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3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever
WeAz writes "GameSpot has news that 3D Realms has no plans on rushing Duke Nukem Forever. Despite the $500,000 bounty that Take-Two Interactive was found to be offering for the game after a filing with the SEC last week, George Broussard, President of 3D Realms, has given his official response: 'We're certainly not motivated by that amount of money, after all this time, and getting the game right is what matters. I would never ship a game early (even a couple of months), for 500k.'"
This company must have the most patient investors in the history of business. They've sunk millions of dollars into this game. At this point so much money has been spent that it has no hope of being profitable, even if it becomes the highest selling game of all time.
Meanwhile, they continue to delay it and the project clearly has no well-defined sense of direction. They've basically scrapped it and started over from scratch I don't know how many times, and feature creep is not so much a problem as it is a religion for them. I mean come on, an FPS with the ability to send email? 5 years from now, when they decide to release another few screenshots to drum up interest in the "imminent" release of the product, they'll show the game automatically ordering milk when your smart fridge tells it you're almost out.
By the time this game comes out (if it ever does), all of the people that would have run out and bought it just because it's the greatest running joke in Internet history will have all died, and their grandchildren won't get what all the fuss is about.
I thought everyone knew this. 3Drealms in an independent like Id (quake) and can do what it wants. They self financed it from the money earned with the earlier Duke Nukem titles.
Wich goes to show how much of a success they were and how little development has to cost (especially when you don't produce anything). Compare this to the guys who did daikatana burning through millions in a fraction of the time and you get the idea that 3d realms may not be the fastest developers ever but they can sure stretch a dollar.
Saying that investors are worried shows you are an idiot who does not know the least bit about the subject. The fact off self-financing has only been known for the last decade. It is the reason why it could go on for a decade.
DNF should not be confused with stuff like the Phantom console. 3D realms is only wasting their own money. Or not. Maybe they are just waiting until all current FPS are so fucking boring that a blast from the past will be very welcome indeed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
There's an expiration date on almost all the content in a game. Ok so music you can have composed and rendered to WAV files and keep that forever. Soundeffects too maybe. Plot, well it's a FPS, plot is light anyhow but ya. However the really expensive and hard parts, the code and the graphics assets, expire after a year or two. Consider if UT2004 had not been released and was instead to come out right now. Nobody would give a shit. It's not a bad looking game but it fails to impress by today's standards. It has been exceeded many times, and it's only two years old. UT2007, which should launch this year or eairly next year, has totally new graphics assets and a major code reqrite to stay current.
So when development starts to stretch in to the 5+ year bracket you are losing a lot of work. Unless they orignally planned to release it this far off and designed accordingly (which would be hard with the way technology changes) they've been doing a lot of development to no end.
A similar thing happened to Shadowbane. Though it had many other problems, one was just that it didn't look very good. It's graphics were fine for when they first started talking about it, but it took so long to release that by the time they came out they were rather dated. That could have worked perhaps had it been an awesome game, but it was so it flopped.
I think DNF faces a similar problem. Either they have been updating their engine and assets, in which case they've been wasting colossal amounts of time and money, even if it is their own, or they are talking about releasing a game with Quake 1 graphics to compete with things like FEAR.
They claim they are using the Unreal 2.5 engine (basically the post UT2004 development engine, UT 2004 was UE2) so that means that they have redone development. In fact, if you look at their timeline they went from Q1 to Q2 to UE1 to UE1.5 to UE2 to UE2.5. Well that means there's had to be some significant updating of grpahics assets to keep pace with that. It's also a lot of money sunk. iD and Epic do not give their engines away, they license them for 6 figures, regardless of if you get your game out the door.
I don't think I've ever seen this many Score:5 Funny comments on any given /. article ever.
More serious note:
I find the whole DNF saga tragic. They're trying to create the ultimate game, but the longer they wait, the more spectacular it will have to be in order to be considered
a) worth the wait and...
b) better than whatever else is out at the time.
3D Realms had their time, but the electronic entertainment industry is one of the most competitive out there, and firms like 3D Realms just don't stand a chance of survival unless they can produce quality product on a consistent basis. I have the feeling that they're reworking their game every time some new trendy concept becomes popular. For example, how much you wanna bet that one of the "start from scratch" moments was when bullet-time got huge? Remember Max Payne and how revolutionary it was? I'd be willing to wager that 3D Realms has an Achilles' Heel, and that is a propensity to go chasing after whatever is popular rather than trying to set their own trends.
3D Realms: Take a hint from Rockstar and create a new game. Create a game no one has played before. Bring elements into the game that are truly unique. At this point, with all the time and money you have invested in the project, it's too late to make anything mediocre. Be creative and think outside the box, because if you copycat, people will call you on it, and you will lose everything.
Who is Duke Nukem to your average teen gamer today? When Duke 3d was big they were mastering potty training.
On the other hand, players of the original probably will not be interested in that type of game anymore. I played Duke 3d in University but that was 10+ years ago. I don't play FPS games anymore as I don't have time to get over the motion sickness curve. It takes me too long to get my FPS legs now.
I think this game will get no advantage from being a sequel.
I also have a serious hard time believing this game is actually in development. If it is, it already ranks as the most colossal development failure in the gaming industry ever. 10 Years. I am quaking in my boots at the dev costs on this one. And if this is a mind boggling huge game it will take an army to to polish and test it.
The first 100 Million dollar game?
Judging by the sceenshots from 1999 in the article the game has been in development so long technology has passed it by. They look almost laughably low-detail when you compare them to any other game less than 5 years old. They're probably having to spend almost as much effort just to update the graphics and re-port it to more recent engine every couple of years than it would be just to write a new game from scratch.