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Duke Nukem Forever Canned [and then not]

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I'm not saying there wasn't self funding going, but the publisher did invest money or else they wouldn't own it, not to mention there may have been private investors too.

There was also that odd transfer of property between 3dRealms and some new company right at the end? It sounded odd and illegal.

My memory obviously isn't the best so I'll just mention that's all I remember and shut up. :)

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Upside?

For Gearbox and 2K, I mean. Sales won't be hurt by negative reviews the way they might be for an FPS without the same brand.

Like Pirates of the Caribbean 4: you've probably made up your mind about whether you're going to watch it before the reviews come out.

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So basically, 3DR were a monied mod team? :D

Case in point - the naked women stuck in biomechanical ooze and begging to be killed in DN3D were a bit iffy anyway (although the Aliens pastiche was very clear). But in DNF, the evolution of the engine and the space for sound files means that you've got a level where [...]

Very much this. It's an absurd thing to do with modern games tech and current video games culture.

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I bought and played Duke Nukem Forever out of curiosity, i just really needed to see what this game is. Not really a big fan of the series or anything.

So first let me play Devil's Advocate - It's not that bad.

This is not a Daikatana-like disaster, this is a functional and adequate game. I have played quite a few shooters even just on the 360 that are considerably larger failures of design. The shooting action here is reasonably capable, the game is filled with honestly kind of clever puzzles, there's a few tolerable vehicle sequences, the campaign is long and varied.

I've actually found it kind of fascinating for being such a bastard mess of ideas from different eras of FPS game design. It's also a little bewildering to play this game and recognize set pieces from decade-old trailers when it was, with no exaggeration, a completely different product. They must have just had this one defined design document that they've been iterating on endlessly this whole time, rather than completely rebooting the project when moving over to new technology.

I've seen a lot of people decrying the game for being a glitch ridden mess, which reeks of people just pulling out all the stops to shit on this game. The framerate is reasonably stable, and the game also certainly doesn't have any noticeable bugs, and it hasn't crashed on me. Load times are interminable though, oh my god. You die, and you wait like two minutes to restart. It would also be a fairly easy argument to make that it is the ugliest FPS on any of the current consoles. Just shiny, blurry textures and limp particle effects everywhere. All of that then lit by nothing but harsh, uniform lighting. It's actually hard to look at sometimes.

A lot has also been made of that hive level, and i think the people who made this thing seriously lost some perspective. The whole thing about aliens impregnating the women was in in those previous Duke Nukem games, but in a very abstracted and cartoonish way. I mean, here the way it's presented just makes it seem like something you would expect to see on some idiot teen's vile deviant art page. It's like those guys just took what they had in Duke 3d and dialed it up without thinking about the implications of doing that. 3D realms must have been so closed off and isolated from the world for that shit to get through enough hands to be okayed for the game without somebody going "Guys, guys... What the fuck?"

Eggghhh...

The game isn't funny, and all the low-fi nudity is just an extreme example of uncanny valley nastiness.

The multiplayer is pretty worthless.

Eggghhh...

It's just a rather below average game that is trying really hard to be really offensive. I think the incredibly negative reaction boils down to people having already decided that they want to hate this game, and that being the story they want from this game, that it was a catastrophic failure.

And that's it.

I don't want to think about this game anymore.

So now George Broussard's monstrosity is out and done with, will we see Randy Pitchford's Duke Nukem game? I wonder if the Duke Nukem license will have any value to Gearbox after this is all done with, getting the license was clearly why they took this project on at all.

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A lot has also been made of that hive level, and i think the people who made this thing seriously lost some perspective. The whole thing about aliens impregnating the women was in in those previous Duke Nukem games, but in a very abstracted and cartoonish way. I mean, here the way it's presented just makes it seem like something you would expect to see on some idiot teen's vile deviant art page. It's like those guys just took what they had in Duke 3d and dialed it up without thinking about the implications of doing that. 3D realms must have been so closed off and isolated from the world for that shit to get through enough hands to be okayed for the game without somebody going "Guys, guys... What the fuck?"

No loss of perspective. That passed through Gearbox, and it's fucking rank. Fuck being an apologisist for that titillating, tasteless bullshit.

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No loss of perspective. That passed through Gearbox, and it's fucking rank. Fuck being an apologisist for that titillating, tasteless bullshit.

I don't think you even read what i said, i wasn't defending the misogyny at all, it is pretty fucking tasteless and weird. I have a hard time imagining how all it survived its development intact.

As for Gearbox's involvement, by all accounts, the campaign was content complete by the time it arrived in Gearbox's hands, and the amount of actual work they did on this thing minimal. Are you saying those guys should have held it back and redesigned it again? That would have been a ludicrously stupid thing for them to do, and in the long-run the controversy generated from this is only going to help the game.

This game is average, that is worse than being bad. Without the built-in history and the controversy some individuals are generating around it, it would have been forgotten in a week.

Instead, it will probably go on to be fairly successful.

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I'm sorry Sno. I read too fast and misread made for take:

A lot has also been made of that hive level, and i think the people who made this thing seriously lost some perspective.

I think we're in agreement.

That level is like a racist elderly relative; it doesn't really understand what it's saying and how the world has changed.

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That level is like a racist elderly relative; it doesn't really understand what it's saying and how the world has changed.

It's such a strange artifact, it's stuck in a different era and it's not self-aware about it at all, that whole game is so out of touch with reality. Not even just tonally, it's striking just how old the entire thing feels. It's cribbing tricks from games that were newer than Duke 3D was, but are themselves now tired and old. You have Half-Life 2 physics puzzles, what is literally just the health system from Halo 2/3, CoD-style off-handed grenades, etc. There's nothing invigorating or new about Duke Nukem Forever.

It's just... Eggghhh...

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Not to derail the thread, but how am I to read "Eggghhh..." Is the g silent?

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Not to derail the thread, but how am I to read "Eggghhh..." Is the g silent?

Heheh, yeah, sure, i suppose that's how you should read my exasperated sigh.

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I was imagining a sort of drawn out "egg," which is fine.

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I wrote up the launch party, which was very well-managed but sort of put a lampshade on some of the things that are odd about the game... selflink here, if anyone's interested, because it's quite long and ramblomatic.

Oh, hey, I saw you there! I remember the cream suit! Awesome party, that.

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Scary shit over the review scores thing:

PR Firm Threatens Publications (Then Apologizes) Over Duke Nukem Review Scores

So fucked up.

Speaking of which, it really does seem as though they really didn't get Duke's humour. In that 2001 trailer you can see that Duke is the incredibly capable underdog -- he gets abuse from everyone, gets all the shitty jobs, but saves the day. In the GiantBomb video you can see that in DNF he's hailed and worshipped as a hero by everyone he bumps into.

It changes his character from the 80s action hero underdog into an unlikeable asshole.

That seems to be where things started to fall apart, and every gameplay video I've seen of this game just seems to show me that they TOTALLY missed the mark, and really, just offends the shit out of me.

I started watching a video of the Hive level and I hated what I heard just a few minutes in... Opening weird alien doorways that are designed to look like sphincters Duke says things like, "Ooh, tight fit." and "I thought this was exit only."

What?

Can you imagine Arnold saying that as he worked his way alone through some Predator homeworld in a movie? You'd be squirming in your seat wondering, "Jesus. What's wrong with him?!".

Duke Nukem isn't supposed to be a disgusting, lewd, horrible human-being, he's supposed to be a hero. He's supposed to be Ash from Evil Dead, Roddy Piper from They Live, or Arnold -- he crosses the line in risque, but only just, because he's a hero. He's not a sex obsessed misogynist.

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Scary shit over the review scores thing:

PR Firm Threatens Publications (Then Apologizes) Over Duke Nukem Review Scores

WTH?

Fuck Take2 and GearBox if that's how they do business.

Umm... isn't the whole point of that GB article basically that the guy who ran the Redner Group Twitter account was acting only on his own accord and 2K basically fired them afterwards? Like, therefore saying that it's exactly the opposite of how they do business?

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Yes, sorry. I was editing my post as you replied. I shouldn't have clicked post until I'd actually finished writing it. I got caught up editing the second half and forgot that I'd not re-read what I'd written in the first bit. Doh. :getmecoat

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To quote that Giantbomb piece:

Getting blacklisted by a publisher is not new. Publishers aren't required to work with any website. The difference is that when this happens, you don't tend to hear about it. Games just don't show up, emails go unanswered. It's part of the job, but what is usually constant is how it's a practice that remains behind-the-scenes. It almost never goes public. In this case, it went completely viral.

Practices like that are why we're always prepared to buy our own review copies, if necessary.

This kind of stuff happens all the time, PR types controlling who gets early review copies and who doesn't in an effort to curb the scores. (Favoring sites and writers that are either outright willing to work along with them or have simply expressed a positive interest in the game.) What's different here is that you heard about it. If that guy didn't start blabbing about it on his twitter, nobody would have made a fuss, and 2k wouldn't have had to make good on it.

It's pretty horrible, but it happens, it is a reality.

You've probably noticed it happen a few times at least without even realizing it, a big game will have a lot of really positive pre-release reviews and then get ripped to shreds upon its release. (I know some people felt this was particularly noticeable with Homefront, for a recent example.)

So reviews are kind of fucked, basically.

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Yeah, as someone who has written off and on for smaller enthusiast sites, I personally know that publishers are really fickle sometimes for almost no reason. Ubisoft is pretty notoriously bad for not wanting to interact with anyone but the bigger press outlets and beyond that I remember a distinct time when Dan Hsu from EGM (pre-reboot) remarked that they were blacklisted by Ubi for negative press on a few games in a row. It's really kinda bullshit, but I think every industry has to deal with it to some extent. I know that for movies there's no established system for pre-screening of movies, with some movies not having any, to some only having one screening per major city, to others having pre-screenings everywhere with multiple sittings open to almost any critics.

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So yes, finally finished DNF last week.

Gameplay time took me around 19h so I am truly extremely slow at playing game, but I had no rush.

The game had it's Duke moments, but felt a lot like set piece gaming where all levels were like completely separately designed. The gameplay felt quite slow compared to DN3D which I just played through during summer.

I'm relieved that they made the four weapon patch to the game as the idea about having only two weapons in a Duke game is quite horrible from the start. Also not a good idea to have the regen health and checkpoint saves from modern console games.

Checkpoint saving made me pissed the most if I happened to die in the wrong place at the wrong time, I had to backtrack a lot of stupid sequences.

Also the game made me feel like I was handheld almost the whole time and the levels did not feel open ended at all, because mostly it seemed to happen in quite small areas where the door always closed behind so you couldn't go back to the start.

I did however like to hear John St. John's voice again and the beginning of the game was pretty great with the museum and all that. I really liked all the small homages and nods to the previous games and other games. The game was practically filled with constant reminders and jokes about other things, just like DN3D was.

Seems I'm mostly writing about the bad aspects of the game, but overall it was a pretty mediocre game, I'm happy that the game finally came out, but also wondering that according to the history docs that came available in the menu after completing the game, that the PC single player was already done in spring 2010. How could they not see that this was not old school at all and that many changes should've been done to remove all the stupid stuff.

I watched all the videos that came to the menu as well and still even today, the 2001 E3 trailer is so great. The build videos from 2006 etc. look really crappy, from those you can clearly see that 3DRealms had no idea.

End verdict: :tmeh:

I hope next one will be great as that one should be now officially first real Gearbox project. Please Randy, make it really old school and seriously, play DN3D while you design it to really get the true old school feeling. Duke will work during these times if they make it right.

Lets see what happens with the DLC, it's taking too long to appear anyway and the achievements have been visible in Steam since summer so you pretty much know what to expect.

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