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Duke Nukem Versus Take Two?
TimeTrip writes "There's a new column at CNN which offers a great overview of the ongoing problems with the Duke Nukem franchise. The publisher (Take Two) has serious issues with the developer (3D Realms), and vice versa. There's also some good quotes in there, including: 'George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms, fired back later that day on the message boards of Shacknews, one of the larger gaming community and news sites, suggesting 'Take Two needs to STFU imo.'"
I like the part where the 3D-Realms guy says "We don't want hype."
If you don't want hype, don't announce a game and then wait like a decade to release the thing!
This 'game' (I use that term lightly - nothing has been seen of it since 2001, and even then it was just screenshots and a cheesy movie) is so over-hyped, over-due, and the expectations are so high, that 3DRealms cannot possible live up to the expectations. They'd do best to write it off, and start on thier next project. I, for one, am no longer looking forward to this game.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Any actual game could only take a back seat to its status as vaporware.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
George Broussard is the one who needs to STFU.
It has been about 5 years, and he is the one who can't shut up about the game they have been hyping all these years.
Seriously, I do not read their forums but I sware it seems that the only he has been doing is posting to every known message board and defending himself/his company/game/etc. Someone needs to spend more time running a company and working on this vaporware game then spending most of their time posting PR stuff on gaming sites.
Then there is the fact that after so much hype and having nothing to prove they decieded to now shut up about it or at least keep it to themselfs. I have not heard anything, I use to look at their plan files, but most of them talked something other then DNF. I remember one of the talking about their online rpg character, which gave and confimred my feeling that they were not doing any DNF work at all.
I didn't even know untill now about their claims that DNF was a "(insert year) title." Even though I have not seen their forums, I am willing to bet it is the same thing, all of them talking about nothing as if it actully existed and they were really working on it.
IMHO, all this PR crap is doing is pissing off more people, a lot of them have already given up on DNF and have had it with 3DR's attitude.
Sad part is that if it ever is released DNF probably will sell so well that 3DR will not get the lession in consumer relations that they deserved.
They don't make games. What has 3D Realms done since Shadow Warrior? Gotten rich off of Duke licenses, released the source for a few older games, and switched the engine that DNF will use from Quake 2 to Unreal Tournament. This game has been "in production" forever. 3D Realms no longer makes games.
IMO, 3D Realms should probably be spending a little less time trolling message boards and more time working on the game. At this point, the game is the laughing stock of the industry. They really just keep embarassing themselves.
Of course, the aforementioned public has to take responsibility, too. All it takes is an announcement of a game and one or two screenshots for some geeks to immediately declare that "This will be the best game ever!" followed immediately by putting up fan sites full of speculative information. I've seen people complaing about not seeing any game info for a LONG time, but of course if they got any they would complain once again: "Only three screenshots?? We need more than that!"
3DRealms, since going through all the DNF turmoil, has for the most part done the responsible thing: They've shut up about the game. When asked about a release date, they now say "When it's done" and they don't answer any more specific questions than that. If gamers would just let it lie, they might just end up with a pleasant surprise when the game comes out. And, if it doesn't, then maybe the stories about this game will end...which would be a very good thing, indeed.
I think they're probably gonna wait to switch over to the Doom III or HL2 engine.
And then, a while later, the Doom IX or HL8 engine...
cygnuhchur
Duke Nukem Forever will go down in gaming lore as the best game that never was.
What kind of business people take their fight into the open public? If the publisher or the developer is that bad, word gets around the industry and no one wants to work with them.
By having this war of words in public forums, it really makes both sides look like morons and probably have just committed their companies to death.
Just kill DNF and move on. Try to save your companies and reputation.
The press approach of 3drealms is obviously an attempt at swinging the pendulum from their (former) contempory Ion Storm/Romero. The thing is though is that all they've done, what with the press release of Half Life 2, is contrast themselves with Valve. Valve never really said anything in regards to Half Life 2, and any kind of hope for a sequel was only hinted at by rumormongers.
The biggest problem facing DNF is that 3d games have advanced so damn much since Duke Nukem debuted, and I don't mean merely graphically. Obviously Half Life 2 will push that even further. Let's examine Medal of Honor. It's a fun, solid FPS and yet in implementation it doesn't really do anything we'd consider "new" (ala Tron 2.0, or Deus Ex). Still, MoH has so much more in it than anything Duke Nukem that anything even resembling the original DN will be nothing less than outdated. Unreal II, another example of everything done right but not great, showed us that good just isn't "good enough."
Basically, this: Duke Nukem is so fundamentally one dimensioned as a game structure that 3drealms has completely missed the viability of selling their game. I played the crap out of the original DN, but I can't see myself playing DNF with the same character and similar storyline when I have stuff like HL2 and Deus Ex 2 sitting around.
Back to the subject at hand, I really wouldn't worry about DNF too much. I talk to the guys over at 3DRealms at least twice a week, (Well, okay, I email them.) and while I make it a point not to bring up DNF, I've gotten good vibes from them recently. I honestly think that we'll see something by Christmas in the form of some announcement and a release early next year. That's just my crazy talk there. Call me goofy (see next post I'm sure) but I wouldn't count out DNF just yet.
CNN article: "Take Two believes that a five-year development cycle is more than enough time to complete a game." Five years?!? Actually, it's been more like seven years. 3D Realms first bought a Quake 2 engine license to build the game on, and development began before Half Life came out. A recent Gamespy article summed up the situation best: "The now-legendary Quake and Unreal series hadn't even been launched when the Duke 3D shareware first came out. The 3D hardware acceleration boom hadn't even begun yet! Is there any legitimate reason 3DRealms hasn't been able to develop a single game since Duke 3D?"
this sounds like the same drifting, unfocused development methodology that IS had for Daikatana. They may not be living like rockstars, so they can make the money last a little longer, but with aparently no risk management, I'm sure the feature creeep and reworking for the game has been a total nightmare. :)
They have been wise to keep themselves out of the media. I think they learned something about the meteoric cratering of Ion Storm by letting the media see what a mess the internal workings had become.
I'm more interested in the postmortem of this game than the game itself
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