Duke Nukem Forever in Production

An anonymous reader writes "Like that fungus under your keyboard, Duke Nukem Forever never really seems to go away. Well in the latest installment in unsubstantiated DNF rumors it appears that the game is finally in production. Via Joystiq "everyone's favorite vaporware is "in full production" according to George Broussard, co-founder of 3D Realms. In an interview with 1up, towards the end, Broussard chats about the status of Duke Nukem Forever, the unfortunately-apt title to the game over a decade in development."

Comments

You all miss the point!

[perrin]

Why should 3DRealms make Duke Nuke'm Forever after all this time? Because when it finally ships it will receive the most free PR from the trade press and every other press under the sun ever. Sure, they will make fun of it, probably give it poor reviews, but as long as 3DRealms manage to keep it fun, ironic and in bad taste it will still sell like hot cakes. If they play their cards right they could turn this into a stroke of genius.

Although we'll lose a good joke. But the joke might in the end be on us.

Look, that's just a status update.

[Vo0k]

In other news, Australian tectonic plate heading towards Asia at full speed now!

They got the guns and monsters. That's like, 30% of the work. since the end of the design phase. Add to that maps (30%), engine (30%), piecing it all together (10%). Development phase is about 50% time. 25% for design and preparations, 25% for betatesting, bugfixes and release.

So given their current speed and progress (about 45% of the whole project) I predict DNF around 2018. That's a realistic date.

Forget "expectations of a ten year wait"

[typical]

no game can live up to expectations of a 10 year wait.

Forget that -- I want to know why anyone expects DNF to live up to the standards of a *regular* game. Why would DNF be an exceptional game? Because it has the same name and possibly a few characters as an ancient game?

Sequels make sense when they're truly related to the earlier work. Bungie's Marathon series was good right through the series. That was because the game design was still fairly new and interesting for the time, and the same team was working on the games. It was legitimate both to expect "more of same" from the same people, and that "more of same" would be a good thing.

But, while I'm not familiar with DNF development, I doubt that the same team is working on the second game -- and that's what makes the game good, the artists and musicians and programmers and writers. Even if it was the same collection of people, I'm not sure that a team that could produce "more of same" would be a good thing.

I've only played a little Duke Nukem 3D, but I remember that the game was mostly notable for its simple, crude humor and its ability to allow you to have simple interactions with objects. (And according to WP, the mundane environments, instead of Quake's fantastic ones.) None of this is exceptional any more. The only "edge" that I would expect DNF to have over any other modern game is that some of its marketing work will have been done for it -- people with fond memories of Duke Nukem 3D might remember the name and want to buy it. Possibly that means that a smaller percentage of the funding need be blown on marketing for DNF.

Other than that, there's no reason to expect that DNF would be better than any other new game coming out.

Furthermore, DNF has constraints on it that a new game does not. This is most commmonly visible (in an extreme form) in "video games of movies". Most people who follow the video game industry know that video games based on movies tend to review rather badly. Some of this is undoubtedly due to time pressure, but I would suggest that some of it is because the game developers are constrained to follow the movie and figure out ways to incorporate the movie into the game, instead of having no restrictions on their ability to do what is necessary to develop a good game. This restriction, to a lesser degree, is present in game sequels like DNF. (Plus, these video games based on movies have the same marketing edge that DNF can be expected to have, yet they are frequently pretty bad.)

So I just can't see why anyone would expect DNF to be a particularly good game any more than I would expect a modern remake of a classic movie to be any better than any other modern movie.

Sometimes it's nice to just let pleasant memories lie and go on to producing new, different ones...