Shouldn't it go atomic instead?
You mean it's finally right.
The game better have some of the most epic fights ever printed onto a disk.
If there isn't a scene where you have to drive a jeep across the undulating back of a flying serpent alien while simultaneously rocket launching at other alien ships and machine gunning smaller aliens bursting out of the big one's back while the serpent flies back and forth through a city and military jets constantly spray at the alien with you having to dodge it *takes a breath* and not spilling your beer all to the song "Ghost Love Score" by Nightwish, topped off by decapitating the serpent with a well timed jump off one part of it's back and plunging the jeep (with custom blade attachment) into it's neck and rocket launching yourself to safety on one of the military jets being piloted by some blonde air force woman and spouting out a one liner then they have failed.
Duke Nukem Forever, most immature game ever? Some of it was amusing despite itself, though...
As for the game, there's some backlash against the demo, but it's to be expected really, this game was supposed to be out a year ago and is such a long-running project that it's obviously not going to do everything the same way other games of today do. That's what's good about it really though, it's a throwback in some ways... some people won't like that but oh well.
I don't know what I'll think of the game -- FPSes aren't exactly my favorite kinds of games after all -- but at least it's finally coming out, which is pretty awesome.
Reviews are finally coming in...and they're not pretty.
I think much of the press made up their minds on DNF a long time ago...
Great Rumbler Wrote:Reviews are finally coming in...and they're not pretty.
The harshest critic I heard, said that it felt like playing a 5th generation (PSX,N64) era First person shooter that was ported over into being a 7th gen game.
The P.C version has noticeably received higher ratings and that was dukes traditional home platform afterall.
Most Duke fans think its good but not great , It won't live up to the hype and expectations..
Some say its a piece a shit and a massive disappointment, while others oddly enough will say it's so bad that its good! LOL!
Yeah, I think the fact that the console ports are apparently not so great is hurting the game a lot, because most people are playing it on consoles. All agree that the PC version is much, MUCH better than the console versions -- which makes sense, given that the PC version was all that 3D Realms was working on and the console ports are just things that have been made within the past year.
Notwithstanding the fact that all FPS' are much much better on PC anyway.
However that seems like a controls issue, while the main complaints don't seem to have to do with controls at all. Unless the PC game is notably different in much bigger ways than controls, that wouldn't account for it.
All that said, the reviews aren't good, but I lost a lot of faith after finding out that Splatterhouse was actually very good (at least I had a great time) after all the reviewers skewered it. Maybe this will turn out to be good as well. However, I've heard of some of the humor... It doesn't sound very funny... instead it just sounds aweful.
Quote:However that seems like a controls issue, while the main complaints don't seem to have to do with controls at all. Unless the PC game is notably different in much bigger ways than controls, that wouldn't account for it.
It's not just controls, the PC version has better graphics, no framerate issues, shorter load times, etc. Better all around.
Quote:All that said, the reviews aren't good, but I lost a lot of faith after finding out that Splatterhouse was actually very good (at least I had a great time) after all the reviewers skewered it. Maybe this will turn out to be good as well. However, I've heard of some of the humor... It doesn't sound very funny... instead it just sounds aweful.
Yeah, some does sound stupid... just like some of the humor in Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior, so 3D Realms is doing the humor just like they always have.
Anyway, I really think that the biggest factor in the low review scores is reviewers prejudging the game because of how long it was in development. It just wasn't going to get a fair chance. Scores for DNF are lower than scores for many other much worse games, and there's no good reason for that. Sure, it was in development for 14 years, but still its total budget was well below that of some other recent games (this was not a $50 million game like Homefront, for instance, I'd guess it was half that). I think that it is fair to have somewhat high expectations for it, given that it was in development for so long, but overall it should be judged on its own merits... reviewers clearly aren't doing that.
Quote:but overall it should be judged on its own merits... reviewers clearly aren't doing that.
The only reason the game was even finished and released was because of its notoriety regarding the interminable development cycle (which was not, in my opinion, a compelling reason for the game to be finished). The more recent generation of gamers probably only know about the
Duke Nukem franchise in the context of this title and its infamous backstory. Given what I know about it, it seems as though the acquisition, development, and release of this game focuses at least as much on that infamy as it does all the other factors which make for a game anybody would want to play. That doesn't sound like a particularly well-informed decision to me.
A Black Falcon Wrote:but still its total budget was well below that of some other recent games (this was not a $50 million game like Homefront, for instance, I'd guess it was half that). I think that it is fair to have somewhat high expectations for it, given that it was in development for so long, but overall it should be judged on its own merits... reviewers clearly aren't doing that.
DNF was essentially a home-brewed game almost, George Broussard funded development for it right out of his own pocket and that's largely why it never met the deadlines since he didn't have to answer to the publisher and he was accountable to no one! DNF only got released because Broussard ran out of money and started to depend on outside funding and the investors would only put up with so much before they lost their patience and pulled the plug filing a lawsuit, If Broussard had his way DNF would still be in development.
DNF is pretty fun so far, It's got some challenging puzzles and ameauture humor, The only game I've ever played were you can slap uncensored alien titties to get a power up!
I can understand why the demo got so many negative reviews as DNF is pretty slow to start and the two-gun limit really blows and is such a retarded pointless restriction, I can't comprehend why 3d realms thought it was a good idea since it wasnt even like that in DN3D.
I agree about the two gun limit thing, those limits are always so stupid... that was one of the bad things Halo did to the FPS genre. :(
Weltall Wrote:The only reason the game was even finished and released was because of its notoriety regarding the interminable development cycle (which was not, in my opinion, a compelling reason for the game to be finished). The more recent generation of gamers probably only know about the Duke Nukem franchise in the context of this title and its infamous backstory. Given what I know about it, it seems as though the acquisition, development, and release of this game focuses at least as much on that infamy as it does all the other factors which make for a game anybody would want to play. That doesn't sound like a particularly well-informed decision to me.
I just don't believe that. Actually I think that it'd have quite possibly have been released last year had 3DR not imploded. It was on track, the PC version was nearing the end of development... had 3DR just had a few million dollars more, the PC version easily would have been out last year.
The console ports probably would have taken longer, 3DR wasn't working on those (those have just been made within the past year), but the PC version is better anyway so oh well.
Of course Broussard could have sabotaged that by blowing up the game again and starting over yet again, but they finally had a team lead willing to push back against him and say "no, we need to just finish this", and the money was running out, so I really do think that they'd have released it.
Yeah, but it'd probably have been even worse for it. The PC version is the same game, just with different controls and some slightly better graphics. I watched a "video review" of it by Video Games Awesome, and they played the PC version. There's really no difference. People aren't complaining about controls or graphics, they're complaining about the levels and stupidity.
A Black Falcon Wrote:I agree about the two gun limit thing, those limits are always so stupid... that was one of the bad things Halo did to the FPS genre. :(
I just don't believe that. Actually I think that it'd have quite possibly have been released last year had 3DR not imploded. It was on track, the PC version was nearing the end of development... had 3DR just had a few million dollars more, the PC version easily would have been out last year.
The console ports probably would have taken longer, 3DR wasn't working on those (those have just been made within the past year), but the PC version is better anyway so oh well.
Of course Broussard could have sabotaged that by blowing up the game again and starting over yet again, but they finally had a team lead willing to push back against him and say "no, we need to just finish this", and the money was running out, so I really do think that they'd have released it.
Its a average game that will give you a few good laughs, It's worth renting on the consoles but I don't recommend buying it unless you plan on getting the PC version like I have already said.
The game would not seem so underwhelming and dated had it actually been released 6 years ago rather then sit in the shadow of COD , Duke Nukem has so much untapped potential as a franchise that I hope gearbox will do something better with it next time around.
George Broussard - "I didn't ship it, I only worked on it up to mid 2009" ... Technically true, but what would you have done, started over again and delayed it another five years? I'm hoping that he just means that he thinks that had he been able to finish it, instead of the mini-team at Triptych, it'd have been a better, more complete game... and while that is likely true, I doubt very much it'd have entirely addressed all of the complaints people have.
Duke Nukem Forever was almost certainly going to be a kinda busted, really janky game whether or not 3D Realms was able to finish it.
Now I start to wonder if 3D Realms just had a 12 year scam going, just milking whatever money they could.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Now I start to wonder if 3D Realms just had a 12 year scam going, just milking whatever money they could.
Most of the money came from their own bank account, it wasn't until near the end that they actually started going to other companies [mainly 2K] for the cash to finish.
Great Rumbler Wrote:Duke Nukem Forever was almost certainly going to be a kinda busted, really janky game whether or not 3D Realms was able to finish it.
Likely so, but it probably would have been more polished and complete with the whole team finishing it for that last year instead of a tiny group of them just trying to use what they had to get it done enough to ship, once someone helped them out with the costs of that as Gearbox eventually did.
Also yeah, 3D Realms spent over $20 million of their own money on this game, not money they were getting from others.
Why do you keep saying that it was finished by a "tiny group"? Triptych continued to work on the game by themselves after 3D Realms went bust, but before 2K stepped in. After 2K stepped in, Gearbox joined the development and provided the man-power necessary to finish it.
Neither of those two groups had anything [or, at least, very much] to do with the multiplayer or the console ports, which was handled by Piranha Games.
Well that's one conspiracy I can clear off the list.
At any rate, it makes it all the sadder it ended up like this.
There are way too many penis jokes. Why are there so many penis jokes? The brochure said there'd only be a few penis jokes. This is a terrible Duke Nukem.
Dark Jaguar Wrote:Now I start to wonder if 3D Realms just had a 12 year scam going, just milking whatever money they could.
I've already addressed this issue in advance, Your not the first person to suspect 3drealms of pulling an elaborate scam to shirk money off of publishers, that allegation is unfounded given that DNF for the first eight years was funded personally by Mr Broussard out of his own pocket.
That's not right ASM, 3D Realms never got additional outside funding. That's why they had to fire the team in May '09, because they couldn't get Take Two to give them the money they needed to finish it, since they'd finally run out of their own funds.
Take Two may have given them some money at some point, years and years ago, for development, when the publishing deal was signed or something (I'm not certain offhand), but there certainly was no continuing funding coming to 3DR, and none came at the end, which is why things ended as they did.
Quote:Why do you keep saying that it was finished by a "tiny group"? Triptych continued to work on the game by themselves after 3D Realms went bust, but before 2K stepped in. After 2K stepped in, Gearbox joined the development and provided the man-power necessary to finish it.
I was referring to Triptych, which is a small group of people who had worked for 3DR and were fired when the team was dropped as described above, who decided to finish the game on their own and worked on it for some time without pay before Gearbox picked it up for completion. From what I've heard, by the time Gearbox got it (and moved Triptych in with them to complete the work) it was mostly complete; I'm not entirely sure what exactly Gearbox itself was doing on the game. More final polish, I imagine... plus testing, bugfixing, etc. But I don't know how much actual design/programming they did on the game. Not most of it I'm pretty sure, but they could have done more than I think, I'm not sure... it's hard to sort out exactly who did what.
Quote:Neither of those two groups had anything [or, at least, very much] to do with the multiplayer or the console ports, which was handled by Piranha Games.
True.
Quote:I was referring to Triptych, which is a small group of people who had worked for 3DR and were fired when the team was dropped as described above, who decided to finish the game on their own and worked on it for some time without pay before Gearbox picked it up for completion. From what I've heard, by the time Gearbox got it (and moved Triptych in with them to complete the work) it was mostly complete; I'm not entirely sure what exactly Gearbox itself was doing on the game. More final polish, I imagine... plus testing, bugfixing, etc. But I don't know how much actual design/programming they did on the game. Not most of it I'm pretty sure, but they could have done more than I think, I'm not sure... it's hard to sort out exactly who did what.
I highly doubt that Gearbox grabbed up a half-finished game, slapped their name on the box, and then released it. If it was half-finished when they got it, then they finished it. But that's neither here nor there. The problem was the foundation that everything was built on and the foundation was riddled with cracks, made with poor quality concrete, and far from level. It was mess and was always going to be a mess. The only way to NOT make it a mess was to scrap the entire project and start over from scratch.
I'm not convinced that ever actually happened at 3D Realms, despite the repeated start-overs. Too many left over elements, too many left over ideas. Or that there was ever a project leader with a singular vision for what the game was going to be when it was finished, or at least not until it was far too late.
ABF , Thanks for the clarification.
I am surprised 3D realms didn't go bust allot sooner, When was the last time they released a game and injected new money into their company? These guy's not only fail at making deadlines they completely bomb when it comes to running a business!
Everyone attached to DNF who did not abandon ship like so many did years ago, Is now gonna have a hard time finding work within the industry now that their so infamous at fail that their in the Guiness book of world records for the longest protracted project in the history of the industry and also the most vaporware awards ever won.
3D Realms made a lot of money off of Duke Nukem 3D, Duke related products [including some other games], and licensing their engine. They also had a really small team working through all those years, so the company was probably costing less than a million a year to operate.
The latter really hurt development because games kept getting more complex, yet they never increased the size of the team.
Yeah, despite the very long development, the total cost was only something around 25 million or something, not out of line for a big game these days. It's just that 3DR never had more than 35 people on the team, and they only got up to even that number in the last couple of years before their collapse; they'd had a smaller team before that. They just didn't have the same number of people to pay that other big studios do, or did. And yes, it did hurt them, both in making it take longer and in making it harder to keep up with those other teams.
Quote:I highly doubt that Gearbox grabbed up a half-finished game, slapped their name on the box, and then released it. If it was half-finished when they got it, then they finished it.
I don't think it was half finished by the time Gearbox got it, I think it was mostly done, thanks to 3DR and then Triptych's work at piecing together what they had into a game form. Gearbox just had to finish it up and get it ready for release. But yeah, I don't know that for sure either. Unfortunately though, in addition to the lacking polish, there were sacrifices -- whole big chunks of the game as it existed in May '09 aren't in the final version, including for example all the parts with the female helper character, Bombshell, who you can see in the '01 trailer I believe for instance. I'd thought she'd been removed years ago, but apparently not.
There is a rumor of a 15-stage single player DLC coming though, perhaps they're working on finishing up some of the missing stuff for release as DLC? We'll see.
Quote:But that's neither here nor there. The problem was the foundation that everything was built on and the foundation was riddled with cracks, made with poor quality concrete, and far from level. It was mess and was always going to be a mess. The only way to NOT make it a mess was to scrap the entire project and start over from scratch.
I'm not convinced that ever actually happened at 3D Realms, despite the repeated start-overs. Too many left over elements, too many left over ideas. Or that there was ever a project leader with a singular vision for what the game was going to be when it was finished, or at least not until it was far too late.
That is probably likely, they scrapped most of their work repeatedly, but yeah, some ideas did carry over. Look at how the '98/01 trailers have gun turret parts, vehicles, a western town, Vegas, etc. in them -- clearly some elements did carry over from each version of the game to the next.
But the old versions looked pretty good (the '01 trailer... so impressive for the time...), so I can see why they'd do that, and it's not all a bad idea... and once you're that far into it you don't want to throw out EVERYTHING, understandably.
The problem was that they kept trying to fit in the old, holdover ideas into the newer iteration, rather than starting from scratch with a singular vision. It led to things being messy and making it that much harder to fit it all together into a coherent whole.
A Black Falcon Wrote:I just don't believe that. Actually I think that it'd have quite possibly have been released last year had 3DR not imploded. It was on track, the PC version was nearing the end of development... had 3DR just had a few million dollars more, the PC version easily would have been out last year.
It could have come out five years ago and what I said would still apply. Come on, people were making jokes about the 'Forever' part of the title when Clinton was still in office.
So PC Gamer (the US magazine) gave DNF an 80%. Not bad, that's one of the highest scores I've seen so far! :)
Quote:It could have come out five years ago and what I said would still apply. Come on, people were making jokes about the 'Forever' part of the title when Clinton was still in office.
Quite true. I was just saying that it'd probably be out a little earlier, not that that would have made a big difference for the "insane dev time" issue/mockery. It wouldn't have, that's true.
I just played the demo, finally. I had fun, I'm definitely still thinking about getting the full version. (The main reason I haven't, of course, is because buying full-price FPSes is something I do about once every five years...)
Other than the somewhat short length of the demo, my main complaint really is that I hate checkpoint-based saving. Oh, the regenerating heath and two weapon limit are lame and shouldn't be there, but checkpoint-based saving in a PC FPS? That's just wrong. Still though, it was decently entertaining. Graphics look fairly nice, and I was able to put the settings up pretty high with a decent framerate.
I paid all of $1 for Duke Nukem Forever [Amazon was selling it for $6 and I had a $5 coupon off certain downloadable games] and that's probably about what it's worth.
And it's not like it's a really terrible or broken game, it's just...so boring. The combat is so bland and boring and the most basic corridor running and gunning imaginable, the locations are bland and sometimes repeated [had to go through the same part of the hotel twice, not that it matters since every part of the hotel looks the same anyway] and it's all just boxes with different textures for you to run through, and there's nothing about the enemies that's particularly exciting they just appear then run at you. The only thing this game has going for it is sex humor and nostalgia, and I don't have much nostalgia for Duke Nukem and the sex humor gets old fast, so there's really not much left.
If anything, DNF has really made me appreciate Rage that much more, since Rage does throw-back FPS gameplay so, so much better.