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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 still haven't seen anyone joke about how in sports DNF is short for did not finish. Can we get on that?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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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."
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If you COULD care less implies some level of caring.
Here's a handy guide to the caring continuum, for quick reference when you are in doubt:
http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html
To sum up
"Could care less" = Might care a LOT
"Couldn't care less" = Do not care at all
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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Serious Sam came close to Duke3D. I just discovered it works nicely in CrossOver games (although, for some bizarre reason, only in Direct3D mode, not OpenGL - somehow emulating Direct3D on top of OpenGL works better than emulating OpenGL on top of OpenGL...). I played the whole game from start to finish - which I did once when I first bought it - although it's a lot shorter than I seem to recall Duke being. The same sort of one-liners and humour as Duke, but also wide open levels where massive numbers of enemies rush at you (also one level I only completed because a bull accidentally threw me up onto a wall where I could hide and fire all of my ammunition into a mass of monsters). Even the plotline - such as there is - is quite similar between the two games.
It's almost a shame that they didn't just buy Croteam and brand Serious Sam as DNF.
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Story be damned - it's always the most forgettable part in gaming, regardless of how well it was written. Bring the fun back
Wasn't Carmack the one who said (about FPS) that:
Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
Very true!
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