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Spanky The Dolphin wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:I refuse to believe that there has been an actual Duke Nukem game in development at 3D Realms for years; I think Broussard and whats-his-face have basically been dicking around having LAN parties and eating pizza for the past several years.

So basically things in the game development field are the same as they were in the mid 1990s?

Are you thinking of the dudes who made Ion Storm? Because they actually, you know, made something. It was crap, but it was actually something.

No, I seriously suggest that there is not even any haphazard effort at making a game at 3D Realms any more. I think they seriously have just been doing nothing for the past few years, and every so often someone fires up an image editor or something to "leak" to the internet.

Edward Yee wrote:Wow... I'd literally forgotten thinking, much less hearing, about this for years...

I say! I remember reading an article about 'Duke Nukem Forever' in a magazine published sometime between 1997 and 1998. JESUS that's a long time!

Uraniun235 wrote:Are you thinking of the dudes who made Ion Storm? Because they actually, you know, made something. It was crap, but it was actually something.

They made Deus Ex. Probably the best game I ever played.

I agree with U235. It's not as if Duke Nukem requires some kind of magic special new programming technology. It's just another FPS game, and its only special feature is its comical setting and mood. Big deal; there[s no reason it should have taken this long to come out with something, unless they're not really working on it at all.

I think the problem is that rather than just trying to make a game that's fun and a worthy follow-up to Duke Nukem 3D, they've gotten themselves under the illusion that they're making something that'll revolutionise the world of gaming. As a result, they've set such ridiculously high standards for themselves that they'll never satisfy them.

Darth Wong wrote:Big deal; there[s no reason it should have taken this long to come out with something, unless they're not really working on it at all.

Well, there is a reason: they can be constantly rewriting the game. We know they've switched 3d engines several times by now. It can also be that the team keeps seeing something new (or wants to implement something new), finds that it is beyond the limits of the currently written code, so something has to get rewritten. Rewriting that breaks other things, so more has to be rewritten.

Basically, the development team has no real design plan for the game. The more code that has already been written when they discover a limitation, the longer it takes to rewrite. Given the way they switch 3d engines, it's a good bet the thinking applies to the rest of the game as well.

I mean, back in 2000/2001 when Red Faction was in development, the DNF team probably just had to rewrite their engine to support blowing holes in objects the way Red Faction allowed.

Half-Life 2 probably sparked a requirement for a more robust physics simulation, as well.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't 3D Realms published a fair number of titles in the intervening period since Duke Nukem was announced? In any event, Duke Nukem Forever is not the worst example of vaporware (that would have to be a tossup between some of the advanced features promised for Microsoft's "Cairo" OS that aren't even in Vistas, and a complete, release-grade, standalone GNU operating system.

Kane Starkiller wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:Are you thinking of the dudes who made Ion Storm? Because they actually, you know, made something. It was crap, but it was actually something.

They made Deus Ex. Probably the best game I ever played.

I wasn't quite clear enough; I accidentally juxtaposed Daikatana and Ion Storm.

In any case, there were two major Ion Storm branches. One of them was led by John Romero and made Daikatana, and had an atrociously undisciplined work environment. (Masters of Doom detailed it very well.) The other was led by... Warren Specter? I don't remember. The other was led by some other dude and they were the dudes that made Deus Ex.

RThurmont wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't 3D Realms published a fair number of titles in the intervening period since Duke Nukem was announced?

Published, but not developed.

Uraniun235 wrote:
In any case, there were two major Ion Storm branches. One of them was led by John Romero and made Daikatana, and had an atrociously undisciplined work environment. (Masters of Doom detailed it very well.) The other was led by... Warren Specter? I don't remember. The other was led by some other dude and they were the dudes that made Deus Ex.

Yes, it's him.

Didn't John Romero have anything to do with Mafia: The Game, the wonderful piece of 1930's godfather style game?

Tolya wrote:Didn't John Romero has anything to do with Mafia: The Game, the wonderful piece of 1930's godfather style game?

No, that was a Czech group, Illusion Softworks who also made H&D.

There was a long running argument on a certain other webboard with a DNF fanboy. It was pointed out that the continual delays are like never buying a new pc because 'theres something new due out', in that case you'll never get anything done.

Duke at its most basic is a very simple blast em up, the FPS market has moved on from that, and the FPS market is saturated. Freelancer that took 5 years to come out probably barely broke even and that was in a genre that was short of games. Even if they go multi-platform it's very unlikely that they'll break even, never mind make money.

If it ever gets released, it'll feel like Prey. Maybe mildly inventive for the first few levels, but then showing every bit of it's development lifecycle.

Vendetta wrote:If it ever gets released, it'll feel like Prey. Maybe mildly inventive for the first few levels, but then showing every bit of it's development lifecycle.

I enjoyed Prey immensely. I doubt DNF will be as inventive as Prey though. The gravity stuff, spirit walking, the really psychedelic level design, funky weapons and stuff ...

What do you mean about it's development lifecylce?

Prey was announced, with pretty much the feature set it came out with, eleven years before it was finally released.

It feels like an eleven year old game, all but untouched by any progress made in FPS games since Unreal, all the refinements in how weapons and shooting work, how to present stories and how to design levels as places rather than obstacle courses with bad guys in have totally passed it by.

The big impressive inventive things like fooling around with local gravity which would have been really impressive when it was announced, by the time it came out have been done many times before (more often in third person action shooters, Ratchet & Clank games have you walking on all the walls and celings for example, and Serious Sam had a spherical room you could walk all around.

Some of the spiritwalk stuff was cool (like the first boss), but in the end it was pretty much exclusively used for pressing buttons whilst you left your body on the platform, lift, or whatever else the button moved.

Likewise the really cool bit where you walk through a portal onto a small planet, and then realise you're on a little ball in the room you used to be in, with the really huge enemy looking at you. It was cool, but absolutely nothing like it ever happens in the game again!.

It was fun, but it wasn't worth the wait.

Not to mention regarding the whole "portal" gimmick, that the demonstration teasers of Valve's Portal were released right before Prey came out, and showed a far better implementation of the same application.

In that manner the game literally got a final kick to the balls before it even came out.

Not to mention that the original Unreal had portals you could seamlessly see and shoot through. That capability in the Unreal engine was what gave rise to the original idea for Prey.

weemadando wrote:

Tolya wrote:Didn't John Romero has anything to do with Mafia: The Game, the wonderful piece of 1930's godfather style game?

No, that was a Czech group, Illusion Softworks who also made H&D.

Maybe he's thinking of Romero's borderline-underage eastern European girlfriend he picked up a couple of years ago.

Nah, for some reason I thought I saw Romero's name on Mafia's website. I don't know why.

Really, what is DNF going to offer the FPS market when (if) it is released?

DNF is at its heart a basic shooter. If they try to make it too complex, it's essentially not a Duke game any more. However, there is no denying that the FPS genre has moved on, whether its theme (WWII games were popular for a while), or in terms of atmosphere, Fear for example. DNF, however wonderful it is graphically is still essentially going to be an outdated game.

Either that, or I'm a cynical SOB.

Personally, I'd love to see a basic, pretty, run-and-gun shooter where you mow down dozens of enemies. The hell with some dude I can't even see killing me in two shots and lame-ass characters prattling on about shit I don't care about.

Onward to oblivion...

Hell, at this point the developers aren't even taking the game seriously.

The only thing Duke Nukem could possibly have to offer people is the light-hearted comedic aspect, with NC17-rated strippers. GTA got there first, but it doesn't have to be all seedy and negative. The atmosphere should be more like the Adam West Batman TV show: campy and silly.

If there's one thing I'm really tired of, it's the relentless "grittiness" that game designers are constantly trying to sell in their FPS games. Ooooh, my game is even more depressing than yours!!!! With an even more cynical, grim view of the future!!!