Forever is how long I'm willing to wait to play this game, in that I have little to no excitement and don't care if I don't play it within my lifetime.
I loved Duke, he was a hero of mine. Now, because of fucktardRealms his franchise has died, he's now associated with the most successful money-hole ever invented and it's going to have to be a complete reboot to even hit relevancy now.
Seriously kill Forever and start a new game called 'The End' and release it in 2012. (Edit: I'm serious, do a parody alien-Mayan end of the world, cash in on the popular hype, sell it to a new expanded market and then do Forever)
The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series.
The game is currently expected to ship in 2011, although given its history, Pitchford [CEO of Gearbox Software] is understandably reluctant to be more specific. "We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not make a promise we can not fulfill," he says. "We need to get past the shock and awe and then we can go to all the retailers and first parties and work out a launch plan."
This is interesting. Modern graphics is beginning to make his character look dated, rather than stylized. (Not because we are 'used to better', but because of a more realistic background) They can't really change how he looks much either, because everyone and their brother knows what he is supposed to look like.
That's really an interesting puzzle. What do you do when graphics outstrips your content?
You either up the realism on the character model or scale it back on the environment, physics, sound, story, gameplay, etc..
The Team Fortress 2 art style would be perfectly appropriate to keep him looking smarmy and impossibly perfect.
A grittier character model like what you see in most modern war games would work too. You can still give a guy blonde hair, huge muscles, and dark glasses without making him cartoony. You'd just make him look like Ivan Drago or something.
I think that Dolph Lundgren has all the necessary qualifications:
In January 2009, Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[Wikipedia]
Funny you should mention that, because the new developer of DNF is Gearbox software, who previously released the game "Borderlands" which was a very stylised, comic book-style game.
Even more interesting is that they first developed Borderlands as hyper-realistic, Crysis-like game and then moved to the new art direction during development.
Building current trunk weekly != release. It was acknowledged that those "releases" are not what people in the "real world" are waiting for (http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411). It was fixed with Star which is a release for "early adopters". It's polished alpha by another name. It's only one little step ahead of vaporware. Can we get over it now?...
I guess it's because I'm slightly too young to have enjoyed it in its prime, but I don't get the excitement over the Duke franchise.
It seems like a standard FPS with some cheeseball bravado, sexism, and sex wrapped around the mechanics. Also, I can't imagine why anyone would think the same people could make a modern game, which is 1000x more complex and expensive to produce than the games of old, with the same success that they made the old, relatively simple one.
So what's the major excitement here? Humor? Pure nostalgia for the days when the cheeseball stuff was really satisfying?
This game was like seeing The Matrix without anyone telling you the basic plot. Your first hacker news post where pg actually responds to it. Your first bungee jump. Your first go on a real gun. Your first pvp kill in eve online.
It was ground breaking. It blew your mind and sent a chill up your spine.
It's just one of those things that when it came out it was so ahead of its time. It opened your eyes to what could be done. Now it seems dated, then it was amazing.
I guess those that had that the first time round are all hoping it will do the same thing again.
Technologically it looked very well for its time, but mostly it stand out as a game with "character" (art design, levels, weapons, sound effects, voice acting, writing).
It was so cheesy and over the top that it became masterpiece (like Tarantino / Rodriguez movies, or recent Old Spice commercials).
id soft may have had technologically superior games (Quake is about the same age and had full 3d models instead of just sprites) but they were incomparably bland compared to Duke Nukem.
Also, gameplay was really fun. There were some very inspired gameplay elements: shrink and freeze guns, laser traps, remote triggered pipe-bombs, jetpacks. I still fondly remember multiplayer Duke sessions late in the night at lab in my university.
Both. IIRC, the only alternative FPS to play was Doom 2 or Quake, which had very little character and focused on the action.
The Duke Nukem engine was (from my point of view) on par with Doom's engine, but their level design made playing the game a lot of fun. From seeing yourself in the mirror, to kicking toilets and fire hydrants, the world seemed much more alive than any other game at the time.
The game had a fun boy-ish "I'm gonna kick ass" vibe to it that isn't really seen today. Most FPS action games nowadays, while fun and entertaining, seem to take themselves too seriously. Musclebound Marcus Fenix is too brooding, and Roach too focused on terrorist plots to really portray the giddiness that was found in kicking a pig in the face with your manly boot.
Ah, chalk it up to fuzzy nostalgia. I swore that the mirrors actually were functional, and you could damage stuff that was on the sidewalk with the boot-kick. Maybe I'm mixing it up with other FPS games of the time. It's been a while.
"While Doom and Duke Nukem 3D feature similar technology, Duke Nukem 3D could in most respects be considered technically superior. The player can jump, crouch, and aim up or down. The rendering engine features slopes, overlapping and moving sectors, arbitrary scaling of textures and strong scripting capabilities"
I think that the major point here is that you consider Duke Nukem 3D to be a "standard FPS". You have to understand the 1996 context in which it was released. Prior to that, the "best and most advanced" FPS was Doom. There was no "real 3D", whole maps where flat. You could never stack monsters and players and items over a Z axis.
Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells, more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast majority of large studio productions.
This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".
Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!
I can't agree with you that FPSes haven't changed since then; it's only true if you are very selective about what you consider important about a FPS. What you have said implies that you don't care about story line, realism of physics simulation, gameplay, etc., which I'm quite certain is simply not objectively true of the gaming marketplace. Even if you think it's the "3D" that matters, then things were vastly better in Quake than Duke Nukem, where you could look directly up and down without bad distortion etc.
And then, one needs to ask, what quality is it of the 3D that matters? Simple things like decent texture scaling (trilinear filtered mipmapping, anisotropic filtering etc.) and antialiasing make a big difference, but are often only viable at high resolution in 6-month old games with the latest hardware, such are the demands of the processing.
> I can't agree with that FPSes haven't changed since then
Yeah, I found Portal by Valve Software a couple of years ago the same groundbreaking experience in terms of gameplay that I felt with those first 3D games. Some of my friends said the same about HalfLife before it.
Thief, System Shock and Deus Ex were clearly a nice departure from Duke Nukem and Quake in terms of game play.
And they are still playable today. (At least if you substitute System Shock 2 for the original System Shock. The original's controls did not use the now-standard mouse-look.)
I think DN was the first game I played where you walked about a real environment with realistic objects and furniture etc. instead of empty rooms on a spaceship. I remember seeing it at a friends house and being totally blown away that... he was running around outside on a street. It was also the first FPS game 'with attitude', Grand Theft Auto style. Also had some cool gameplay mechanics like CCTV terminals. In fact I think I only had a demo of it, not even the full game, and it still made an impact on me.
Every FPS before it was super serious. Then comes Duke, a trash talking, stripper payin, badass mofo who is all out of bubble gum. Also it has holo-duke which I contest is the best FPS feature ever created. Many a friend parished from my holo-duke + room lined with pipe bomb combo.
It will be strange to live in a world where Duke Nukem isn't vaporware. It's status as vaporware has always been one of the basic tenants of the internet as I know it, up there with Rule 34.
I was at a mutual gathering and I ran into someone who had worked on an iteration of Duke Nukem Forever. He seemed genuine about the product and he definitely said it was still on... even though he wasn't actively working on it.
Anyone get the feeling this game is going to sell like crazy. It's like an urban legend you can purchase. They should embrace the jokes and try to leverage it to build suspense and PR before the release. I was awaiting this game as an 8th grader for crying out loud, and now I'm 28!
Does anyone know if any of the original developers are still working on the game? I'd like to believe that this is the story of a few intrepid programmers overcoming great odds to ship a release that everyone had given up on. But I suspect that all remnants of the old team are gone and a whole new team was put in place when the IP changed hands recently.
66 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadhttp://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D#Controversy
[1] http://www.armchairempire.com/Features/Top-10s/quotes.htm
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE46xsJ11GU#t=0m47s
I loved Duke, he was a hero of mine. Now, because of fucktardRealms his franchise has died, he's now associated with the most successful money-hole ever invented and it's going to have to be a complete reboot to even hit relevancy now.
Seriously kill Forever and start a new game called 'The End' and release it in 2012. (Edit: I'm serious, do a parody alien-Mayan end of the world, cash in on the popular hype, sell it to a new expanded market and then do Forever)
The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series.
The game is currently expected to ship in 2011, although given its history, Pitchford [CEO of Gearbox Software] is understandably reluctant to be more specific. "We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not make a promise we can not fulfill," he says. "We need to get past the shock and awe and then we can go to all the retailers and first parties and work out a launch plan."
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial-long...
----
Edit: And some more from Kotaku. Here is a video of people actually playing it at PAX:
http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem-fore...
Few screenshots:
http://kotaku.com/5629778/the-duke-nukem-forever-pax-demo-a-...
First impressions:
http://kotaku.com/5629782/duke-nukem-forever-impressions-two...
That's really an interesting puzzle. What do you do when graphics outstrips your content?
[1] http://dorol.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/jeu_duke_3d_dorol.j...
The Team Fortress 2 art style would be perfectly appropriate to keep him looking smarmy and impossibly perfect.
A grittier character model like what you see in most modern war games would work too. You can still give a guy blonde hair, huge muscles, and dark glasses without making him cartoony. You'd just make him look like Ivan Drago or something.
In January 2009, Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[Wikipedia]
Even more interesting is that they first developed Borderlands as hyper-realistic, Crysis-like game and then moved to the new art direction during development.
I agree, and that's why we've had a documented and polished release process for almost three years now.
Existence is a binary condition, and binaries have existed for (almost) three years. A claim of vaporware is trivially dismissable FUD.
It seems like a standard FPS with some cheeseball bravado, sexism, and sex wrapped around the mechanics. Also, I can't imagine why anyone would think the same people could make a modern game, which is 1000x more complex and expensive to produce than the games of old, with the same success that they made the old, relatively simple one.
So what's the major excitement here? Humor? Pure nostalgia for the days when the cheeseball stuff was really satisfying?
This game was like seeing The Matrix without anyone telling you the basic plot. Your first hacker news post where pg actually responds to it. Your first bungee jump. Your first go on a real gun. Your first pvp kill in eve online.
It was ground breaking. It blew your mind and sent a chill up your spine.
It's just one of those things that when it came out it was so ahead of its time. It opened your eyes to what could be done. Now it seems dated, then it was amazing.
I guess those that had that the first time round are all hoping it will do the same thing again.
So it was technologically groundbreaking? Novel game-play? Both?
My game like that was either Ocarina of Time or maybe Goldeneye 64.
It was so cheesy and over the top that it became masterpiece (like Tarantino / Rodriguez movies, or recent Old Spice commercials).
id soft may have had technologically superior games (Quake is about the same age and had full 3d models instead of just sprites) but they were incomparably bland compared to Duke Nukem.
Also, gameplay was really fun. There were some very inspired gameplay elements: shrink and freeze guns, laser traps, remote triggered pipe-bombs, jetpacks. I still fondly remember multiplayer Duke sessions late in the night at lab in my university.
The Duke Nukem engine was (from my point of view) on par with Doom's engine, but their level design made playing the game a lot of fun. From seeing yourself in the mirror, to kicking toilets and fire hydrants, the world seemed much more alive than any other game at the time.
The game had a fun boy-ish "I'm gonna kick ass" vibe to it that isn't really seen today. Most FPS action games nowadays, while fun and entertaining, seem to take themselves too seriously. Musclebound Marcus Fenix is too brooding, and Roach too focused on terrorist plots to really portray the giddiness that was found in kicking a pig in the face with your manly boot.
Both true. Neither possible with the Doom engine.
I found something here: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D
"While Doom and Duke Nukem 3D feature similar technology, Duke Nukem 3D could in most respects be considered technically superior. The player can jump, crouch, and aim up or down. The rendering engine features slopes, overlapping and moving sectors, arbitrary scaling of textures and strong scripting capabilities"
I have to note that Ken's story is one of the things got me into programming as a kid, back when DN3D was still fresh.
Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells, more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast majority of large studio productions.
This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".
Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!
I can't agree with you that FPSes haven't changed since then; it's only true if you are very selective about what you consider important about a FPS. What you have said implies that you don't care about story line, realism of physics simulation, gameplay, etc., which I'm quite certain is simply not objectively true of the gaming marketplace. Even if you think it's the "3D" that matters, then things were vastly better in Quake than Duke Nukem, where you could look directly up and down without bad distortion etc.
And then, one needs to ask, what quality is it of the 3D that matters? Simple things like decent texture scaling (trilinear filtered mipmapping, anisotropic filtering etc.) and antialiasing make a big difference, but are often only viable at high resolution in 6-month old games with the latest hardware, such are the demands of the processing.
Yeah, I found Portal by Valve Software a couple of years ago the same groundbreaking experience in terms of gameplay that I felt with those first 3D games. Some of my friends said the same about HalfLife before it.
For instance you couldn't do proper floors above floors, but there were some rendering tricks you could use to do bridges.
It also supported slanted floors, which helps level designers more than you realize. Also there were invisible teleports to fake a real 3d layout.
But the most important part was that the level designers were very good at using those tricks to hide the limits of the engine.
Halo later brought in regenerating health, but yeah, that's all I can think of.
And saying that, multiplayer in general seems like a big step (although not sure how well multiplayer was in the 90s)
And they are still playable today. (At least if you substitute System Shock 2 for the original System Shock. The original's controls did not use the now-standard mouse-look.)
We all want it to be coming, that's the point. :)