Duke Nukem Forever Is Gold

[A Black Falcon]

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.

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.

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.