Colonial Marines is “Massive” Project, Hundreds of Staff Employed

Aliens: Colonial Marines is apparently a mighty huge project, with hundreds of people at work on it, developer Gearbox has stated.

The company currently has three first-person shooters in development, all being watched very carefully by the beady eyes of fans, enthusiasts and games press. If there’s any doubt there aren’t enough people to cover the relatively large amount of cherished IPs at once then studio boss Brian Burleson is here to us otherwise.

“It’s been pretty massive,” Burleson said. “We have hundreds of people working on this game.”

The size of the game has meant that Gearbox has had to enlist help from TimeGate Studios (responsible for Section 8 and its sequel), amongst others, to help with the workload.

“They’re pretty well known for their engineering,” came Burleson. “They’re very methodical and they just get s**t done, which is really fun. So when you need to get some stuff done they’re pretty good at that.”

Also on board is Shadows in Darkness, a company that worked on Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age and Borderlands, to name a few. They’re the guys to call when all hands on deck isn’t enough it seems.

“They had done a lot of character work with us on Borderlands,” Burleson explained. “They’ve done some fantastic work with some of the other stuff we’ve done in our game. They can just do things very quickly and they nail the xeno design so nicely that we can focus on some other things.”

Burleson insists the game is still very much a Gearbox project, even with so many helping hands, “The real juicy stuff we always like to keep inside. We like to say, we do the glamour stuff and the outside people don’t. But that would be kinda d*ckish. It’s all about what’s going to make the best experience for the gamer in the end. If working with someone who can do this part of engineering or art, will that give us a better game in the end? Will it give us more time to make a better game? That’s where the choices are made.

“Sometimes there are people who can do it better than we can. Or we just don’t have the bandwidth to do certain stuff in the time we need to have it done.

“So on ACM we worked with a lot of outside partners who had a lot of expertise that Gearbox doesn’t necessarily have. Because we want to make the best game possible, we find partners who can fill a niche part of the production cycle, and work with them to finish that part. We were able to get more in the time we’ve been working on the game than we have in any other game before.”

Just this week SEGA and Gearbox announced the release date for ACM, making reference to the previous, hints of an fall 2012 release from SEGA, insisting this was the final announcement on the matter. It’s now slated for a February 12^th release on PC PS3 and Wii U. Though the reaction from fans was to view this as a delay, Burleson denies such a thing, stating that Gearbox themselves never actually announced a release date.

Just now, we’re almost at alpha. Going through that, you get a sense of how long it’s going to take to finish it. So there really hasn’t been a delay. We never agreed on a date to begin with.

“We never formally announced a date,” he said. “So the proper time to release it, we were still sorting out when that would be. Just now, we’re almost at alpha. Going through that, you get a sense of how long it’s going to take to finish it. So there really hasn’t been a delay. We never agreed on a date to begin with.”

What happened then? Why was there a fall 2012 release window? “Every time it’s always something different. Marketing and all that stuff.”

It was 6 years ago that ACM was originally announced with a press release and it’s due to this early announcement that Randy Pitchford, Gearbox top dog, thinks gamers feel this title has been taking a long time to create.

“You’re never supposed to announce a game before you start working on it,” he said. “It makes things seem a lot longer than they actually are. It happened when we just had concept art and just some other things that were just starting to be developed. We didn’t have a full team of people. We were just starting. You’re never supposed to do that. Live and learn of course.”

The game has apparently only taken as long as Brothers in Arms or Borderlands to create says Burleson. He stated that ACM had been in development for two-and-a-half years when he began working on the title. “So it actually hasn’t been in full development for that long.”