Gearbox must not be living a really nice moment right now: the first reviews of their latest game Aliens: Colonial Marines, based on the Aliens franchise is getting some really poor reviews. The game has a lot of technical issues and overall is very unpolished despite being more true to the source material, unlike previous Aliens games.
According to some rumors, however, Gearbox is really not to blame for the poor quality of the game: a former Gearbox employee has stated that most of the work on the game has been done by TimeGate studios and Gearbox did everything they could in a short amount of time to salvage what could have been salvaged from the project.
This rumor isn’t the only one suggesting the game was heading towards disaster: back in May 2012 another Gearbox former employee stated that gamers shouldn’t have got their hopes too high for the game. Development was considered as a total wreck and the long development time of over 6 years didn0t help at all: the only thing Gearbox worked on was the multiplayer mode, while everything else was handled by TimeGate Studios.
TimeGate Studios’ involvement in the game was known even though we didn’t know how much they had worked on the game: multiple sources stated that Gearbox handled over 80% of the game.
Source: Eurogamer
