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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.'"
You mean it's possible to rush Duke Nukem Forever at this point????
I was so worried that they'd release it too soon.
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Don't wory George, I don't think anybody could accuse you of doing that!
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I wonder what's weirder: That DNF has taken longer to develop than Windows Vista, or that Windows Vista has taken almost as much time to make as DNF?
I know we were all worried about this.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
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.
Boy. Theres a shocker headline.
Right up there with "A new study shows that Men like to have sex" and "The sun is expected to rise in the morning"
Wait. Im being handed a piece of paper. Holy Cow! Breaking news! "Companys like free publicity!"
... cause major problems with the globally accepted definition of vapourware. My god, what if the damn game actually gets released?
What would the kittens do?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever
Oh yeah, well how long will they be rushing it?
Bad-dum-dum
Get it? Forever? Like they'll be rushing it forever
Thank you!!! I'll be here all week!
We didn't even have NT4 when DN-Forever was started, let alone XP.
5 years != 10 years.
I think they *did* consider a re-write 10 re-writes ago.
3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever
1998 called. They want their story back.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
At this point I hope they *don't* ever finish DNF. It's a great running joke and the name just fits oh-so-perfectly! It would be a tragedy to lose that. :'(
"I would never ship a game early (even a couple of months), for 500k.'"
This must be some new usage of the word 'early' that until now I have been unaware of.
3DRealms has earned from Max Payne franchise alone about 50 million USD (about 25 miljon royalties and sold the max Payne brand (game + engine to take two for 50 million , the developer Remedy got their share of course so I estimate that 3DRealms got at minimum 35 million USD). Now they are doing (trying) the same with Prey (developed by HumanHead) produced by 3DRealms. 3DRealms have lots of older other profitable self-developed games aswell. So they can afford to drag DNF development forever with the cash they have in spare.
As they say on their website: In business since 1991. Never had a loan. Never had layoffs. Extremely stable and successful environment.
And even weirder still, I was working on this really funny response, but then this new humor engine was available and I started using it and went back to square one. Then I thought, crap, I can adapt a humor engine better suited to my style than any off-the-shelf models, so I started work on that. But the whole concept of what constitutes high quality jokes changed in the meantime, so I started over again. There will be a really funny rejoinder here real soon now.
I am not a crackpot.
There is no game. No one is working on the game. The investors got fleeced.
Use common sense for a moment.
It takes 3-4 years to write, cast, design, film, edit, and release a major Hollywood picture like a Star Wars or an X-Men, which can cost $100MM or more to develop.
It takes 3-4 years to concieve, design, manufacture, and ship a new console like a PS2 or Gamecube.
Rockstar developed and released three new hit games with a new engine and tremendous amounts of content since 2001.
But it takes nine years to program a knockoff Doom clone? Really? Are they coding it on a loom?
Things I would love to know:
1) Exactly how many programmers are working on DNF.
2) What percentage of their days are spent on DNF versus other tasks.
3) Why management keeps an obviously defunct product on the books when normal business practice would suggest writing it off at this point, having missed at least SEVEN release years in a row.
4) I am dying to see the balance sheets for this project.
There is no game, there never will be a game. But there may be an audit.
A game is only late until its released, but a space probe which smashes into the body it is orbiting because it doesn't know the difference between feet and meters is gone forever.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.
He was misquoted...
"I would never ship a game early (even a couple of months), for 500k.'"
What he really said was:
"I would never ship a game"
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Here is a source to those numbers and a nice interview with 3DRealms CEO Scott Miller:w ith-3drealms-ceo-scott-miller-prey-game-production -insight
http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/06/13/interview-
GameProducer.net: 3DRealms got praise from Remedy when they were doing their first cinematic action title Max Payne. Remedy said that it has been great to work with a publisher that gave no or little pressure about the deadlines. I heard the famous slogan "When it's done" first time said by Remedy & 3D Realms. How do you approach this attitude nowadays? Do you have no deadlines at all? What it really means to you to publish a game "when it's done"?
Scott Miller: Well, we have a simply philosophy that if you're going to make a game, do it right. Another words, the game comes first. Most publishers do not see the value of this philosophy, and therefore the majority of their games are not hits. Also, since we retain ownership of our game brands, it is in our best interest to insure that our games are big hits, because not only do we like those fat royalty checks, we also like to see the valuation of our brands exceed 10's of millions of dollars. In 2002 we (us and Remedy) sold the Max Payne brand for nearly $50 million, and that was after earning some $25 million in royalties. So, was it worth the 4.5 years to make Max Payne right?
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?
I think what everybody is missing is the right context to interpret the word "rush" here, so i'll give it a try at sketching it:
Imagine you have a snail. The snail has been moving from one city to another distant city. This has been going on for the last 5 years.
Thus "rush" in this context means making the snail go faster, but still within it's capabilities.
Now, just fill in the blanks by considering that the Duke Nukem Forever development team departed one year before the snail and the snail already overtook them and you'll get the picture...