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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..
It looked cool, but for all the years they put into the development, and redevelopment, and reredevelopment, I have to admit I was expecting more. I think it would be cool if they made the Duke Nukem series a big open source project -- let the community develop it. Either that, or give the intellectual property rights to a University with a good gaming development/design program, and let them use it to teach the various aspects of game design.
is if the developers had, I dunno, got that work done on time.
Yeah, just like Windows 7 Betas/News were "leaked".
I recently watched the games company I worked for come within inches of liquidation while our almost-ready-to-launch title sat on the shelf going nowhere. They seem to be back on their feet now, thankfully, but it was a very rough 6 months for them and they lost most of their staff (including myself).
The thing that really got to me, a little at first and then more and more, was what would happen to the game that we'd all worked so hard on. The parent company had proven very inept at finding a publisher (two deals came to the final meeting before our directors walked away claiming the terms weren't good enough) and they owned the copyright on the code and assets. Most likely the game would just have ended up mothballed permanently.
I'd like to see some provision whereby almost complete products owned by a freshly deceased company could be freed (open sourced, or just released unencumbered by any copyright). 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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
First, when they shut down, we saw the screenshots. Now, we're seeing the gameplay footage.
I'm quitely (well not so quietly now that I'm talking about it) suspecting that we may next see the leaked marketing materials, then the playable demo, then behold! The laid off staff members actually finished the game! Here it is in all its glory!
Given the fact that this game has been one of the most famous vapourware titles for over a decade, could this simply be a marketing stunt leading up to it's release?
I've been waiting for this game since I was 12. Release the source, or hawk off the game to another developer. The game could own GTA in both sales and pushing the envolope as to the limits of content (sexual, graphic) in games, resulting in, more sales.
I wasn't the only one hitting space bar throwing dollar bills at strippers back in the day. I'd literally pay 100+ dollars for a finished copy of this.
I bought every add on and got Redneck Rampage and That Samurai game (cannot remember the name) solely because of the similarities in both game play and content.
*Tears*
I still haven't seen anyone joke about how in sports DNF is short for did not finish. Can we get on that?
Looks like the Duke to me, too bad about all the circumstances involved. Seems like it would have been decent at least.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
A list of things that happened since the List of Things That Have Happened Since Duke Nukem Forever Was Announced was written.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Quick time events suck. I doubt I will be picking up God of War III because their over-use of it.
Good-bye
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.
It doesn't have to do entirely new stuff. We play duke nukem for duke and the setting. Not innovative game play gimmicks. Could always play dead space if you wanted that.
One would expect that after this many years in development, the game designers might have been able to put in some exceptionally complex technology that allowed things not seen in previous games.
No, no, no. The original Duke Nukem 3D came out with Quake. Duke 3D was sprite based whereas Quake was a full 3D game in Technicolor Brown(tm). Duke 3d was *fun* to play, whereas Quake was meh. Duke 3D had fun weapons (pipe bombs, shrink rays), potty humor, strippers, etc., whereas Quake just had advanced graphics and mediocre game play.
Technology isn't as important as having fun factor, and Duke 3D had fun factor in spades, especially when you include the Duke 3D expansion packs.
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.
Something else is leaking here...
If it's dead, I feel someone will accidentally 'leak' it to the web. Creative types won't deal with BS like their brainchild being tossed due to "ownership".
The fact that is hasn't hit a server somewhere makes me think marketing hype...
When's the next release of a major competitor?
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
So are they going to either sell it or make it FOSS?
We're playing it right now, didn't you notice the one up at the strip club? I think if you search the fountain at the mall you'll find a shot gun...
I feel as though a dozen voices have cried out and were silenced. In the back of my mind, I knew that things were OK because DNF was in development. Somewhere, some programmer or mapper was toiling away on a game that would never be released, hoping that his piece would make it into an E3 video, or better, be leaked!
In all seriousness, I really hope they leak the game as it stood in 2001. There is very little about that IP that would be of value to a potential debtor. The new gameplay looks like it would stand up to modern games if given a 6-8 months finishing rush cycle under good management. Granted button events are lame, but everything else looks like it'd be a fun romp. Maybe it wouldn't be top 5 titles of the year, but I'd pay 50 bucks for it. That being said, the video didn't have enough time to demonstrate what made duke 3d great, the personality of the game. I mean in multiplayer, you could drop a pipe bomb, if somebody collected it, you could detonate it on their body, no matter where they were! I mean you just don't get dynamics like that nowadays. That kind of mechanic doesn't show up well in 2 minute demo vids.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
If you ever wonder why old-school bosses are needed in this world. You know the guys in the shirt and tie that expect people to show up to work on time and produce results, this is why.
It didnt even have to be a computer pro, just a competent manager their dad's age to say.
"Boys and girls you have some nice looking stuff here, now lets put it all together and make a videogame"
It sounds like you have a lot of talented people working without a sense of guidance or direction.
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.
Do you know what most of Apple Intel newcomers (those switches from PPC to Intel) did when they first had Boot Camp? Install Half Life 2 and play for hours. It was them for years asked MS to provide some kind of functionality to Virtual PC 7 (very expensive piece of software which focuses on office) so they can run Half Life 2.
Do you think they were for the amazing technology (!) in Half Life 2 or they were looking for something they can actually enjoy playing on their boxes which can run Doom 3/Quake 4 perfectly and natively?
I gave up FPS genre after first Quake 3 and never came back. That is allthough I paid significant money for it as it was Linux version by Loki Games. This kind of fun and really targeted for adults game could make me buy it instantly or even finally switch to Intel from my Quad G5.
Not trying to be a troll here, but seriously. The games themselves seemed more like leisure suit larry meets first person shooter.
the games didn't push the envelope or really add much to the genre yet it seems like there are a ton of people that are like "OMG Duke Nukem!"
Perhaps I am missing something but I really don't care if DNF ever sees the light of day.
At this rate I just want them to pull the plug and let it die. As others have stated there's no real engine work here so nothing lost there. At this point it seems like they would just lose the artwork and whatever plotline they have.
Just my .02 as I can't figure out what the draw is and why so many people care.
My understanding was that all the "footage" that was ever made for DNF was all fake, scripted video, not a view of a playable demo that they were playing with in-house.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm really hoping that someone will write a post-mortem of the project for Game Developer magazine. It sounds like what happened here was a classic case of "the design document is in my head."
I once worked on a game project that lacked direction; I'm curious to hear just how much the experience here mirrored my own. (From the post linked in the story, it sounds suspiciously similar. If you don't have someone at your company whose mandate includes calling bull$#!% on projects that aren't going anywhere, and has the power to affect change, the end result is obvious.)
It was cool seeing the player jumping on the beast to rip off its horn.
Good grief; a post calling Quake's game play "mediocre" hasn't been modded into oblivion? Is there not a single self-respecting nerd with mod points to be found?
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.
I bet it'll be released any day now! Where can I pre-order?
Whatever state it's in, I hope they release it anyways. Just so us who've actually been waiting the whole time (ok, "were around when DNF was first announced and didn't entirely forget about it over the years" is probably closer) can get closure.
It looks playable, if that's actual gameplay footage. And if I have to load each level via console, and half the guns aren't working properly, and whatever else is missing - I'd still want to play it, at least once.
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...
The whole point of agreeing to publish (meaning pay for) a game is that you want to make money on it. A development stupid has an idea that you think will make money, so you agree to fund said idea and bring it to market. In return, you get to make money on all the sales.
So sure, depending on the contract, you could refuse to give them more money, stop the project, and take what assets have been developed. But then what? Now you've paid for something that isn't useful to you. You have a nice unfinished game and nobody working on it. Wonderful. That is stupid business 101 right there.
It also isn't as though you can just take a finished product and run. There is going to be a contract between you and the developers. Now maybe the contract is straight pay for work. Like "We agree to pay you X amount to make this product." Ok well then the developers don't care what you do, they've been paid. You sell it or don't sell it as you like, they aren't getting more money from you for this game no matter what. Maybe it is a royalty situation "10% of all sales," or the like. Ok well you still have to pay that. So if you grab the finished product, well the contract is still in force, you still have to pay them the royalties, so again they don't really care. You "cut and run," so to speak, they make their money all the same.
What it comes down to is that all the assets that go in to a game are only worth anything when they are all put together in to a working game that can be sold. So there is nothing for a publisher to gain from trying to cut and run in the middle of development. It is in their interests to see the game completed so they have a product they can put on the shelves.
Duke was an entertaining game, but nothing special. It wasn't one of those games that pushed video games forward or anything, nor was it an extremely unique kind of game. It was just another first person shooter, and of those we have thousands.
Thus I never cared about DNF once it became clear that it was something that wasn't coming out. No, it wasn't going to be revolutionary, it never was and no matter how long they spent wasn't going to change that. It had a chance at being an amusing shooter, but the good news is that there are a whole lot of those so the fact that it never made it out isn't a big deal.
Only games I care about losing are ones that were somehow special, either something that promised to move gaming forward, or simply games the likes of which you don't see much of. X-com would be a good example. I really liked the special strategy blend it offered. It is something that you really don't find in other games. Thus, it is sad that it was discontinued. Duke though, just another shooter. Nothing wrong with that, I like shooters, but I also have no lack of them at all.
There have been a lot of posts demanding the release of the DN(F) code into the open source community, but I wonder if that is even feasilbe. Legal and commercial issues aside it I guess they will have amassed hundreds of thousands (or even millions of lines) of code that is in different states and versions and has been re-written for a a decade. Not to mention story board, skripts 3D-Models, Level Layouts etc. I guess it would take 20 dedicated and qualified people the better part of a year to make an assessment of what is usable and what still hast to be developed to finish the game. I do not think I have ever heard of a refactoring project like that undertaken by an open source community.
OOPS lol
I meant to say Quake single player was generally stale, while Duke nukem and quake were good :)
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
Except that games like Bioshock or Crysis, among many others, bring in various twists to spice up the gameplay.
From the last link in the summary, "things that have happened during DNF's development cycle":
> World War II and the Manhattan project took less time than DNF.
"Nukem 'till they glow, then shoot 'em in the dark!"
> 661 million people have been born.
"Don't worry babes; there's enough Duke to go around."
> George W. Bush was elected and re-elected.
"You're an inspiration for birth control."
> Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Marvel movies, Star Wars prequels.
"[after discovering Luke Skywalker's corpse hanging upside down] Now this is a force to be reckoned with!"
> A ton of other great games: Every Zelda game between Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess; Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, WoW; Final Fantasy VII through XII; all things Counterstrike; all games using the Unreal engine (including every Unreal game, of course); every MMORPG (except Meridian 59)... everything under the sun, except DNF.
"This really pisses me off!"
I can just see what ID could do with it.
"Duke Nukem 4": Duke is out to kick ass and chew bubblegum, but he's not just out of bubblegum, he also can't use his boot and a flashlight at the same time. The refreshing twist that will inject new life into the series.
And the exciting expansion pack: "Duke Nukem 4 Dark Edition". He's not just out of bubblegum, he's also out of batteries for that flashlight.
"Duke Nukem 5: Attack Of The Nazi Demon Babes from Mars" ID hopes to also attract fans of their Wolfenstein and Doom/Quake franchises with this twist. Plus, nobody around the office had any ideas that don't involve nazis or demons. Plus, at least it will still have the demons left in for the German or French markets, after the nazi symbols and references have to be removed. (See, Return To Castle Wolfenstein.)
Or it could get sold to Bethesda, who'll add such exciting new twists as item damage (Duke's boots will need repairs after every 5 asses kicked), armours that don't actually stop much damage, etc. And a construction kit which the users can use to add such original, meaningful, in-character stuff as jedi lightsabers, black recolours of everything (hey, it's an easy to use filter in either Photoshop or Gimp), silenced portable fully-automatic nuclear howitzers, and the ever popular DD-cup naked female bodies.
As a welcome twist for nostalgic fans of their past games, the creative genius behind Morrowind's story is brought back. In Duke too, the story will again be along the lines of, "go and save the world, if you can be arsed to. No hurry. If you can't be bothered, someone else will. See if we care. It's not like the evil will happen in less than a few thousand years anyway. If it does at all, that is."
Gamers sick of being told where to go and how urgent their mission is, will undoubtedly welcome the change. Self-confessed casual gamer John Smith is quoted as saying, "Finally a game which doesn't put me under pressure. I couldn't take it any more, being told how I'm the only one who can save the world, or how urgent it is. It can make a guy incredibly stressed, you know? It made me want to curl up in a corner and cry, like when I can't find a card to move in Windows Solitaire. I was waking up at night in cold sweat, thinking that maybe the Ultimate Evil is finally succeeding while I sleep. It's a stressful life, knowing you're the big hero. Knowing that I'm a completely unimportant nobody and that nothing bad is going to happen anyway, now that's a welcome change of pace."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Seriously. Look at that video. It's the most beautiful vapourware I've ever seen. The leaked footage has the atmosphere that made Duke Nukem 3D so great, and I can see only improvements there. I haven't played games for about a while now, but this looks like a game I would have killed to play.
They might have failed spectacularly, and deserve being laughed for that over-than-a-decade vapourware inanity, but this shows that they had something. And should be applauded for the quality what they were attempting.
Really, this must get in the hands of someone who is capable of completing it. Killing what I just saw doesn't serve it justice, really. It deserves to see the light of day. They should make it FOSS... Or at least sell it to someone who has shown that can complete the game.
Seriously. After all this time in development, do they really think that players want to spend that much time having Duke look at the floor? No really, when the level boss knocks you back in a heated battle, the last thing a player wants is to stare at the floor for several seconds while more missiles may or may not be coming his way. How would we even know until we exploded?!?
Not to mention the flying. Setting a pipe bomb trap, flying up somewhere out of sight, and then detonating it when someone came through was great fun. Another good trick was to set a laser trip mine at one end of a long corridor. When someone came around it, they would see the laser and make sure not to trip it, and feel smug right up until the point you sidestepped into the laser beam at the other end of the corridor and blew them up.
Some of the guns were great. I remember playing an 8-player deathmatch in the arena level where somehow everyone had shrinkrays. At any given time, about half of the people would be tiny, and the other half would be trying to stamp on them.
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I watched the video, I saw the screenshots, and I can't believe it's come down to this exact feeling I have looking at all of it:
Eh.
Duke was *special*. It was a FPS in the era of Doom and Quake that gave humor and a personality to the genre. Who here played Doom, then played Doom2, and didn't think "Wow! More of the same!" Quake was especially disappointing insofar as, yes, it was 3-D and all, but it too lacked that certain "something" that kept me playing DN well into the 21st century.
But all of that is gone now. The video and screenshots showed a generic FPS that could have been any game.
Ultimately my feelings directed to the dev team are: "Really? Seriously? Forget the time spent, were you really proud of this?"
...Duke 3D had fun factor in spades, especially when you include the Duke 3D expansion packs.
To this day, every time I walk into a supermarket I think about how much fun that level was, shooting out the milk section while chasing someone who then ran straight into my trip mine.
Good times...good times...
You are so right brother!
Nothing was more fun than watching my collage buddy down the hall shoot the crap out of my Holoduke, I could actually hear his curse from my room, just before feeding him rockets from concealment.
Of course his favorite thing was to shrink me, and then step on me... It always bugged me than when I jetpacked away all tiny, he could run UNDER me and squish me.
Anyway great memories of that game for sure!
Dear Slashdot,
This isn't "gameplay footage." It's an animator's demo reel. Look at the comments from people who are saying they're disappointed, as if this was supposed to be a clip of the actual game. They are all misinformed.
DN3D came out a bit before Quake. I could not play Quake comfortably on my machine of the time. It was a 486 running at 33 MHz with a 1MB ISA SVGA card and 8-bit stereo SBPro. Duke ran fine though and I remember playing it on a lan in our dorms. It was very fun and funny. Years later I got a new K6 motherboard and borrowed a PCI gfx card. I was very excited to finally get to play Quake. I borrowed the card on Friday and returned it on Sunday. Quake just felt so lonely and there was absolutely no humor, it was not a fun game. Also the online was buggy, laggy, and people were just plain jerks. This was when I was on a 10 mb subnet.
But Duke was not all about the superior game play, it actually did have tech that was neat and first or nearly first at the time. It was able to run at above 320x200. It had levels where things could be above and below you. It had levels where you could damage walls to open new paths in the levels.
Also one thing I do not see mentioned very often about the game design aspect was the whole 3rd wall thing. There were all sorts of little nuggets sprinkled around related to that. I'd find them and think that was neat.
Well, from what we could see in the video, the gameplay was the same game we've been playing for years and years.
Yeah. It was fun then, and it can be fun some more.
I don't understand the industry. Having the latest graphics engine ranks about 5 on my list of things that make a game fun. Me? I'd be OVERJOYED to be playing, say, the fifth SWKOTOR story on the EXACT SAME GRAPHICS ENGINE. I understand that you need to keep up to some degree, but it just gets old.
I was really excited when Valve seemed to be on track to deliver lots of game content while staying with the same engine. And they have, basically. TF2 is still based on Source, and that's what they're focusing on. I wish they'd do more with the HL2 franchise, but the concept is the same and I applaud that. I own TF2, but I hardly ever play it.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
Some company with a lot of money should buy the rights to it and have it ship on Windows last.
Either OSX, Linux, Windows, or Linux, OSX, Windows.
It read, "The End Is Near - Repent!".
But he was laughing at another man, holding a sign.
It read, "Duke Nukem Forever Is Near - Upgrade!".
That's when I started to suspect I'd never see this game finished.
But ya know... I learned something today: Never accept behaviour in yourself, that you would have fired someone else for years ago. Like refusing to set and meet development milestones.
A little bit like SotC, I liked that too.
The greatest weapons you didn't mention were tripbombs and pipe bombs. That made multiplayer BIG FUN. Put a handful of pipebombs in front of a door, then deposit a tripbomb so that the laser would point to the door. The next player to open that door sure was in for a surprise. I haven't seen anything like that in modern multiplayer FPS.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?