You may have heard that Aliens: Colonial Marines has some problems. Among those problems is the fact that the PC version of the game looks like pretty raggedy. The ship interiors and darkly-lit alien worlds taking very little advantage of recent advances in PC graphics technology.
While the game itself—the levels, the writing, the audio—may be beyond saving, that's not going to stop intrepid PC modders from doing their damnedest to improve it. Soon after the game came out, several mods surfaced that would enable DirectX 10 support and enhance Colonial Marines' lighting effects, which were a notable weakness of the vanilla game. (Top image is another slider is of the SweetFX mod via Dsogaming.)
Other users have taken to tweaking the game's .ini file to make it more detailed and add support for modern video cards, as well as increasing the number of dead space-marines the game can show, among other things.
Steam user adonys has posted this comprehensive list of .ini tweaks, along with some downloadable .rar packages containing all of the modifications. It's a work in progress, and I haven't had a chance to test the tweaks out myself, but they sound worth a shot.
Among adonys' findings when studying the game's settings is the fact that the game doesn't even appear capable of recognizing modern PC graphics cards. You'll have to go in and manually add support for advanced functionality.
- none of the new generation video cards are listed into the compatibilities files, and therefore my 680 GT OC was loaded with the default batch settings no 4, instead of 5 (which is the maxed out one).
Huh.
It'll be interesting to see just how far modders can push this game beyond its initial flawed state.
