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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.'"
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.