Anonymous whistle blower claims Gearbox stole from SEGA

no you cannot sue for a crappy game but if you were given money for a project that you spent on another unrelated project and the initial game suffered clearly because of it, and sega should have pulled the plug the first time around when gb was fing around and doing little or nothing on the ip, then you clearly should be allowed to recoup some of your misspent funds, even if they luck out and get a good game out of it and the money was misspent they should sue.

its not just the demo it is everything the pr blitz, the i am a huge aliens fan speech, the blackouts on reviews and so on trying to sell this.

far as the reedit thing getting pulled it was sourced out and "confirmed" to reeedits satisfaction at lest for whats that is worth, and honestly this day and age i somehow trust reedit to vet sources better than the mainstream media which seems to do nothing in that reguard.

believe the guy that posted it was rumored or did pull it himself, might have gotten nervous about being found out or w/e but it was never stated anywhere that it was yanked because it was inaccurate in any way.

i at lest would give this guy equal weight vs anything pitchford says since we know ranfy is full of **** utterly at this point.

 

And where is the proof to validate that rumor?
There isn't any. That rumor came from an unsubstantiated source who was a "tester" at SEGA.
Since when do testers (the worst, bottom end job in the industry) have inside knowledge on what Gearbox did with the funds SEGA supplied for A:CM's development?

Also, people keep sidestepping one thing.
Why would Gearbox need to use funds from SEGA for a project 2K were dumping huge amounts of money into?
Borderlands was already a record breaking title for the company, and Borderlands 2 was looking to do much, much more. With that 2K were supplying vast amounts of resources to push the game.

Oh, but then the rumor was randomly changed to say the money also went to buy the Duke Nukem IP... yeah, that's it. Rumor had to change.
How long until the money helped out Furious 4?


SEGA supplied (roughly) 60 million for Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Sadly, in the grand scheme of things, 60 million is not a lot to develop a game on these days. Specially when you want a full single player campaign and a MP component.
So, you've got conceptual work, planning and early development at GBX to pay for.
Then you've got outsourcing to TimeGate and Nerve to cover. And you've got royalties to pay to Nintendo to get A:CM on the Wii U, along with funding development costs of Demiurge for that version.

Then, there's internal testing to pay for. Music to license and create, voice actors to pay, professional actors to pay...


I'm not saying GBX didn't mishandle the development of the game. But, it was an overly ambitious project that was thrown up against various roadblocks....
Between GBX's big blowup with Borderlands, SEGA almost canning the project twice and then acting very unsupportive on if it was still happening or not...
Yeah. It's not surprising that a game with 6+ years of hype and a troubled development cycle has issues.

But the embezzlement claims are pathetic reaching by people who can't accept the game just fumbled. A witch hunt for some reason to throw blame because 1, it's Aliens. A series fans hold ungodly close to.
And 2, it's Gearbox. A studio people expect a lot of things from because of their recent success.

 

and the reason supposedly that sega wanted to can it is because randy was pulling the people off acm team onto other projects.

randy certainly has proven that he cannot be trusted, with any ip really, he talks a huge talk and often his games fall well short of his ability to run his mouth, amusing when your games are good, but not so amusing when it is seen as part of a grander lie to get people to pre order or just buy on launch day without reading reviews because it is aliens because it had this really kick ass looking demo, that last i heard was still being shown as promo material selling the game, and maybe because they had seen some of the interviews or read them about randy promising the best game ever made.

the story went specifically that when acm was given to gearbox that gbx was developing bl1 at the time, and randy took people off the acm team to work on bl1, and continued to scalp the team working on it, until sega started getting grouchy and then gbx dumped the whole mess into timegates lap and whoever.

i had read that timegate had said somewhere that all they had gotten were a jumbled mess of assets and levels half done and the shader model of bl1 included, etc and then it gets more murkey from here what was kept and what was tossed out, i doubt it was accurate to say they threw everything out.

timegate saying they got much nothing is sure a pretty huge slam against the amount of effort that gbx had put into the game, which may have amounted to them hiring someone to crank out a demo that could be run on any current hardware and pass it off as actual game play. and fixing stuff because it was a horrible broken mess in a near record 6 or so months to get it into gold before sega really did sue them.

i see fraud i see fraud against his employer who was sega, i see fraud against the consumers saying that demo was actual gameplay, gbx had this game sitting in their lap for 6 years, in that time they crunched out 2 bl games and dnf.

of course this needs more than rumors but the way things appear looking at the game they produced they seem to fit what we ended up with.

 

Im still surprised that people hold gearbox in high regard in the first place.
Borderlands imo, has to be one of the most lame games out there. It feeds on the simple human/gamer desire of materialism to keep people playing, neither game has any storyline or any other reason to keep one playing except for the next big loot find. Practically an fps version of every failed mmo.

Everything that's wrong with gaming today.

 

that's promising a bonus to the developers if it reaches a certain score. you can't put in the contract that if your game doesn't get at least a score of 80 we are going to sue you.

 

One of the times SEGA considered canning the project was after AvP released in 2010 and it didn't do as well as SEGA had hoped.

Considering the rumors came out after the game did... it's easy to get rumors to fit.
If they rumors had come out before release and still fit... I'd be more inclined to have a little faith.

 

I love Borderlands 2 and games like it. It's not like an MMO, not sure where you got that from. It's an FPS version of old dungeon crawl/loot hunting games such as the Diablo series. How much of either game have you actually played? I'd happily take it over any other modern FPS out there right now, Crysis 3 included.

The first game had a light storyline, but for co-op play it was an absolute blast. The bits and pieces of story you did get were generally enough to turn a smile, if not outright make me laugh. Borderlands 2 improved on that immensely, and provided a solid story from start to finish for a game of its type.

As for 'materialism' - I see tons of that whenever a game like Crysis is released. A short underwhelming story with boring and generic game mechanics that people go apeshat over due to the fancy visuals. Just as they do for almost every other generic FPS title out there. If it wasn't for games like Borderlands 2 I'd not bother with the genre at all.

 

First off, im not looking to win an argument of some sorts, im just simply stating my opinion of the B/L series and the devs who make them.

Diablo is pretty much a MMO, well at least no.3 anyway and as for the previous Diablo's, they had dungeon crawling and a rpg stat system also, just like B/Ls and all other RPG's/MMo's. And if it weren't for all those stats'n'Numbers, would you play any of those games just for the story.

Crysis is a first person shooter and as simple as they come. Being like most Crytek fans, i hope for a interesting story and c1/far cry 1 type gameplay, dont care about what in game items there are, I mean there's only so many ways you can portray a handgun, a shotgun and a rocket launcher, so it's the story I play for along side the the characters.
As being a gfx whore, that fits into all genres of games not just fps.

As to how I came to the conclusion of comparing B/Ls with an MMO, its quite simple:

1. Do damage to any enemy and all those numbers pop up for some reason. That reason is mainly to fuel the materialistic nature of the game I was referring to, as in that if the game did not display those numbers then the player would have very little satisfaction from finding a new weapon other than what it looks like since the only way to know if the pink shotgun is more powerful than the green shotgun would be the one or two less shots that will be required to take down an enemy.

2.You can play the main story and it's quest online with "friends", just like every other MMO.

3. RPG stat like system.

4.It's one big tedious grind for little satisfaction other than to say that you've got this or that weapon/item and your character is level XX.

 

You're welcome to your opinion, not sure where you're getting an argument from. As for your points:

1. Numbers pop up like in RPG's, not just MMO's.

2. So multiplayer co-op = MMO? That's a bit of a stretch.

3. You said it.

4. It's not one big tedious grind. As I mentioned earlier, have you played much of either game? You follow the storyline, optionally with friends. When the storyline is over you finish playing. If you don't want to stop you can 'grind out' more weapons/levels. Just like in any game with a stat system. At no point is 'grinding' required unless you're absolutely hopeless at playing games.

You're essentially saying there's something wrong with a game for adding extra layers of depth to the gameplay, and that those who enjoy that are 'everything that is wrong with gaming'. I wont even go into your seeming opinion on RPG's, I'm guessing you dislike the genre as a whole as you seem to have very little experience with it. As I said, you're welcome to your opinion, but it's one I disagree with.

I find Crytek games to be 5-8 hour long tech demos with crap gameplay and awful stories. The only thing games of that type have going for them as far as I'm concerned are there visuals, other games can get by with a dated look and still be enjoyed. It's the goto genre for graphics whores, always has been. That doesn't mean I'm arrogant enough to believe that people playing those titles are somehow damaging the community.