As some one who is learning game programming, the "typo fix" on the Aliens: Colonial Marines intrigued me. Would there be a change that some who has not played the game would notice? The answer is "yes". After the typo fix Aliens seem far more deadly than I believe they should be from the game play perspective. They also seem way more smarter than your AI partners and human enemies - both who constantly get stuck around things and just do plainly stupid things. This makes levels containing human enemies very easy and levels containing alien encounters - especially those where AI partners are designed to do some work (shoot enemies, draw fire)- extremely hard in contrast. It almost seems like AI partner damage was nerfed and alien HP boosted to offset AI (that they could not get to work before the typo was found).

So, fix might change a one thing but by doing so really highlights games other problems and game still deserves all the flag it got.

Edit: ironically the typos.

@charlie_victor_bravo: Weird! I'm going to have to try this out for myself and see. I don't know if I ever got past the opening menu of Colonial Marines as it started to crash and automatically restart itself the last time I tried.

It's so droll trying to wrap my head around this typo fix. The thought that Gearbox spent millions of dollars and multiple years on this rubbish title, never found such a simple typo that crippled so much of their AI programming and work, and ultimately just gave up and tweaked monster health / npc damage instead so that they could release on time... what a bizarre tale.

Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me for Borderlands 3.

@lazyimperial: What did you think of the last 3 Borderlands games?

I find myself wanting to play this game, if only because no one is making single player first person shooters anymore, and i mean no one.

@willza92: Well, No. 1 felt kind of hollow like they had changed direction mid-production and didn't quite have enough time to get all the bits and pieces in order (which, incidentally, was apparently the case). No. 2 was pretty good, until you got to a high enough level that the gameplay effectively mandated usage of the purple energy weapons to get a debuff on enemies before you used your regular weapons. Then... it kind of wasn't my jam. The Pre-Sequel... I got to the room right before the last boss and then just kind of stopped. I've been meaning to finish it for the past couple years, but the motivation isn't there. The itemization in the game is horrible; billions of guns, sure... but 99% of all the guns you get are pure vendor trash. Sifting through mounds of uninspired garbage in the hopes of getting an assault rifle that will actually be competitive against creatures of my current level was not my idea of a good time.

They were all better than Aliens: Colonial Marines and Battleborn, but I'm not exactly craving another Borderlands. Billions of RNG guns, of which a smidgen are actually useful, is not the draw that they think it is. Also, I never have any co-op buddies so it feels lonely. Eh, shrug. :-P

Regardless, wow:

As someone who has worked in a developement shop for 15 years (I’m an operations guys, not a developer), this is fucking insane.

I did build and deploy work in my 20’s. The idea that someone didn’t catch that their AI wasn’t working right, or if it was that no one noticed the delta in AI from one build to the next amazes me.

Notice the issue, open a defect, triage. Get a build change report if you need the help isolating the issue, review the code, fix, rebuild, deploy, retest.

It sounds like it was a variable that was typoed, based on the one story I read...there are so many easy ways to find and fix this sort of thing...

Doom, wolfenstein, farcry X, prey, titanfall 2 campaign?

Unfortunately, the A.I. isn't the games only issue.

@ntm: This is true. I played through it in co-op on PS3. I recall the Aliens assault rifle being pretty damned satisfying.

The game had moments where you could mentally squint and see a good game hiding behind all the silliness, weird design choices, questionable plot, and general mediocrity.

I did have fun with it, but we knew we were getting into some nonsense.

The thing I liked was the customizable weaponry. That was cool, but taking into account the unsatisfactory shooting, the glitches, the terrible story that says many times that it has answers, but gives you absolutely none where it counts (and where it does count, if you can call it that, is laughable), and with characters that are super dull, it's just not a good game. As a big fan of Alien/Aliens, I couldn't help but get it; fortunately, in 2015 the game was about three dollars on Steam, so that's when I got it.