Duke Nukem Forever Gets Delayed... again | Hacker News Reader

Duke Nukem Forever Gets Delayed... again

thinq.co.uk

133 pointsmrschwabe60 comments

The Duke Nuken Forever List is my favourite place to check out at times like this.

> Things that have taken less time than Duke Nukem Forever's Development: The United States' entire program to put a man on the moon, from Kennedy's challenge to the landing.

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

Elite IV migh find it's way onto that list, if they keep up this pace.

Let's admit to ourselves. We don't want duke nukem forever to be released. It's legendary.

But we were so close this time. We even had demos at a game conference!

Of course. If it ever gets released, it will be a giant let down. Nothing they release now, no matter how good, will live up to 14 years of expectations.

I played DNF at PAX. The graphics are a bit dated, but goddamn is it fun. In an era where every shooter has to be hyper-realistic and penned by Tom Clancy himself, Duke is kind of a breath of fresh air.

Second that. Graphics were passable but it was damn fun.

Sure, but I've played games that were incredibly fun and had a tiny (or none at all) budget and were finished in a matter of months.

DNF will have to be very special to make up for the 14 year wait. If people make fun games in 6 months, I'd expect DNF to have a lot more. I still play Genesis games, so graphical flash isn't something I put much value on, usually, but after such a long development time, I'd expect DNF to be at least on-par with the current generation of high end game AS WELL AS being fun and addictive, having replayability, great storyline, physics, AI, dialogue whatever.

So (IMO) my point stands: no matter how great DNF really is, it will never live up to the expectations built up by 1) previous DN games, 2) marketing and hype, 3) the 14 years of development and 4) the amount of money 3D Realms and Gearbox Software put into it. Thats my opinion anyway.

So you've set it up to fail entirely. With all that's happened to Duke Nukem: Forever. I don't think all of those years should be "held against it"; and we should enjoy it for what it will be.

Agreed. Not only that - there's honestly nothing like Duke (old or new) on the market right now. We have a glut of hyper-realistic shooters (CoD, MoH, Halo, Killzone, etc) and just not enough silliness.

That alone is enough to make Duke stand out from the rest I think. I mean, how many games start off with you taking a piss in a urinal, using the right thumbstick to control your aim?

you should try bulletstorm, it has one of these "hyper realistic" graphics, but it surely will remind you of duke

Thats right, having the actual game would break the magic of something you can't have and it's epic

Exactly - it's like the movie you play in your mind when you read a good book. No movie you see after that will ever raise to your expectation level.

Lord Of The Rings came pretty close.

Fortunately it works the other way too, c.f. Battlefield Earth

I've never worked on a AAA game, with a fancy engine and an art department and motion capture and so on. That said, I can't help but wonder how this has been in development 14 years. What failures of management and process took place here? It seems like once Gearbox got control, there was an entirely brand-new development effort (I could be wrong, that's what it seems like, though).

Importantly, could Programming, Motherfucker have fixed this? Or could the game have been so far ahead of its time that they were waiting on hardware able to run it? Or -- my personal theory -- were they not working on it for 14 years, and they just told the public they were ... some kind of 20% project that ended up having press releases and screenshots?

If you're curious: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1

Thank you, I am; that's on my list for reading at home this evening. From skimming, it looks like managerial incompetence, which is unsurprising.

Ultimately it can be boiled down to that kind of incompetence, but I got the impression that they HAD to be the best by the time they released... but the bar kept getting raised each time a new game came out(Quake, Unreal, Quake II, etc), and thus got delayed to perpetuity.

The root issue is that they interpreted "the best" to be "the best at every single feature," which is completely ridiculous. The fact is that the Duke3d had an atmosphere, depth, and immersive-ness that most games since haven't matched. They definitely should have been able to release a game within a few years that was the best game for its time.

Tycho at PennyArcade wrote a great piece about it yesterday: http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/3/23/

The comic touched on a good point, too. The controversy behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's airport massacre level went on for a little while but has since fizzled away-with that in mind, I can't see how long people will be really taken aback by this game mode.

There was also an interesting point about the curse of having too much money. With no pressure from a publisher or from outside investors to ship, they were relatively free to keep blowing deadlines.

Commercial pressure can often produce better art.

Compare old Star Wars to new Star Wars.

Or The Matrix to its hypothetical sequels.

These examples might also be due to collaborative pressure.

On Star Wars, Lucas worked with a great editor who could say no to him. Same for script on Empire. For the Star Wars films 1-3 Lucas had total control over everything.

I guess I didn't put it very well. You're right.

Put another way: It's commercial pressure that made Lucas subject to collaboration. And it's subsequent commercial pressure that made collaborators subject to Lucas.

That Wired article is a great story and insight into perhaps the biggest pitfall of software development: over-perfection. I refer back to it from time to time as a stark reminder.

There's actually a really great post-mortem of 3d Realms that covers in good detail. It basically can be summed up with "too much money and an inability to settle for less than perfect".

Edit: Looks like I was a bit too little, too late. I don't like unpublishing, so I'll leave this comment untouched, but the linked Wired article is exactly what I was referring to.

DNF was more like a series of half-finished games, all worked on for a couple of years and thrown away. Nothing they showed the public ever had more than a year or two between it and one of the many restarts.

The analogy to a 20% project is actually pretty apt. 3D Realms was mainly a publisher. The cash from that business let them screw around on DNF almost indefinitely without worrying whether it would ever ship or make a profit.

I hope I can pass this experience on to my grandchildren.

Like the Second Coming of the Messiah, the arrival of DNF (The Second Shipping (or third, if we count the apocryphal side-scrolling Duke)) will be a basis for a future religion.

There were two Duke Nuk[ue]m side scrollers.

Heretical tales not part of the Canon...

I hope my grandchildren get to play DNF.

Part of me thinks this is a genius marketing ploy. Seriously, outside of the few remaining die-hard fans, who even knew that Duke Nukem forever was still being developed? I certainly didn't before this piece of news, and I'll now be watching when they release the thing to see how it goes.

It boggles the mind how much money this would have cost in forgone earnings.

Perfection comes at a high price. Duke had and retains the power to be an absolutely massive franchise. With a steady tick-tock development model, you could pump out new Duke games every 18 months and be raking in hundreds of millions per release by now. And that's before considering movies, tie-ins and merchandising.

Perfection has destroyed value.

"duke never comes early"

cheeky bastards.

Well I for one welcome our always late to the party overlord.

Wanna speculate about stealth April 1st launch?

I wondered that myself.. you still get the free PR for claiming to be late (which everyone expected), but then you get MORE PR for being early, and an April fools joke..

who knows..

Yes, but games always get delayed. It isn't surprising that the new developer is subject to the same forces that delay everyone else.

I feel even more confident about my 2011 prediction:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970634

Sounds like Duke hasn't run out of gum yet....

I'm convinced that it's not actually delayed, but rather Gearbox is trolling all of us.

I'm glad to see that the new development team will stay true to the source material.

Personally I was hoping for a February 29th release date this year.

Another good resource:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_history_of_Duke_Nuk...

Idle, evidence-free speculation: I suspect that Gearbox completely started the project over when they got the trademarks. I suspect that they didn't use a single line of whatever morass of code in various stages of abandonment or obsolescence that they got out of acquiring the property.

I think they dove in and built a game from the ground up. Perhaps there were art assets worth using, but perhaps not even that.

Surely this is the classic tech "dog bites man" story.

It's pretty obvious that this delay is a pure marketing stunt. It's a pretty obvious one, but I mean, developing this title, you kind of have to!

Hmm, I don't think it was a pure marketing stunt. They simply embraced the situation - and leveraged it for some extra publicity.

Mis-read the title as 'Duke Nukem Gets Forever Delayed'

I now get the joke with 'forever'.

Really? Just now?

Darn. I though I could play a GNU Hurd port of this title somewhere around this year. Tough luck ...

Yeah, but we did see the release of Volume 4A.

It remains to be seen, however, whether we'll actually get A Dance with Dragons.

Duke Nukem Forever Delayed

haha

how is it not funny that this game, that has been years in the making, is delayed again? I think they're trying to go for the Daikitana record...

John Romero started writing the design for Daikatana in February 1997 and it shipped in April 2000. I don't think that's much of a record.

3 years development (2 if we discount the abandoned Quake engine work) is standard for a large project with lots of content. Although, around 1996 there was little experience in what a big project entailed.

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