StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It's finally, really, actually ... maybe going to happen at this point. The rumors are true: Gearbox Software and 2K Games have taken on the Herculean task of completing and releasing 3D Realms' unfinished Duke Nukem Forever. The project was officially unveiled today at PAX during a livestreamed presentation at the 2K Games booth and announced for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. "It's coming out in 2011," Gearbox president Randy Pitchford said during the presentation. (Of course, we're skeptical about any release date associated with this particular title.)

Gearbox began finishing Duke Nukem Forever in late 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. "Clearly the game hadn't been finished at 3D Realms but a lot of content had been created," Pitchford told WSJ.

"We're in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not make a promise we can not fulfill," Pitchford added. "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."

Duke Nukem Forever is a sequel to Duke Nukem 3D and will feature both a single-player campaign and multiplayer. "Aliens come and say they're going to be our friends, and Duke knows this isn't going to work out," Pitchford revealed of the plot. "Duke once again is in the pivotal spot and it's up to him to save the world."

Duke Nukem is back and he needs to take a piss.

The Duke Nukem Forever playable demo here at PAX 2010 makes the seemingly impossible a reality. People, including your Kotaku reporter, are playing Duke Nukem Forever, maybe a dozen years after we expected to. Duke, from what I can tell, hasn't changed.

He's still cracking jokes, chewing bubblegum, and getting oral sex from two ladies at a time when he's not using his guns — or his buggy — to obliterate his enemies.

Duke Nukem Forever is, of course, a first person shooter. The controls are standard, mapped as you'd expect on the Xbox 360 controller on which I played the game. Zoom on the left trigger. Shoot on the right. Click the right stick to crouch. But, before all that, at the start of the demo, pull the right trigger to piss.

The demo starts with a first person view of the urinal. You can make Duke urinate as much as you want. The wait is over!

Well, no that's not what this game is about. You're in a football locker room. There are a couple of hot tubs and, in the main area, some soldiers gearing up for a fight. On the whiteboard they plan their move against the beast on the field. Their strategy: cockblock. You can draw on the whiteboard. I drew straight lines. But on another TV playing the game here at PAX I saw someone drawing a penis.

The game is 100% in the spirit of classic Duke. By this point in the demo you've been hit with "Hail to the King, Baby," and sooner or later he's whistling, laughing at the bad guys he kills and lamenting that "Those alien bastards are going to pay for shooting up my ride."

When you leave the locker room, you race down some halls where aliens are fighting soldiers. These scripted sequences show some of the destructibility (mostly of your allies' limbs) and the smoke and explosion effects in the game. The effects look modern, though not beyond what we see in other games.

Out in the field, things became more impressive. A massive monster — the big aliens seen in leaked Duke artwork — is stomping across the grass. You've gone from just having your fists up to being armed with The Devastator, a big gun in each hand. Health is regenerative and the big bad guy wasn't that tough in the demo. I unloaded my ammo into him, waited for the next ammo drop, and then fired some more. Duke finished him with a button-prompted melee move.

The finale: press a button to do a "field goal," which is a punt of the monster's eye down the field.

Cue the Duke Nukem Forever logo and a camera pulls back to show that Duke, in first-person, was playing a video game. He's got a gold Xbox 360 controller with the face buttons re-named as D, U, K and E. There's a busty lady in a schoolgirl outfit near the bottom of your first-person view. And there's a second one. One stands up and wipes her mouth.

"What about the game, was it any good?" one of them asks.

"Yeah, but after 12 fucking years it should be," he answers.

After that the demo jumped forward to level 15, which began as a driving level. Duke was in a dune buggy, racing down a canyon as an alien shuttle streamed forward overhead. The buggy can boost for big jumps and, since aliens do run in its way, run over bad guys with a splat. Quickly, though, I was out of the buggy and running Duke toward an enemy turret, his laser-sighted pistol in hand. I was also able to get a railgun which had a scope and was good for headshots.

One of the most prominent tech elements of the game is a depth-of-field aspect which blurs enemies who aren't in Duke's focus. Of the obvious tech demonstrations happening in the demo — the destruction shown as cacti splintered from gunfire, the shattered mirror back in the locker room — this blurring effect was the only one that was distracting.

People wondered how Duke Nukem would make his return. Would a parody video game character steeped in 80s absurdity play in 2010? Or would he have to be a parody of a parody? It seems from the demo that Duke is strictly himself and that the kind of profane, naughty, steroid-injected humor of the Duke of old is indeed what will play in 2010 — or in 2011, to be more specific. The game is set for a 2011 release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Gearbox Software is working on the game with other studios and, we believe, creators who used to be on the project at 3D Realms.

To those who don't know the Duke Nukem Forever story, the game might seem like a standard first-person shooter with a few technological gimmicks and a more absurd, played-for-laughs attitude than today's more straight-faced but equally gruff shooter games. For those who know the DNF tale, this is the king returned as if through a time machine, a playable time capsule of one of gaming's wrongest icons.

P.S. The trailer being shown behind closed doors for the game includes strippers and a three breasted giant monster. Of the latter, Duke says, "Hell, I'd still hit it."

CaptHawkeye wrote:It's actually pretty sad to think how many people will play this game literally just because of how obsolete and broken it will be.

FSTargetDrone wrote:They had better release a super deluxe edition that includes playable levels (or at least video of said levels) showing its various incarnations through the years.

I remember a screen shot of the game back in 1997 or 1998 in a gaming magazine showing a grizzled miner/prospector and a mule for some reason.

CaptHawkeye wrote:It's actually pretty sad to think how many people will play this game literally just because of how obsolete and broken it will be.

Lagmonster wrote:I think I speak for a horde of people when I say I will play this out of sheer morbid curiosity, given the mythos of the game.

Stark wrote:

Lagmonster wrote:I think I speak for a horde of people when I say I will play this out of sheer morbid curiosity, given the mythos of the game.

By 'mythos' you mean ... nothing? Failure? Shit? Tax dodges?

The idea that anyone 'waiting' for the game expects it to have anything in common with the original DNF project is pretty funny stuff. The fact that this will sell simply because people are so stupid they'll buy any piece of shit that gets mentioned on gaming blogs is sad.

General Schatten wrote:I'll believe it when it's in my disc tray and the credits are rolling.

Molyneux wrote:

General Schatten wrote:I'll believe it when it's in my disc tray and the credits are rolling.

I'll second this.
I must admit I was a fan of the series before it hit development hell, but I'm extremely leery of what DNF will look like. I've been playing Borderlands lately, and it is quite a fun game, but with certain bizarre bugs that make me worry about Gearbox's competence.

General Zod wrote:
The game is already pretty much finished, all Gearbox is doing is polishing it up. So their involvement with the actual development is fairly minimal

Mr Bean wrote:

General Zod wrote:
The game is already pretty much finished, all Gearbox is doing is polishing it up. So their involvement with the actual development is fairly minimal

I'm calling Bullshit, you don't polish a game for two and a half years after it's been working on for a full decade. That time is going to be spent taking that decade of worth and the thousands of hours and cramming it into something unusable that does not crash every twenty minutes.

Psychic_Sandwich wrote:It's been 'mostly finished', 'pretty much done' and 'being polished' for years now.