Duke Nukem Never.....

Oh, it already achieved that status some time ago.

The whole DNF thing is hilariously stupid, but at the end of the day it's a shame a potentially great gaming series was stopped in its tracks by whatever spectacular ineptitude it was that kept it locked in development hell. At least now we might hear some proper reports about what they actually did with those 12 years.

1. DNF has always been vaporware
2. DNF is a greater disaster than Daikatana, I think more money has been spent on it and with Daikatana at least you had a functional (if not boring) game.

But at least Duke Nukem never made me his bitch...

Wasn't some top secret gameplay footage revealed recently? At some Con, right? I coulda sworn I remember people swooning over that, too.

I can't believe it took this long to die. Whoever was writing the checks for this project must've been a supreme idiot.

The footage looked good. Had the shrink ray and everything.

Yep. http://www.chud.com/articles/article...STS/Page1.html

You make absolutely no sense.

This is probably common knowledge, but I was amused to read earlier that another 3D Realms game, Prey, lingered in development hell for 11 years and only got finished when they outsourced the project to another developer. I'm amazed they stayed in business this long, frankly.

I hope there's a book about this project somewhere down the line. It would make for a fascinating read.

Their official line is "it's done when it's done". Note that this is a common phrases among tech people for OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS. Because, if you are not getting paid to do the work, and/or the customer is not paying it makes sense to say that.

However when you say that for a commercial project, that's a line that a developer will invoke when they're horribly behind on work. So I wouldn't trust any dates these guys spout about how complete their game was. It seems like there was no game, just a bunch of concepts and technology that never really meshed together.

I guess the only upside at working in that company is that you never hard to worry about delivering anything, and the paychecks kept coming in.

*R.I.P.* 3d Realms
My guess is the engine changes broke the team's back somewhere in 2001/2002 and they just worked on without a real motivation after that.
They started with the Quake-Engine in 1996, then Unreal1 1999, Unreal2 in 2001/2002 and then sometime after that Unreal2.5.

3D Realms was one of the last independent game studios, too bad it's gone.
I hope Crytek (a very independent studio) or another high-tech company with their own engine picks up the IP and does something with it.
The concept art that is leaking now that the employees are looking for new jobs looks like the game had a promising design foundation, but the endless engine changes and lazy management probably killed it years ago.

Wasn't Duke Nukem pretty much a novelty franchise, anyway? The following, as I saw it, was sort of a meta nerd joke about wanting the obscure game that they probably wouldn't get.

Maybe, but the joke started as legitimate anticipation. Duke Nukem 3D was an excellent, excellent game. It did a lot of new things in the FPS style, especially in level design and interaction, and it did them well. I wanted Duke Forever because I wanted to see what that talent could produce with even better tools. Though I'm not sure how much of the original talent was involved anymore.

I still hope the game gets finished and released, and if it doesn't, like Headless Fett said, I at least want to read the book about what the hell happened over the past 12 years.

Yeah, Duke Nukem 3D was the real deal. I always preferred it to Doom- it had more style, and the graphics and amount of interaction was phenomenal for the time.

I believe this was the first FPS that had you battling aliens in between strippers at a club.

Plus unlike Doom, the character you played had an actual personality.

Footage. Funny how it takes the end of the development studio for us to finally get a real, appetite-whetting look at the game.

I'm feeling pretty sad now.

The animation reel looked very cool.
You can see they were aiming for very fluid movements and animation when interacting with the world. Duke's body was completely there in 1st person, (like FEAR) and giving the alien mothership the middlefinger was great.

Also like that his health bar reads "EGO".

The footage looks pretty great, but the thing that people have always said is that they could whip up these little sections pretty easily but creating a cohesive and existent entire game seemed to be out of their capabilities.

It does look like there are some good concepts and creativity in that footage which makes it disappointing that they were unwilling to hire management that was capable of getting them to actually finish the game.

Yeah, I get the distinct impression these guys were working about 5 hours a week, if that. Think of all the great games that have been made, from start to finish, from small developers and large, just since the last "engine change" for DNF.

If that shows how far they got, the clip just reaffirms just how far away they were from a real full blown game. Strip away the updated models and animations and what is shown there is much less of a game than the original one released eons ago.

Good riddance 3DRealms.

http://www.duke4.net/news.php

The renders and unskinned models that are showing up on sites now are pretty impressive too. If they were actually that close though, why is Take 2 not willing to fund the final months. Sounds like speculation.

This is sad, I think. I know it turned into an industry joke by 2001, after the original 1997 announcement, but I don't see why anyone would wish ill upon the game. Who wouldn't want a shooter with satirical humor and creative level designs? Yeah, the graphics might have been a little behind the times (if it came out), but it could have been fun.

the graphics didn't seem to be the issue, last word was that they were using a recent unreal engine. And I don't think anyone(who isn't just being a hole) wishes the game ill, but patience can only be stretched so far.

http://duke.a-13.net/

A pre-order receipt from 2001.

And other interesting tidbits from this fiasco. Funny stuff at the end is a list of things that have taken less than the dev. time for this "game".

Cracks me up everytime I read that list.

In the early days of multiplayer gaming (nobody lugs computers to each others houses any more do they?) Duke was fantastic. Few games were so much fun to play single player and quite possibly 10x as fun to play multiplayer. It wasn't a novelty franchise, it was a game that a lot of gamers looked forward to for a few years and then realized it was just never going to happen.

Like others have mentioned, what they were unable to do graphically they made up for with great gameplay and level design. I've mentioned it on these forums before, but I can specifically remember doing multiplayer on Duke 3D and my friends and I got to the point where the most creative kill on a level would "win" it. I spent 5 minutes littering the floor to a single room with pipe bombs, then found an out of the way room with a security monitor and sat there watching that room over the monitor. As soon as a buddy ran into the room and realized what he was looking at, I detonated. I was on the other side of the map and blew up my buddy and we laughed like idiots for 5 minutes.

Duke 3D also had one of the best mod communities ever.

It was a great game, but the franchise was always tongue in cheek - that doesn't mean it was any less relevant as a game.

Still, I never held out hope this was going to be any good.

I remember playing a console Duke game as a 3rd person shooter. What the hell was it?

EDIT: Think it might have been Time to Kill

That PS1 game, probably. Time To Kill?

Edit- Yeah. That was a pretty crappy game. Didn't even know there was a sequel.

Manhattan Project was a lot of fun though.

Ah, anybody remember this:



How far the Duke has come. RIP you alien ass kicking, chick saving, world saving group of polygons.

Perhaps it was the N64's Zero Hour? That was a great game, though damn hard. Huge levels with an unforgiving save system, but they were loads of fun. Great multiplayer too; I had more fun playing Zero Hour deathmatch than I ever did with Goldeneye.

You mean they ARE suing.

Didn't Apogee (3DRealms) sort of go bankrupt anyways?

Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeemorieeeeeeeeeeeeeeees...

God I adored that original Duke.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/duke-lawsuit/


Yep, Lawsuits in the works. And they are trying to get the Source code preserved during the suit

could prove interesting

Some disgruntled ex-3DRealms guy should just leak the current build of the game together with the SDK, the community could then pick up where they left of and we could play this game in 2-3 years.

http://games.ign.com/articles/981/981284p1.html

ouch.