Brad's dismissing the biggest news story of the week

When Aliens:CM was brought up on the 02-19-2013 podcast, Brad said, "I don't want to talk about that," and it was swept away, but even if they don't care about it, it's hard to deny that A:CM and the state of games previews is the biggest news this week and at least deserves more than a quick dismiss. I don't even care if they defend previews and Aliens, but I come to the Bombcast for opinions, not to have big subject ignored.

Thoughts?

It's his opinion that the subject should be ignored?

It's not the biggest news story of the week. Gearbox released a terrible game, it happens every day, how is that even a news story?

+1 It's his opinion that A:CM should get as much attention as gearbox gave it when "making" it.

He decided he didn't want to talk about it and the other dudes didn't feel strong enough about it to overthrew his stance. It is what it is. It's their podcast and can do with it what they want.

specifically, a big chunk of the preview footage that was supposedly running in engine was pre rendered and featured custom animations and effects that aren't in the final game. Very weird stuff.

Still, promotional and advertising elements have always been twisted and faked, so the joke is on whoever bought the game because of supposed in-engine footage.

My thought is that you should first learn when you should and shouldn't be using the question option.

HE LOVED THE GAME

@officegamer said:

The only joke there is in this case is on Gearbox and Randy Pitchford. It's one thing to portray the game in a specific light or twist footage, and a completely different one is to sell something based on shit that doesn't exist. It's only slightly less disgusting than the WarZ bullshit.

Haven't yet listened to podcast, but good call.

There really isn't anything sensible to discuss about Aliens:CM at the moment. All there is happening right now are outraged fans creating angry forum threads and sending angry tweets to Pitchford. Gearbox is technically on radio silence, because behind the scenes they're* still trying to find out who fucked up / scapegoat. We are not getting an official response for a long time, no matter how much people will bitch about it.

Frankly all this noise is just about as tiresome to watch as ME3-ending outrage. Best move on.

edit: *with "they" I mean all parties involved.

Pretty much everyone involved in gaming thinks there is a really interesting story here, besides the end product being bad. The outsourcing to other studios, supposed Sega money being used on Borderlands instead, developers of the game being surprised they are actually releasing it in this state, demos that are so different to the end project on a scale we have never (?) seen before. It's cool that you don't care about all that that, but you are dismissing it a bit too much with your statement "It's not the biggest news story of the week. Gearbox released a terrible game, it happens every day, how is that even a news story?" in my opinion. A train wreck on this scale is pretty rare..

I dunno man, if you're releasing a game as big as that surely its obvious theres a distinct difference to what is actually put out and what theyve been showing. I really cant believe a studio that made borderlands 1 and 2 don't have at the least weekly progress reports on how a game is doing. I bet fair well they know exactly who fucked up and where. Most likely they were pressured by Sega to get the game out and time constraints meant they pushed that out. While I think everyone expected Duke Nukem to be that bad, it seemed like Gearbox actually had enough time to work on this game themselves to do something good. The bigger question I would like to know is whats the season pass about, granted most game dev teams start work on dlc (including them with Gaige) before the main game is even released I wonder if they have actually looked at it or were they too busy trying to do as much as they could to the resulting game.

I would prefer that the GB crew not cover stories like this. As a reasonable person looking in at the situation, I can say that once again the gaming community has latched onto something that was kind of shitty and managed to totally fucking eclipse it it every way.

I thought the announcement of the PS4 was the biggest news of the week. Not some Aliens:CM-related bitching.

lol aliens.

Good point, I guess it's an exception.

Commenting on the whole business around previews is probably something Jeff or Patrick would get into more than any other member of the crew and since neither were there it's not surprising they didn't talk much about it.

In any case i'll take Vinny's parenting talks over anything else. That was truly a #podcastforkids

Yes, because the duders always spend so much time of the bombcast talking about news. It's almost a newscast as far I'm concerned.

Maybe they didn't feel it worth discussing because they don't really do previews, thus never went about talking up the game. Also, this type of outsourcing shit show is probably far more prevalent then we're aware of so they don't feel the need to comment. In this case the game isn't very good and the previews made it look better than it is. Movie previews do the same thing too. It's not news. They made a kind of crappy game, most reviews reflect that, and there's your coverage. What do you want GB to do? They aren't part of the preview cycle problem

I listen to the bombcast for moving and house tips.

Take it as it is - he just didn't want to talk about it. Seeing as Jeff is the closest the site has to an EIC he would be the one to discuss it with anyway. Although if you read his tumbler he pretty much outlines his position.

This isn't even news cause Killzone 2 did it 8 years ago. Big deal.

it will be discussed next week.

It's not the biggest news story of the week. In fact, it's not news at all. I'm glad they didn't waste their time.

This is not a question. Please do not set your thread as an answerable question unless you are searching for a specific answer.

This stuff has been happening forever. It goes back to Atari box art that gave no representation of the game you were buying.

This is correct.

The biggest news of the wiik is the PlayStation , not the Aliens game.

At this point that might as well be lumped in with the Mass Effect 3 bitching. It's a non-issue.

The story has been well and covered by Alex and Patrick. No, it wasn't on the Bombcast, but it was covered.

The real "story" (aka what actually happened, who can we blame) is at least a month out, but probably years out. Similar to the Dark Sector story we got a few days ago.

Newsflash! Everything about Aliens: CM is garbage.

...happy?

When you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything. Dismissal is worse than any criticism, it means a lot when a critic won't even bother critiquing a game out of apathy.

What's left to discuss? Fans and the media have torn that game and everything surrounding it to shreds. From what I've read, some of the vitriol seems genuinely justifiable, but, a lot of it is just beating a dead horse at this point.

Products do turn out mediocre despite the best intentions of the people involved. This happens all the time.

In a few hours this will all be old news and everyone will be talking about Orbis and whatever surprises( or lack of) there is.

@ltsmash said:

I assume he meant "the biggest news of last week", since obviously the Bombcast isn't in the business of clairvoyance. The Bombcast news section tends to discuss the gaming news stories that happened in the 7 days priorto the Bombcast, which would include the Aliens: CM debacle. The PS4 announcement is the biggest news of this week.

Overall though, yeah, I think this guy is flipping out. So they didn't want to say much about it. OK. Fine. Moving on.

think it's a moot issue. Fans fall for marketing material. Companies in every industry use these marketing tactics and theres nothing new or devious about it.

//My own b.s. opinion/rant bellow stop reading if you don't care//

And to be honest. If you're pre ordering anything without fully knowing what or how the product will perform, you deserve to get fucked... This push towards crazy pre order sales numbers is gross and if you support this behaviour shame on you.

Try not to think of what happened with AC:M as a story. The information isn't out there yet and when it does eventually come to light over the course of the next year or more, it will just be a disappointing list of mismanagement. There was no bile or malice from anyone in the development. No one wanted to build a bad title and everyone involved is likely as disappointed as the biggest fans were when it launched. More than likely the demo and marketing were sincere, they simply weren't able to make good on their original vision either due to time, money or the right team at the right time.

I haven't listened to the Bombcast yet but brushing over what happened with this game isn't that big of a deal. There was a Quick Look, written review, and Alex and Patrick both wrote about it so I think GB adequately covered the story.

The game came out and, according to the vast majority of gaming news outlets, it sucks. It's not the first time that a game has been in development for ages, its trailers and alleged gameplay footage seemed too good to be true and that turns out to actually be the case. The most notable example is probably Killzone 2. While I thought it was a damn good game, its trailer set some pretty lofty goals that it failed to live up to (even though Killzone 2 was probably the best looking console game when it came out).

I agree that there is an interesting story to be told regarding this game but the details about what may or may not have happened during development are murky so it's not yet a story that can be told.

i think this is a non-story. they released a bad game, the internet got angry. that's where it begins and ends for me.

there will be a post-mortem one day, and maybe we'll learn something interesting.

but this isn't the first time, and it won't be the last time. when development time runs that long on a licensed property...the writing's on the wall.

While I would like to hear the Giant Bomb guys discuss this, I would rather they did so when there are more details rather than rumors available as to what the fuck happened with the game. Brad made the right decision there.

However, I think there are many people in this thread and in general that are downplaying what could potentially be the severity of the A:CM situation overall. If it does end up being true that Gearbox used Sega's money to fund Borderlands 2 further while passing off A:CM to Timegate, it could easily be lawsuit time for Gearbox. Pitchford has already said he's going to lose a lot of money over A:CM, and if a lawsuit were to happen, it could also mean the end of Gearbox as a studio.

Moreover, this whole thing just kills my trust with these guys. Poorly developed game aside, that level of shady shit just kind of breaks my trust with them. I'm not looking at all the marketing and shit. I'm looking purely at the behind-the-scenes and thinking "do I really want to support those guys?"

I'm holding off on buying Borderlands 2 now until I know more about this overall.

Pretty sure that Brad doesn't care about the content of a podcast that he'll never be on again. I wish him the best of luck at his new job.

The difference here is that Killzone 2 was actually a fairly good game. Not mind-blowing or truly memorable or whatever video game review catch-phrase you usually apply to 9.5/10's, but it was worth playing at least. Perhaps more importantly, it came out at a time when shooters weren't really getting boring yet.

But if we're going to go down this path, much of Halo 2 that was shown had to be scrapped as well. And I'm sure there's an example of a decently received game from before that could have the same "criticism" leveled at it.

I do think that it's disgusting, yes, but I don't really think it's something worth talking much about, and I definitely don't think that we need to tell the Bomb crew what they should talk about in their own podcast. The solution here is "don't buy the game". Or, rather, "don't pre-order a game until you know how it's been received" so we can get rid of all these exclusive guns, missions, armor types, and other bullshit.

Its a non-story until it happens with a game these guys care about. Then you'll see who's crying; and we'll go like: "Nah, its not a story at all", while smelling our own farts: "they didn't mean to fuck it up, they are innocent like children crying as if they've just fallen off a swing" or something. There's like no ability for empathy. This game sold more in its first week than Dead Space 3. That's quite interesting to me. A lot. Of. Pre-orders. Based on what exactly?

Biggest news story of last week maybe, the topic has been done to death so I'm not surprised they didn't feel the need to talk about it.

No there is not going to be a Breaking Brad Aliens edition please stop asking.

@kidavenger: Perhaps. A writer named Alex Navarro wrote an article about it on a site called Giant Bomb three days ago, but I guess that's a millennium in frog years.

they should talk more about Guns N' Roses, screw this gaming talk!

done to death

last week

Honestly I'd much rather they talk about good games than have a 30 minute bitchfest about generic shooter number 347 of the generic shooter generation.

Gearbox is now known to me as the guts who make shitty games come out, that shouldn't have come out.

Sad.