Tendo City

Here's a game that was technically finished decades ago but got delayed due to publisher disputes. It came out last year, after a 25 year delay. So, is this the most delayed game of all time, or does it not really count since the basic design was completed ages ago and all they did to the code was get it functional on modern versions of Windows?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/348300/

IMO a delayed game is a delayed game, regardless of publisher disputes or redesign. So this beats out Duke Nukem Forever as the most delayed game ever. However, Duke Nukem Forever is still a sadder example of a game getting delayed and redesigned ad infinitum. All the blood, sweat, and tears gone into that game, and it was still a mediocre game with mediocre sales. I guess we should have seen it coming.

Well, I don't think it's quite like DNF (or other long-in-development games that released more recently like FFXV and The Last Guardian) because this wasn't in full development the whole time, it was just brought back after a long time as an abandoned project. It still is really cool that the game was resurrected. I've never been a huge Chip's Challenge fan, but it is a puzzle game classic and it's great they made more of it. I think I actually have Chip's Challenge 2 from some steam sale a while back, I just haven't played it... I should.

How much development does a game need to have to be considered in development during the whole delay? I ask because Half-Life Episode 3 is, eventually, going to actually get made at some point (even if Valve has effectively cancelled it now, these things have a way of changing as time goes on). It's very clear all development on this episode is basically over and done with now, but should it be released, it'll have the mantle of "most delayed game" by then, unless you consider the total lack of development during various gaps an issue. Then you've got to consider just how much development Duke Nukem Forever actually had during certain periods of the project. The game we eventually got was such a disappointment that I really do have to wonder if that team really was just making up excuses to keep the money coming in with only occasional work on it. Sure, they were heavily developing it at first, but I think they really did get too "comfortable" with the arrangement of eternal delays and it made them lazy.

DNF was under development by a fairly small team for a AAA game, and it was rebooted repeatedly during development as George Broussard always wanted to keep up with advancements in the genre, ultimately to the games' detriment. Basically it had no controls on its development because 3DR funded most of the games' development themselves, so there was no publisher keeping them on track, demanding builds, etc... at least, not until the end, when their money finally ran out and they had to go to the publisher. The publishers had had enough after a while though and didn't keep giving them money, so 3DR had to fire almost everyone and pretty much shut down. A few staff then went to finish the game on their own, first on their own and then with Gearbox, who of course published the final game. The version that was released started development somewhere around '07 (and released a few years later), if I remember correctly; it wasn't the same version that had been in development since the late '90s.

DNF is a game I followed during development of course, as I really loved Apogee's games back in the early to mid '90s, particularly their platformers. I haven't played much of the final game, but it seemed okay from what little I played. So yeah, I can't exactly say "DNF is actually a great game" since I only played a bit of it, but I will defend its development, as I believe the people at 3DR when they say that they worked on it that whole time, it just never came together due to the issues described above and more. With someone telling George Broussard 'enough, finish THIS version' we could have had it a lot sooner, I think... and with how great that 2001 trailer was, I wish that had happened. Being able to self-fund is the ideal situation of course as no one likes having someone else control when you get paid, but Broussard proved himself unable to resist the temptation of endless upgrades that keep the game from actually finishing, so he probably needed it.

In comparison, Half-Life 3? From everything we know, it hasn't been in development in any form in years now. Today's Valve only wants to make games which have endless replay value online and huge amounts of DLC money-hooks built in, not single player shooters. I don't think it's similar to DNF's situation at all.

That's fair. You're probably right and I said too much based on my initial assumptions there.

You really can't blame those investors from being that mad though. I'm sure from their perspective, "sucking up money without actually doing anything" is exactly how they saw the situation. I'm all for the "long project", but when you're a team getting paid, something's gotta give. It's too bad they just plain outsourced it to some company that didn't really know what they were doing.

By all accounts, while Doom aged surprisingly well as a formula, Duke Nukem didn't. Everything Duke says and half the things he does are wince inducing. Doomy Mc Doomington has no voice, so he can be as bigoted or as progressive as you want to imagine him to be (except when it comes to demons, because he hates demons forever, because they're demons). Duke Nukem has a voice, and while I remember him being kinda funny when the game first came out, now I just want to play the game where I shut him up. I recall seeing a let's play on youtube where total excitement turned to disappointment and revulsion within the first level. I didn't have that issue with Doom.

Based on what you've said following the game's development, I think ultimately the problem was they tried to make the game do too much and exceeded their grasp. Miyamoto once said something to Retro's developers during DKC Returns that has stuck with me. "Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it has to go in the game." What they needed was focus. What are the core ideas you're trying to accomplish here? Everything else just needs to serve that. If it doesn't, cut it. If it's a really cool idea, but it's a distraction from the rest of the game, cut it out, stick it in a folder and expand on it in another project. It doesn't have to be in THIS game. Heck, this piece of advice could really work in just about anything. TV series could learn this lesson. Far too many decide to just start writing completely different stories than the one they were telling from season to season, and it all becomes a disjointed mess (I'm looking at YOU, Once Upon A Time, you ripped my heart out one too many times... also your writing is terrible). Save that amazing story idea for some later project where it'll actually fit, and get back to the story you were supposed to be telling in THIS series. Don't suddenly make Rumpelstiltskin a hero and then have him turn into the dark one again inexplicably! (Sorry, that show peaked with the evil Peter Pan story arc and then just nose dived and I haven't gotten over it.)

Anyway, that's Forever's problem right there. It never found a focus, and when it came time to rush it out the door, the team responsible for that couldn't really figure out where the design focus should be either. Also, Duke Nukem himself is a completely unlikable jerk store.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:That's fair. You're probably right and I said too much based on my initial assumptions there.

You really can't blame those investors from being that mad though. I'm sure from their perspective, "sucking up money without actually doing anything" is exactly how they saw the situation. I'm all for the "long project", but when you're a team getting paid, something's gotta give. It's too bad they just plain outsourced it to some company that didn't really know what they were doing.

I agree, after waiting so long it's not surprising that the publisher refused to give them the money they needed, particularly given that the publisher, Take Two, and 3DR had been fighting for years over the game (details), but I do think that it's kind of a shame because the game probably was finally on track, and I think the final product would have been a bit better had the original team been able to finish it... but that didn't happen, so they were forced to sell the Duke IP and game to Gearbox. And on that note, what you say at the end is only partially true. 3DR was working on DNF as a single-player game for the PC. That is the game they worked on, and that is the game that the small group who finished the game after 3DR's collapse finished up, first on their own and then at Gearbox. The story that 'Gearbox finished the game' isn't entirely true. DNF was finished at Gearbox, but while Gearbox staff surely did do some work on the game, I do think that it was the ex-3DR people who were more important.

However, your last sentence is accurate in one important respect: the multiplayer component and the console ports were indeed entirely outsourced stuff done by teams hired by Gearbox. 3DR did nothing on either of those fronts, and the console ports particularly were, going by all accounts (and I would not know myself, I have only played it for PC), not good. Versus the PC they have worse graphics, long loading times, etc, I forget the details... and the publisher decided that reviewers should be sent one of the console versions (X360 I think?), not the PC version. So, most of the early reviews were worse than they should have been because they were reviewing one of the poor console ports of the game, not the better PC original. That's not saying that that was the only problem of course, DNF has plenty of real issues even on PC going by reviews, but that did make things worse.

Quote:By all accounts, while Doom aged surprisingly well as a formula, Duke Nukem didn't. Everything Duke says and half the things he does are wince inducing. Doomy Mc Doomington has no voice, so he can be as bigoted or as progressive as you want to imagine him to be (except when it comes to demons, because he hates demons forever, because they're demons). Duke Nukem has a voice, and while I remember him being kinda funny when the game first came out, now I just want to play the game where I shut him up. I recall seeing a let's play on youtube where total excitement turned to disappointment and revulsion within the first level. I didn't have that issue with Doom.

This is very true, yeah -- one other thing that hurt DNF was that the games' tone, still so heavy on Duke's '80s action movie parody style, was not exactly still popular when the game finally released in 2011. I did not grow up watching the kinds of movies Duke games parody so I'm sure many of the references would be lost on me if I did play Duke 3D or DNF more, so personally I don't know if this bothers me because I have rarely watched/played that kind of thing either then or now, but you are probably quite right about the general internet reaction to the game, that Duke is a relic who was brought back in a way that was too tonally similar to Duke 3D for people to still enjoy after so long.

(As for Duke games, the only one I've actually played a significant amount of is Duke 2, which is a good 2d platform-shooter. In Duke 2 Duke is a cartoon stereotype of an action movie star, but it's not the same kind of tone as the 3D games -- it doesn't have the overdone sexuality and such, for the most part. As for the other games, I only ever played a couple levels of Duke 3D, actually, and while I have tried Duke 1, I only ever got a bit of the way through that one, as I couldn't play it as a kid. As DNF I mostly just played the demo, enjoyed it somewhat, and then never got around to playing the full game after I did buy it.)

Quote:Based on what you've said following the game's development, I think ultimately the problem was they tried to make the game do too much and exceeded their grasp. Miyamoto once said something to Retro's developers during DKC Returns that has stuck with me. "Just because it's a good idea doesn't mean it has to go in the game." What they needed was focus. What are the core ideas you're trying to accomplish here? Everything else just needs to serve that. If it doesn't, cut it. If it's a really cool idea, but it's a distraction from the rest of the game, cut it out, stick it in a folder and expand on it in another project. It doesn't have to be in THIS game. Heck, this piece of advice could really work in just about anything. TV series could learn this lesson. Far too many decide to just start writing completely different stories than the one they were telling from season to season, and it all becomes a disjointed mess (I'm looking at YOU, Once Upon A Time, you ripped my heart out one too many times... also your writing is terrible). Save that amazing story idea for some later project where it'll actually fit, and get back to the story you were supposed to be telling in THIS series. Don't suddenly make Rumpelstiltskin a hero and then have him turn into the dark one again inexplicably! (Sorry, that show peaked with the evil Peter Pan story arc and then just nose dived and I haven't gotten over it.)

Anyway, that's Forever's problem right there. It never found a focus, and when it came time to rush it out the door, the team responsible for that couldn't really figure out where the design focus should be either. Also, Duke Nukem himself is a completely unlikable jerk store.

Yeah, I think you've got it right here. The games "focus" seems to pretty much have been 'make a FPS better than all the other major FPSes out there', and that was too vague and changeable to last, as they kept trying to keep up with the genre, resulting in an endless cycle of restarts and major design changes... and when you don't expand your team at the time that other studios were expanding dramatically, that doesn't help you get it done sooner either.

This is as opposed to a game like Doom 4 (I'm calling it that from now on, because it's the quickest way to refer to the new one, minus this overly long explanation) where the focus was clear: "Move forward". Every aspect of the game feeds that single philosophy, from being rewarded for meleeing opponents to the high-speed running to placing demons in ways that require you to move around to survive to making the main character literally shove the main story out of his way when he gets the chance. Even the platforming in the game is some of the best designed FPS platforming I've ever seen, and all they did was add ledge grabbing to the mix (meaning you don't have to tilt the camera down to make jumps any more).

From what I've hard DOOM (4) actually started development as a CoD-like game, and that version got pretty far into development... when they decided to can it and start over with a new idea for a more classically-styled shooter, which is what you see in the final game. So yeah, they did have a good focal theme, but it changed mid-development. They stayed focused otherwise with each version though, so the game did eventually get finished.

True, and I'm very glad they scrapped that previous idea. No one wants to take "scientists accidentally open portal to literal hell" seriously.