Mini-rant:
AVP 2010 was doomed to mediocrity right from the initial development decisions. I remember all these press interviews with Rebellion's development team leading up to the release of the game, and they kept repeating the same thing over and over...
"We're working really hard to 'balance' the game."
"We want to get the 'balance' just right."
"We have teams of people playing night and day to nail down the proper 'balance' between the species."
And right there I knew the game would be "average" at best. And it was.
Let's be honest. What does "balancing" mean? It means nerfing. It means taking everything that the fans love about these creatures and watering it down to the point where NOBODY is happy.
Monolith had it right. LET THE PLAYERS DECIDE WHAT IS "BALANCED".
If you think the Predator's smart disc is too overpowered, fine. Host your own match and turn those off. If someone doesn't agree with that, they can play with a different host. If they could do it on the PC back in 2000, there's absolutely no reason why they can't do it on both PC and consoles today. The moment a developer starts thinking that it's going to force this "one size fits all" determination of what is "balanced" on the community by nerfing everything, the game is destined for bargain bin obscurity.
Of course, the developer inevitably comes back with the "Well, we don't want to divide up the player community" line. Well, guess what? You know what REALLY divides up the player community? Making a boring, watered-down game. After less than 90 days, there weren't enough people playing online to even get a decent match started. If you take the time to cater the game to what the PLAYERS (read: "paying customers") want, there will be plenty of players hosting plenty of matches.
So please...Rebellion or whoever might make another AVP game in the future: please stop ruining these characters. Give us ALL the genuine weapons and all the skins from the films and give players the tools to decide what to do with them in multiplayer.
Oh, and for god's sake...somebody show the ALIEN some damn respect. Enough with the snarling dogs on all-fours thing. That's not an ALIEN. I don't know if Creative Assembly's "Isolation" game will be any good this fall, but their Alien looks a hell of a lot better than anything seen in AVP 2010.