Quote: Original post by PlayfulPuppy
Yeah, given how many people know of DNF, there's a really good chance that it'll still sell like billy-o, troubled development or not. Probably not enough to cover costs all 12 years of development, but probably enough to make a good number of publishers happy.

I mean, if you saw it in a store today, wouldn't you be at least a little curious as to whether or not it turned out any good?

Sorta begs the question of what any potential current dev team is actually going to aim for with DNF.

Do you put a new coat of paint on oldschool Duke and keep its classic (dated) feel? Do you make a modern FPS with so little in common with the feel of its early counterparts that it might as well be a new IP, but then relying purely on character to bring the fans?

I wonder if anyone even knows what the potential audience for DNF wants or hopes for... and I wonder if the potential DNF audience itself even knows what it wants.

I wasn't a mega fan myself back in the day - nothing against them - but the whole DNF story does make me curious.

My prediction:

1. Duke Nukem Forever will eventually be finished


2. The £££ will roll in due to the name and mystique attached to it


3. People discover that the game is another bland shooter and not remotely similar to the older Duke games


4. "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and the game will have lost focus and be a mess


5. Cries of "should have cancelled it years ago" and it flops

I think anyone expecting great things from any finished product is likely to be disappointed. Sorry, folks - it's now been far too long and I think it's time to just quit while ahead, pull the plug on the project and call it a day. If the game ends up sucking (and Gearbox have ruined good franchises in the past) then it'll be a sorry end.

It's what I expected would happen if the publisher managed to wrest control of the IP. If true, I expect a Duke Nukem game will be out by 2012 at the latest.

But yeah - while I'm sure it will pick up some interest, I'm also not sure why they bother. As IP goes Duke Nukem is so horribly 90s, more in an embarrassing than a retro kitsch sort of way. The industry has moved on.

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
My prediction:

1. Duke Nukem Forever will eventually be finished


2. The £££ will roll in due to the name and mystique attached to it


3. People discover that the game is another bland shooter and not remotely similar to the older Duke games


4. "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and the game will have lost focus and be a mess


5. Cries of "should have cancelled it years ago" and it flops

My prediction:
- Gets finished.
- Gets amazing sales due to the visibility of the DNF project in the public consciousness and good old word of mouth.
- Ends up being quite bland and generic, although not bad.
- A sequel gets announced due to the good initial sales, gaming world collectively groans at the announcement.
- Developer eventually goes bust, and the project is never picked back up due to a general lack of interest.

Quote: Original post by onfu
Sorta begs the question of what any potential current dev team is actually going to aim for with DNF.

Do you put a new coat of paint on oldschool Duke and keep its classic (dated) feel? Do you make a modern FPS with so little in common with the feel of its early counterparts that it might as well be a new IP, but then relying purely on character to bring the fans?

I wonder if anyone even knows what the potential audience for DNF wants or hopes for... and I wonder if the potential DNF audience itself even knows what it wants.

I have to agree that this is a huge question and I think it's an interesting one to mull over. It probably starts with thinking about what exactly it was about Duke 3D that we loved and would expect in a sequel and what parts could we sacrifice and still feel as if we were playing a Duke game?

If you look at Blizzard, they didn't change very much about Starcraft II. Were they scared of changing the formula especially considering all the professional gaming built around it? But not to digress...

1) Duke was a more light-hearted satirical game-play experience compared to the serious, gothic, brooding, demon infested Doom 2 and other competitors during the mid 90's.
- Duke was always wise cracking.
- Cops dressed as overgrown pigs on two legs.
- Duke was an 80's action hero\wrestler stereotype which I think just translates into being a "man's man." Give me some beer, women with nice tits, some guns to play with and shit to blow up, and I'm cool.
- Bizarre and rather crazy weapons for it's day (shrink ray + stomp, freeze ray + kick, pipe bomb with remote trigger) which fits in with the theme of light-hearted and satirical game-play. Half Life again reminded us that a game could have more than gatling guns and shotguns.

2) Many maps were well lit and a change of pace from the horror style darkness in games before it... something i think Half Life duplicated to it's benefit.

3) Pushed the envelope in terms of content and themes. Before Hot Coffee mod there was public outrage all over the media over the killing of topless strippers in a children's game called Duke Nukem 3D.
- Duke was misogynistic.
- Duke was a rebel.
- Duke was a bit of a lunatic really, perhaps even a sadistic one.
- Duke was a bit of a contradiction which added some complexity to what at first glance seemed like a cardboard stereotype of a tough guy.
- Duke was an anti-hero.

4)Duke took place in the real world which served as an anchor to keep all the rest of the absurdity in check. Sure things were campy and surreal, but in just the perfect way. You fought on the city streets, in movie theaters, in bathrooms, on the roofs of buildings... but never in some anonymous jungle or dark dungeon or any other personality deprived setting.

5)Mod-ability. Build engine map editor made modding pretty accessible.

So I think the core theme of Duke is simply "breaking the rules." Duke 4 needs to simply break the rules of what currently is the norm for First Person Shooters. How does Duke 4 do that in this day and age? I can't say. There are all kinds of shooters out today and more are coming out tomorrow. How do you break the rules if your game isn't even going to get released for another 3 years?

I think if you look at Serious Sam 2 you see a game that tried to copy Duke in some respects but in copying it (and Doom) they didn't really break any rules.

[Edited by - Hypnotron on August 11, 2010 9:14:14 PM]

Quote: Original post by Hypnotron
4)Duke took place in the real world which served as an anchor to keep all the rest of the absurdity in check. Sure things were campy and surreal, but in just the perfect way. You fought on the city streets, in movie theaters, in bathrooms, on the roofs of buildings... but never in some anonymous jungle or dark dungeon or any other personality deprived setting.

Y'see, this is what I loved (And still love) about the original Duke. I still don't understand why there are so few (Non-sandbox) games that take place in a modern, urban setting.

(Although looking at the leaked DNF footage it's mostly sewers and warehouses. Oh dears).

Heh, this reminds me of all the gamer arguments back in the 90s as to which was better - Duke Nukem 3D or Quake? And teenaged me arguing that they were both sucky games in completely different ways. [grin]

For me, there wasn't anything wrong with the gameplay itself of Duke Nukem 3D. It had a range of interesting varied environments and interesting weapons leading to fun shooty gameplay for the time. It was the antithesis of Quake's boring-as-all-hell brown snoozefest environments and blandtastic weapons and enemies.

The problem was Duke himself. I know this is a personal opinion, but to me he's the single most unappealing game protagonist I've ever had the misfortune of playing as. I found his misogynistic brand of "humour" to be so unfunny it completely spoilt the rest of the game for me. And that was back when teenager me was playing the game for the first time in the 90s; I doubt the IP has aged well over a decade and a half.

I'm guessing the unfunny humour was a 3D Realms thing given they also made Shadow Warrior which was even worse, but it's a Catch 22 situation. There's no point making a Duke Nukem game if they don't include the Duke 3D "humour", but that will make it a game I don't want to play. (Of course, if they go back to the original Duke Nukem sidescroller I might be interested...)

Trapper Zoid,

I think you're correct that a formulaic rehash would suck and a lot of the themes and style of Duke would not go over well in 2010. But I don't think Duke needs a lot of that.

If I'm right, I think the key to a successful Duke is to keep him as a rebel and for the game to break rules of story telling, action, themes, etc. That is a big challenge in a world of "the Simpson's Already Did It!"

Duke is Duke because he broke the rules as a character and as a game. So Duke 4 has to continue breaking the rules... not trying to re-bake the same cake in a new oven.

Imagine the game opens and Duke is chillin' at home with his ebony wife and 6 adopted kids. One or more of the kids is handicapped. Damn Duke, you've changed! Didn't know you had it in you... but then again, you always were a rebel...

And maybe Duke's learned some new tricks... Duke doing kung-fu or karate? I'm suddenly having images of a white "Black Dynamite." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190536/

Anyway, I would love to own the Duke IP (heh, duh i suppose). Seriously, it's still full of potential.

[Edited by - Hypnotron on August 11, 2010 11:18:18 PM]

Quote: Original post by Hypnotron
Imagine the game opens and Duke is chillin' at home with his ebony wife and 6 adopted kids. One or more of the kids is handicapped. Damn Duke, you've changed! Didn't know you had it in you... but then again, you always were a rebel...

And Duke is in his fifties, and the game turns out to be a political sim where Duke running against his second ex-wife seeking re-election as governor of a random southern U.S. state. [wink]

Duke never sat with me as a genuine rebel though. He was a bog-standard schoolboy-who-just-hit-puberty daydream vehicle; a movie action hero who tries to be cool by spouting lines ripped off cult classic films and always thinking about boobies. I think that's why he still annoys me - he's the poster boy of that adolescent segment of gaming in the mid to late nineties where it seemed perfectly acceptable to have the industry run by men who were acting like they were thirteen.

Quote: Original post by Trapper ZoidAnd Duke is in his fifties, and the game turns out to be a political sim where Duke running against his second ex-wife seeking re-election as governor of a random southern U.S. state. [wink]

I lold :)
I don't really think that it's about Duke's personality. I think that the core of his games were just supposed to be about shooting and blowing stuff up, crossed with some appealing action. Giving him muscles, some memorizable one-liners ["babes, bullets, bombs - I love this job"] and a good sence of humor was just a boost for male players. It's not like his personality ever takes a significant role in the games [take Devil May Cry for comparison, where even their moves somehow resemble Dante's and Nero's personalities].
If Serious Sam's level design wouldn't be so amazingly boring, and there were more monsters than aliens [they're not the same! :O], and there would be some bikini babes, and some more adult speeches coming from the hero, wouldn't it suddenly feel much more Duke Nuk'em than Serious Sam? It's the same plain shooter type, but Sam is just so..unmanly. He's just the guy shooting the aliens. But Duke is resembling a tough guy.

I would like to see a game with a man with balls of steel like Duke, just for the fun of it. But everyone is all about realism for high end machines, making blood splatter physically correct, being able to tore limbs off and see the skin rip apart, and all that stuff. I don't say that this is bad, but I want some more fun nowadays were cop-pigs just fly against the wall and squiek, or slimy creeps explode in a green fontain. But instead, I think I can see the future..a half exploded bomberman crawls towards you, cries and screams "kill me!"; gumbas will squish under Mario spoiling their brains all over the floor; Pac-Man will slowly defibrate, letting us see his insides after his skin, flesh and bones are gone one after another.