So they're actually finishing Duke Nukem Forever

[Whiplash]

Duke Nukem forever? I can't even remember the time when I stopped giving a shit about it anymore

Oh, you're so cool. I could understand why some of you wouldn't care about the game, but a lot of you are just posturing. I'd bet my life savings that we'll see these same exact posts in the review thread. Hell some of you bitching will probably still buy/rent it. I probably won't buy this game, mainly because I don't have a xbox 360/ ps3/ decent pc, but hell, no one called this game revolutionary, the only people that give an opinion about the game are the people that played it, and not your predictions because its so fun to hate popular things. *sigh*

[Aaron]

If the humour is similar to the old ones (pig cops, strippers, one liners) then yeah, I'll at least rent it. I enjoyed the old ones and while it may be rose coloured glasses, I see no reason for me not to play the new one.

[Ghost Rider]

If the humour is similar to the old ones (pig cops, strippers, one liners) then yeah, I'll at least rent it. I enjoyed the old ones and while it may be rose coloured glasses, I see no reason for me not to play the new one.

True, it was Doom with humor. This one is an odd combination of morbid curiosity and nostalgia, but at best a rental given what little has been shown is been to have one reconnect with the complete over the top that is Bruce Cam...I mean Duke Nukem. Very little has been shown of gameplay or such not.

[Stark]

I dunno, DN3D at least helped start the 'novelty weapons' thing that drove shooters for a while. If this doesn't have comedy weapons I'd be surprised.

[PeZook]

It also had a significantly improved engine over Doom. You could...*gasp*...look up! And down! And destroy (pre-scripted) buildings! And there was one weapon which you had to reload!

The Build engine and included editor also drove a huge mod community. It's a game which earned its place in the history of gaming, whatever its flaws and later fuckups of the development team.

[Davis 51]

The funny thing is that until Duke Nukem 3D Apogee / 3D Realms used to be a reasonably productive company with a new game published almost every year. Of course making games in those days was less time consuming in general, but it's still incredible how big clusterfuck the Duke Nukem Forever has been. It was largely the fault of the management, though, because it was certainly they who decided to switch the game engine several times (does anyone even know what the engine is now?) as well as not hiring enough people to work on the project. A competent management probably could have released the game somewhere around 2003, if we assume just one engine change.

I believe the engine is a heavily altered version of Unreal Engine (2.5 or 3 maybe, but its so far modified that it might as well have been built from scratch). And that it was mostly managements fault is absolutely true. There were so many false starts and restarts, reports of pieces which kept getting sent back to be redesigned (at one point they had to fire a large chunk of their staff for plagiarism), the whole thing was an absolute clusterfuck. I actually sympathize with the fact that they finally got their shit together around 2008, only to have their funding yanked mere months before completion.

Anyway, I'm buying it. Even if I never play it, it needs to be on my shelf.

[General Zod]

I dunno, DN3D at least helped start the 'novelty weapons' thing that drove shooters for a while. If this doesn't have comedy weapons I'd be surprised.

It has a "right trigger to urinate" function. I'll eat my hat if there's no comedy weapons.

[adam_grif]

Don't forget "press left to beer".

[Marcus Aurelius]

It also had a significantly improved engine over Doom. You could...*gasp*...look up! And down! And destroy (pre-scripted) buildings! And there was one weapon which you had to reload!

Don't forget actual SVGA graphics modes! (Yes, even 640x480 at 8 bpp (256 colors) is SVGA, but I remember that DN3D supported at least 800x600 as well, although you needed an absolutely top notch processor at the time of the release to run that; after all it was all software rendering.)

I believe the engine is a heavily altered version of Unreal Engine (2.5 or 3 maybe, but its so far modified that it might as well have been built from scratch)

I doubt it could be UE3. It became available in 2007 and surely they did not go for another engine change at that point? Of course if it doesn't require significant recoding compared to UE2, it could be possible.

[Stark]

UE3 is easy to switch to, but you'd need a shitload of better art assets to make it worthwhile.

[Vympel]

I've got to laugh at the DNF epic mismanagement, but I see no reason why all that delay would prevent me from playing the game if its actually any good.

[Davis 51]

I believe the engine is a heavily altered version of Unreal Engine (2.5 or 3 maybe, but its so far modified that it might as well have been built from scratch)

I doubt it could be UE3. It became available in 2007 and surely they did not go for another engine change at that point? Of course if it doesn't require significant recoding compared to UE2, it could be possible.

Looking into it more, yeah, its surely a heavily altered UE 2.5.

Interesting note, one of the former developers made posts on his blog claiming that Gearbox is essentially doing polishwork on what was already a 95% done project, and much of the last stretch of heavy lifting was done by Triptych Games (a studio apparently made up of former 3DR developers.)

Let me break this down for you. 85% of the work you see coming out of PAX is from our group at 3dr. 10% Triptych (the last 10% is the hardest ask any game developer) Which leaves 5% for the guys at Gearbox (with help from Triptych). To be perfectly honest, that Gearbox percentage could be plus or minus a few points. Bottomline, DNF was damn near completion if not completed when Gearbox got it (PC version). I'm not trying to discount anyones efforts as I have nothing to gain at this point. I just want to the truth out there in some form or fashion.

He goes on about how he's pissed that Gearbox is apparently trying to take credit as being "the studio that finished the unfinishable mess that was Duke Nukem Forever", while the way he sees it is that the game was Damn Near Finished (pun intended) already. He does come across as having an axe to grind, but if what he says is true, then I guess its justified.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Let me break this down for you. 85% of the work you see coming out of PAX is from our group at 3dr. 10% Triptych (the last 10% is the hardest ask any game developer) Which leaves 5% for the guys at Gearbox (with help from Triptych). To be perfectly honest, that Gearbox percentage could be plus or minus a few points. Bottomline, DNF was damn near completion if not completed when Gearbox got it (PC version). I'm not trying to discount anyones efforts as I have nothing to gain at this point. I just want to the truth out there in some form or fashion.

He goes on about how he's pissed that Gearbox is apparently trying to take credit as being "the studio that finished the unfinishable mess that was Duke Nukem Forever", while the way he sees it is that the game was Damn Near Finished (pun intended) already. He does come across as having an axe to grind, but if what he says is true, then I guess its justified.

Everything he says may be be true, but they will still have to port it to XBox 360 and PS3, which is bound to require some work, especially considering that much of the code base probably predates PS3.

[Drooling Iguana]

Don't forget actual SVGA graphics modes! (Yes, even 640x480 at 8 bpp (256 colors) is SVGA, but I remember that DN3D supported at least 800x600 as well, although you needed an absolutely top notch processor at the time of the release to run that; after all it was all software rendering.)

The big thing for me was that it allowed for slanted floors and rooms above rooms, and unlike the first Quake (which came out at about the same time) it didn't look like absolute shit.

[frogcurry]

He goes on about how he's pissed that Gearbox is apparently trying to take credit as being "the studio that finished the unfinishable mess that was Duke Nukem Forever", while the way he sees it is that the game was Damn Near Finished (pun intended) already. He does come across as having an axe to grind, but if what he says is true, then I guess its justified.

He should be glad its going to be issued by anyone at all - Gearbox are entitled to take all the credit for it given that they volunteered to take the financial risk associated with finishing and releasing a standing joke for inactivity. And he can now put it on his CV without being laughed at for it.

I think Prey was of the same era as Duke Nukem and similarly delayed, I remember reading about them both in a PC gamer issue many, many years ago.

[Vendetta]

I think Prey was of the same era as Duke Nukem and similarly delayed, I remember reading about them both in a PC gamer issue many, many years ago.

IIRC when Prey was finally released it had been "in development" for 11 years. I remember the first previews of it then, when they were jabbering about making every doorway a portal so they could have structures which were bigger on the inside than the outside without area transitions and loading screens. (Portals were first implemented in UE1, remember).

Of course, the final product had nothing like that, and lets face it wasn't really much cop.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I think Prey was of the same era as Duke Nukem and similarly delayed, I remember reading about them both in a PC gamer issue many, many years ago.

IIRC when Prey was finally released it had been "in development" for 11 years.

Of course, the final product had nothing like that, and lets face it wasn't really much cop.

The final version of Prey developed by Human Head Studios had practically nothing to do with the early 3D Realms internally developed versions, though, except perhaps some bits of level design. The early versions used an internally developed engine (not UE1), which they never managed to make work properly. The final used a modified id Tech 4 (i.e. the Doom 3 engine). In general this delay was more understandable, because developing a radically new engine from scratch was not a trivial matter even in the late 1990s.

[open_sketchbook]

Prey had a lot of problems, but the game took a lot of interesting risks and was jam-packed with really innovative stuff. Some of it worked, some of it didn't, but it was nice to see a game think so far outside the box (to the point of putting you ON a box at one point and having you fight enemies while jumping up and over corners onto the next face of the shape!) I mean, most of it had been done before, but not usually in shooters and not usually all at once.

The part that was wierd was they set up this awesome combination of variable gravity, sticky paths, portals, and spiritwalking, and never gave us any deep interactions with these mechanics, just wierd new context in which aliens needed to be shot in the face and "exploration" puzzles which aren't actually puzzling. So, a lot of the mechanics ended up being incidental; sure, there are portals, but that justs means that sometimes doors will open in air instead of walls. Sure, gravity is variable, but that just means that the enemy might be on a different plane than you, which is not new to Prey at all. These mechanics just sort of happened around you and you shot your way through it, and you never more than brushed the core of them. All these mechanics came across as setpieces.

In that, it was very 1990s, and that's my worry for DNF. Prey it was painfully linear; go from here to here, oh a roadblock, find switch, countinue. With the exception of the manditory spirit-walking bits, you basically followed a path often no bigger than the sticky catwalks from beginning to end. The fact the path inverted on occasion didn't change how painfully straight it was. I'm not saying that there is no room for an old-school attitude but we've learned a lot about making the player feel as thought the are moving under their own power, so to speak, and Prey never really had that. It was immersive only in that you had to really focus because it got confusing at times. I'm just hoping that DNF doesn't fall prey to something similar.

[Darth Yan]

I'm mildly hopeful. with the inept morons out of the way it might make a chance, since they won't keep delaying (the reason it fell through was because the maker wanted it to be perfect, so he torched the game when it was nearly finished a few times.)

[Slacker]

If the game isn't awful, I could see picking it up on a Steam sale or something. The old one has a soft spot in my heart.