Duke Nukem Forever.. is back on.
blog.pikimal.com
blog.pikimal.com
The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series.
The game is currently expected to ship in 2011, although given its history, Pitchford [CEO of Gearbox Software] is understandably reluctant to be more specific. "We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not make a promise we can not fulfill," he says. "We need to get past the shock and awe and then we can go to all the retailers and first parties and work out a launch plan."
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial-long...
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Edit: And some more from Kotaku. Here is a video of people actually playing it at PAX:
http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem-fore...
Few screenshots:
http://kotaku.com/5629778/the-duke-nukem-forever-pax-demo-a-...
First impressions:
http://kotaku.com/5629782/duke-nukem-forever-impressions-two...
That's really an interesting puzzle. What do you do when graphics outstrips your content?
[1] http://dorol.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/jeu_duke_3d_dorol.j...
The Team Fortress 2 art style would be perfectly appropriate to keep him looking smarmy and impossibly perfect.
A grittier character model like what you see in most modern war games would work too. You can still give a guy blonde hair, huge muscles, and dark glasses without making him cartoony. You'd just make him look like Ivan Drago or something.
In January 2009, Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[Wikipedia]
Even more interesting is that they first developed Borderlands as hyper-realistic, Crysis-like game and then moved to the new art direction during development.
I agree, and that's why we've had a documented and polished release process for almost three years now.
Existence is a binary condition, and binaries have existed for (almost) three years. A claim of vaporware is trivially dismissable FUD.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation...
I loved Duke, he was a hero of mine. Now, because of fucktardRealms his franchise has died, he's now associated with the most successful money-hole ever invented and it's going to have to be a complete reboot to even hit relevancy now.
Seriously kill Forever and start a new game called 'The End' and release it in 2012. (Edit: I'm serious, do a parody alien-Mayan end of the world, cash in on the popular hype, sell it to a new expanded market and then do Forever)
It seems like a standard FPS with some cheeseball bravado, sexism, and sex wrapped around the mechanics. Also, I can't imagine why anyone would think the same people could make a modern game, which is 1000x more complex and expensive to produce than the games of old, with the same success that they made the old, relatively simple one.
So what's the major excitement here? Humor? Pure nostalgia for the days when the cheeseball stuff was really satisfying?
This game was like seeing The Matrix without anyone telling you the basic plot. Your first hacker news post where pg actually responds to it. Your first bungee jump. Your first go on a real gun. Your first pvp kill in eve online.
It was ground breaking. It blew your mind and sent a chill up your spine.
It's just one of those things that when it came out it was so ahead of its time. It opened your eyes to what could be done. Now it seems dated, then it was amazing.
I guess those that had that the first time round are all hoping it will do the same thing again.
So it was technologically groundbreaking? Novel game-play? Both?
My game like that was either Ocarina of Time or maybe Goldeneye 64.
It was so cheesy and over the top that it became masterpiece (like Tarantino / Rodriguez movies, or recent Old Spice commercials).
id soft may have had technologically superior games (Quake is about the same age and had full 3d models instead of just sprites) but they were incomparably bland compared to Duke Nukem.
Also, gameplay was really fun. There were some very inspired gameplay elements: shrink and freeze guns, laser traps, remote triggered pipe-bombs, jetpacks. I still fondly remember multiplayer Duke sessions late in the night at lab in my university.
The Duke Nukem engine was (from my point of view) on par with Doom's engine, but their level design made playing the game a lot of fun. From seeing yourself in the mirror, to kicking toilets and fire hydrants, the world seemed much more alive than any other game at the time.
The game had a fun boy-ish "I'm gonna kick ass" vibe to it that isn't really seen today. Most FPS action games nowadays, while fun and entertaining, seem to take themselves too seriously. Musclebound Marcus Fenix is too brooding, and Roach too focused on terrorist plots to really portray the giddiness that was found in kicking a pig in the face with your manly boot.
I found something here: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D
"While Doom and Duke Nukem 3D feature similar technology, Duke Nukem 3D could in most respects be considered technically superior. The player can jump, crouch, and aim up or down. The rendering engine features slopes, overlapping and moving sectors, arbitrary scaling of textures and strong scripting capabilities"
I have to note that Ken's story is one of the things got me into programming as a kid, back when DN3D was still fresh.
Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells, more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast majority of large studio productions.
This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".
Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!
I can't agree with you that FPSes haven't changed since then; it's only true if you are very selective about what you consider important about a FPS. What you have said implies that you don't care about story line, realism of physics simulation, gameplay, etc., which I'm quite certain is simply not objectively true of the gaming marketplace. Even if you think it's the "3D" that matters, then things were vastly better in Quake than Duke Nukem, where you could look directly up and down without bad distortion etc.
And then, one needs to ask, what quality is it of the 3D that matters? Simple things like decent texture scaling (trilinear filtered mipmapping, anisotropic filtering etc.) and antialiasing make a big difference, but are often only viable at high resolution in 6-month old games with the latest hardware, such are the demands of the processing.
Yeah, I found Portal by Valve Software a couple of years ago the same groundbreaking experience in terms of gameplay that I felt with those first 3D games. Some of my friends said the same about HalfLife before it.
For instance you couldn't do proper floors above floors, but there were some rendering tricks you could use to do bridges.
It also supported slanted floors, which helps level designers more than you realize. Also there were invisible teleports to fake a real 3d layout.
But the most important part was that the level designers were very good at using those tricks to hide the limits of the engine.
Halo later brought in regenerating health, but yeah, that's all I can think of.
And saying that, multiplayer in general seems like a big step (although not sure how well multiplayer was in the 90s)
And they are still playable today. (At least if you substitute System Shock 2 for the original System Shock. The original's controls did not use the now-standard mouse-look.)
We all want it to be coming, that's the point. :)
[1] http://www.armchairempire.com/Features/Top-10s/quotes.htm