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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.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Don't wory George, I don't think anybody could accuse you of doing that!
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
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.
3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever
1998 called. They want their story back.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
"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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