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Duke Nukem Forever Gameplay Footage Leaked
Tjeerd writes, "It seems that while 3D Realms is dead, some new footage has been leaked of Duke Nukem Forever." 3D Realms posted a brief good-bye to their website, and two of the developers have hosted screenshots and concept art from DNF on their personal blogs. Also, for those who haven't seen it yet, there's an entertaining list of things that have happened during DNF's development cycle.
Sell the property to someone who will actually create something..
Whatever they could have released never would have lived up to the hype; maybe it's for the best.
I still haven't seen anyone joke about how in sports DNF is short for did not finish. Can we get on that?
I'd like to think so but I really doubt it, since it seems to have been claimed at a senior level that it's for real.
All this gameplay vid shows is that they got the basic engine and some levels down. Creating all the levels / assets for an entire game is a lot of work and we have no indication that they achieved that.
So.. if you're in a position of power over a company- i.e you owe them a lot of money, you can starve the company, force bankruptcy upon it, then get their source code? Hmm. Wonder what could possibly go wrong here?
It's not a publicity stunt. Their site was down the entire day after the news broke, presumably from all the traffic. If it was really a super secret publicity stunt, they would have been able to plan ahead to have enough capacity on their server/network to handle all the extra traffic from the "stunt."
There's a much simpler explanation for the leaks. All the laid off employees are now looking for new jobs. Since Duke Nukem Forever on the resume is worthless, they are now showing off their work for the game. "Hey, I worked on Duke Nukem Forever. Yes, I actually did work. Here are some samples from my time working on the game."
If you're in a position of power over a company you can already extort things from them. ("You owe us six months rent, let us use your soundtrack or find a new office" works just fine under the current system.)
The problem with using software as part of a company's hard assets, and trying to liquidate it to pay debts, is that part-built software is near useless without the people working on it. At the very least, it costs 3+ months of development time to get a new team up to speed on the codebase. I'd say it's probably more likely to actually be released if given to the dev team as 'you work on it in your own time, you can publish it'.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
There was exceptional technology, didn't you see the boobies?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Well, from what we could see in the video, the gameplay was the same game we've been playing for years and years.
Run up to baddies and shoot them at close range with the shotgun. Dodge the big boss's attacks while shooting at the boss with the biggest gun you have. Yawn.
The problem is that the public at large did not fund the game. If there are investors involved, the assets, however worthless, belong to them and it is their within their right to get whatever they can from them. Maybe the code itself would be worthless but there might be good gameplay ideas, etc.
Surely the cultural loss of media like this is far greater than the cultural loss claimed by copyright proponents as due to lack of compensation.
Can't say I disagree. Capitalism is a double-edged sword.
Definitely. It's not like 60% finished software has 60% of the value of a finished product. There's a large amount of waste.
It's similar in the music industry. One example (out of probably hundreds of thousands) is Paul Pena's New Train...cameos by established stars, and at least one song that was already a hit ("Jet Airliner" which Steve Miller butchered). And musically just a great album, something that any label would be proud to put out.
But Albert Grossman's ego was such that it only came out in 2000, despite being recorded in 1973.
My friend was working on something for THQ subsidiary that will most likely will never see the light of day. I get the impression that most game code has a similar fate.
It's unfortunate when people in creative professions have to submit to people who don't value the work outside of what it will sell for. On the other hand, many a company has been mismanaged by a creative professional who undervalued the art of business and/or compromise and thought, "I'll just be my own boss, it's not that hard". Look at Apple Records in the 70s, or Image Comics in the 90s.
Quake was fun.
Unlike Duke Nukem, i could play Quake over TCP/IP on Windows 95 with out mucking about with compatibility mode with WinQuake.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It was cool seeing the player jumping on the beast to rip off its horn.
The games themselves seemed more like leisure suit larry meets first person shooter.
See, you didn't miss the point. And this is what I sorely miss from first person shooters. Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage, Postal - all games that didn't bother trying to take themselves seriously. They were just flat out fun, with a wicked sense of humor. None of them tried to innovate, they just knew what it was they wanted to do, and do it well (and really, isn't that the whole point?).
Nowadays it seems like all these devs are out trying to earn a damn Peabody, and you know what? It's getting OLD. I would trade every Call of Duty, Halo, Killzone, Farcry, Gears of War, et cetera, for just one more Duke.
Story be damned - it's always the most forgettable part in gaming, regardless of how well it was written. Bring the fun back.
Post mortem?
What is there to know? This isn't brain surgery.
Cause of death:
Lack of Adult Supervision.
Duke Nukem belongs in another era, an era when parents didn't know what their kids were playing and the media ignored games.
The reason they can't get 5 mil to finish it is because it won't sell very well. It'll end up with an AO rating(because violence aside boobies are bad in the USA) and the vast majority of resellers won't touch if with a fifty foot pole. Countries that don't have an AO rating(like Australia where I live damned South Australian AG) won't even be able to legally sell it.
The game is about 10 years too late, and/or about 5-10 years too early. They'd have to cull everything that made it duke nukem and then you'd just end up with yet another outdated fps. I mean really what's the point. It'll be lucky if it makes 5 million dollars, let alone enough to actually have whatever stake in the product 3DR was offering to potential investors(probably a few percent) to provide reasonable ROI. The 30 million they were offered for the whole thing lock stock and barrel is the best offer they're ever going to get and they'll be out of business and DNF will be in the bin where, realistically, it belongs.
Hopefully someone will do a post-mortem on the bloated corpse and the industry can learn some important lessons and it can at least provide some sort of positive legacy.
Nostalgia. That's about it.
Duke Nukem was an awesome game in its time. One of the classic franchises. People had it fresh in their mind when it was first announced, and were willing to wait. Then, when it was "wait a little more," they'd been patient, so what was a few more months or so? And eventually, the nostalgia merged with the time invested waiting, and imagining, and people don't want to feel like they missed an awesome game and wasted all that time. I'll admit, that's about what it amounts to for me, too.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
And you think that would work, why?
"Open Source" isn't a magic word. The failure rate of Open Source / Free Software projects is certainly on par with that of closed source projects. More importantly, a game needs a game designer. It needs vision and a driving force, and you can not get that by democratically agree-upon compromise solutions.
Would Duke be as politically incorrect as he is if the project had been created in a multi-national fluid group? I doubt that.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's not the gameplay that is important in these games, it's the atmosphere, the wow factor. In all single-player FPS, the gameplay is nothing more than shoot-the-bad-guys, but some games do it in a fun way, some are dull...
I spent countless hours playing duke on Kali with klos tcp/ip drivers for dos. The multilayer was much more fun than quakes. Holoduke, tripwires, dropping some pipe-bombs then luring people into an elevator and BOOM!
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
(This is no different than any other creative medium, btw. Film, music, art... creators are never fully satisfied.)
Even when they should be. I'm looking at you George Lucas...