in the My DocumentsMy GamesAliens Colonial MarinesPecanGameConfig folder.
Now obviously, this won’t be doable on the console versions of the game, but if by chance the game is up for sale on Halloween (or even sooner), it might be worth it to grab it and get this mod to give us what we all should’ve gotten in the first place.
