Duke Nukem Forever?!?

[Rendakor]

Ahh, didn't know that Wasted.

[tgr]

Sounds like the Duke boat sailed, stolen by Bulletstorm.

Stolen by bulletstorm? How?

[Malakili]

Sounds like the Duke boat sailed, stolen by Bulletstorm.

Stolen by bulletstorm? How?

I think he is saying Bulletstorm did Duke better than Duke.

[tgr]

Looked to me like they did the duke parts well enough, they just forgot the game part.

[Malakili]

Looked to me like they did the duke parts well enough, they just forgot the game part.

Well thats the point, in Duke 3D there weren't really "Duke parts" it was just part of the game.

[Kail]

Well thats the point, in Duke 3D there weren't really "Duke parts" it was just part of the game.

To be fair, it's been a while since Duke 3D.  Things have changed.  Even Quake and Doom have stories these days.  If they'd taken fifteen years to release a game with a well known IP and came away with something like Serious Sam, they'd be a bigger laughingstock than Daikatana.  You'd have to emphasize the character of Duke, that's all people care about this game for.  What else is there?  It's not like Duke 3D was well known for it's realistic water physics or something, that no other game has duplicated in the last decade and a half, and people were looking forward to that.  They're looking for Duke.

[KallDrexx]

To be fair, it's been a while since Duke 3D.  Things have changed.  Even Quake and Doom have stories these days.  If they'd taken fifteen years to release a game with a well known IP and came away with something like Serious Sam, they'd be a bigger laughingstock than Daikatana.  You'd have to emphasize the character of Duke, that's all people care about this game for.  What else is there?  It's not like Duke 3D was well known for it's realistic water physics or something, that no other game has duplicated in the last decade and a half, and people were looking forward to that.  They're looking for Duke.

Figuring they are coming out with another Serious Sam that is supposed to be like the originals (barely any story, just full of shooting shit) I really think that releasing a quality shooter without a major story would do that bad.  There are a LOT of people looking forward to the idea of SS3 with minimal story and maximum shooting shit up

*edit* I meant a quality shooter without story would NOT do that bad

[jakonovski]

Yeah, there's this widespread assumption that a linear modern shooter punctuated by cutscenes is objectively a better experience than what was offered by games like Doom and D3D. I don't know why anyone would think that.

 

[kildorn]

I only find a lack of plot and reasoning bad in a shooter if it tries to give you a setting, and then fails to continue it. "Here is your motivation!" in the first five minutes, followed by the story never showing up again. If you don't try to give me a story, I take no offense to the lack of a continuation of the story line. Serious Sam really just goes "Aliens. Egypt. Guns. Deal with it."

And I really do think personality and humor wise, Bulletstorm out Duked Duke. Even if Bulletstorm started taking itself entirely too seriously towards the end.

[tgr]

To be fair, it's been a while since Duke 3D.  Things have changed.  Even Quake and Doom have stories these days.  If they'd taken fifteen years to release a game with a well known IP and came away with something like Serious Sam, they'd be a bigger laughingstock than Daikatana.  You'd have to emphasize the character of Duke, that's all people care about this game for.  What else is there?  It's not like Duke 3D was well known for it's realistic water physics or something, that no other game has duplicated in the last decade and a half, and people were looking forward to that.  They're looking for Duke.

I literally don't care if it's been a while since Duke3D. I was looking at a youtube video of Duke3D, and it struck me as a far more appealing game, even if it is mostly sprites and 2.5D.

Fuck, if they'd just taken Serious Sam and swapped the monsters and settings for Duke's, added some immature stuff like writing your own name with piss or pissing in the urinals etc, and I WOULD'VE BEEN HAPPY. I didn't think I was a hard man to please, but I'm increasingly getting the impression that I'm apparently putting demands well above and beyond game designers of this age.

[Margalis]

It's not like Duke 3D was well known for it's realistic water physics or something, that no other game has duplicated in the last decade and a half, and people were looking forward to that.  They're looking for Duke.

Duke 3D was known as being a good game.

Yes, it had Duke and pig cops and such - but it was also a fun, well-designed game. I guess it's easy to forget that given the time that has passed.

[Kail]

Ya, but you can't just have "hey, let's design a good game" as your design document.  I'm sure that's their goal, but realistically it's not like they have any reason to suspect that lightning will strike again for this title.  It's been fifteen years since the original.  The map designers have moved on, the artists have been replaced, the programmers have left, even Broussard is gone.  And even if you did have the original crew together, it's been fifteen years since they struck gold, and things have evolved a bit since then, enough that it's no longer a guarantee that they're going to knock it out of the park even if they could manage to crank out a game that was on par with the original.

I mean, I'm sure that they were trying to make a good game.  It's not like the entire thing is The Duke Nukem Monologues.  There are, I suspect, at least a few sections where you actually get a gun to shoot at actual enemies, and the question is: are those as good as the original?  If not, then sometimes a good/funny story can make up for mediocre gameplay.  And if the game is robot jesus, then adding in a few cinematics isn't going to kill it.

I suspect that the game is going to be pretty average.  Which is about what you'd expect; the FPS genre not exactly a land of innovation these days.  Developers know, mostly, what works and what doesn't.  But saying it sucks because it has cutscenes is kind of overstating things.  I guess if you were really pining for a retro FPS you'd be kind of ticked off that you weren't getting one, but I don't think the whole "90s style FPS" subgenre is really a huge market force these days, and I don't recall DNF being pitched as that (though I haven't really been paying attention).

[Margalis]

I think you are mistaken. Some of the appeal is Duke but a lot of the appeal is Duke gameplay, something this game has little of. This has a 2 weapon limit, regenerating health, linear scripted levels, etc. Very little of what made Duke a compelling game seems to be in this game, it's just a mediocre FPS with Duke involved.

Sure, you can't say "let's design a good game" but you can say "let's design a game that has the same elements that people remember and are expecting in a revival."

[Kail]

I think you are mistaken. Some of the appeal is Duke but a lot of the appeal is Duke gameplay, something this game has little of. This has a 2 weapon limit, regenerating health, linear scripted levels, etc. Very little of what made Duke a compelling game seems to be in this game, it's just a mediocre FPS with Duke involved.

Sure, you can't say "let's design a good game" but you can say "let's design a game that has the same elements that people remember and are expecting in a revival."

I'm not trying to defend their choices with regards to 2-weapon limits or scripted levels or whatever.  The game still hasn't unlocked here, so I don't know how shit the gameplay is.  I just don't think it's reasonable to expect a game company to release a game from 1996 in 2011 with a AAA budget.  It's the whole "Duke is in a cutscene, WTF that wasn't in Duke 3D, this game sucks" angle that is really weird to me.  They have to move with the times, you can't just re-package a game from fifteen years ago with a graphical upgrade and expect it to sell like Call of Duty.

[tgr]

I'm not trying to defend their choices with regards to 2-weapon limits or scripted levels or whatever.  The game still hasn't unlocked here, so I don't know how shit the gameplay is.  I just don't think it's reasonable to expect a game company to release a game from 1996 in 2011 with a AAA budget.  It's the whole "Duke is in a cutscene, WTF that wasn't in Duke 3D, this game sucks" angle that is really weird to me.  They have to move with the times, you can't just re-package a game from fifteen years ago with a graphical upgrade and expect it to sell like Call of Duty.

If they'd taken serious sam 1 and 2 and reskinned as a duke nukem game, I would've snapped that bitch up like a cleptomaniac motherfucker on crack. Duke's humour owns, Serious Sam's gameplay owns, the combined effort would own like very little has owned before.

Hell, even console players are fapping all over themselves over serious sam, and that is essentially doom with proper resolutions, mouselook (on the PC at least, I give no fucks on the 360) and 3d monsters. Console players of all things, which has seemingly been at the forefront of what I call the assification of FPS games. Let that sink in for a minute.

Serious Duke would've been robot fucking jesus.

[Kail]

Could be that I'm just retarded, too.  I was under the impression that Serious Sam wasn't doing particularly well financially, however, a cursory search suggests that I'm full of shit.

[tgr]

Could be that I'm just retarded, too.  I was under the impression that Serious Sam wasn't doing particularly well financially, however, a cursory search suggests that I'm full of shit.

I think the thing that made serious sam worth it for them was mainly that they had 6 employees and 4 contracters for serious sam 1. The fact they sold a bit probably didn't hurt, and re-releasing the games as HD editions probably did nothing to hurt either (I certainly bought both).

I actually missed Serious Sam 2 somehow, and it's not on Steam, so I guess I'm waiting for SS3 now.

[WindupAtheist]

Did anyone ever really think that this was going to spend a million years in development, actually come out, and then on top of all that be a good game?

[jakonovski]

Giant Bomb doesn't like it either: http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-duke-nukem-forever/17-4385/

There's some awkward stuff in that game.

[penfold]

Ive tried tweaking the ini file to no effect, but this game gives me terrible motion sickness* and I've given up at the RC car. Up to that point the game itself is distinctly average, I find the humour puerile, the graphics average, even Dukes voice sucks.



*Have to lay down with a headache behind one eye unable to play any games for 4-5 hours.

[UnSub]

Did anyone ever really think that this was going to spend a million years in development, actually come out, and then on top of all that be a good game?

If you listen carefully, you can hear the OW MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES from those who thought pigcops were hilarious when they were 10.

I think the real problem is that it didn't have to suck so badly.

[tgr]

Did anyone ever really think that this was going to spend a million years in development, actually come out, and then on top of all that be a good game?

A good FPS game in 2011? No, not really. I was hoping against hope, but I was assuming they would manage to fuck it up in some fashion, which is why I didn't preorder it or buy the balls of steel edition (even though I was sorely tempted).

[Lantyssa]

Even if they released a nearly identical game people would have hated it.  It's been 15 years.  Tastes change enough that few would have been satisfied once they had it in their hands.

[NiX]

Even if they released a nearly identical game people would have hated it.  It's been 15 years.  Tastes change enough that few would have been satisfied once they had it in their hands.

Pretty much this. The only way a good game came out of this would be if they didn't make Duke.

[tgr]

I'm going to disagree with this. They could've taken all the duke related thingies out and it would still look and play like a generic shit 2011 FPS game.

The setting isn't the problem.

[Chimpy]

The ArsTechnica Review is pretty in depth. The Good, Bad, and Ugly made me chuckle.

[bhodi]

Yeah, I just watched the giantbomb video. It isn't really about the decade plus of cooking. It's just a shitty game. A sad, completely stillborn game with absolutely no subtlety and humor like jar-jar binks in Schindler's list.

I felt really uncomfortable during the scene that they are both referencing. Watch from 15 to 18 mins. That's all you need to see or know of this game.

[Muffled]

I did what you told me to, Bhodi.

WHAT
THE
FUCK

What sort of childhood trauma did the person or persons who built that level have?  Can we get them some counseling?

I need some brain bleach now.

[Azazel]

 

[Surlyboi]

There's worse bits. Apparently there were some bits of concept art released that went for full-on tentacle rape action, apparently that made it in there somewhere too.

[bhodi]

I love trainwrecks, what can I say.

First, a deconstruction worth reading by a goon:

I feel that it's been shown fairly definitively that Duke 3D was not "South Park offensive" (read: halfhearted, 'apolitical' crypto-conservatism) but was rather an precise and laudable progressive statement pulled off with minimal resources, and with excellent gameplay as its base. The revelatory dominatrix scene in DN3D:AE consists of a couple sprites and some tinny sound clips. In fact, that's all the game had at its disposal in any scene. This is absolutely remarkable.

The one 'problem' with Duke 3D is that this minimalism left space for bad people to void their horrors into it and consequently undermine everything the game was actually doing. Effectively: "Duke always hated women, because that's how I played him." And because 'Duke' did it, it's all naturally acceptable.

It's safe to assume that DNF's creators and fans read the dominatrix scene as "hurf, dominatrixes are silly shit" - because everything about Duke 3D was "silly shit" - because there's this very real perception (voiced openly and repeatedly here, and clearly held by the game's creators) that humor is a somehow an apolitical violence. The belief is that the sole purpose and effect of comedy is the mitigated degradation of a target. By 'mitigated', I mean that the humor is considered "just a joke" and "harmless escapism" so there's no consequence to the attacks. They might not even be considered attacks at all. This is not "real" violence, they assert. Duke is and has always been, to them, "just a stupid videogame."

What this attitude reveals is, of course, that people are supporting the rape and hatred perpetuated by DNF's Fake-Duke with utter sincerity. DNF allows them to escape from the society that would tell them rape is wrong and freely enjoy the trappings of rape culture in a "safe" context. DNF's existence as a mass-media event allows them to consider themselves not deviants and aggressors, but simply indulging in some collective (and therefore "normal") rape-wish. The "ironic" approach serves a similar purpose of protecting the DNF creator/player from from being conscious of their hatred.

This appeal to "escapism" - the paradoxical assertion that Duke is desirable because of its lack of impact, relevance, emotional engagement or overall value - is tied into the celebration of its [alleged] "offensiveness".

The real Duke naturally would tell you that an offense involves having a target and a plan. Offense is a strategy. (Again, a game's story and its gameplay are indivisible.)

Clearly then, DNF is not actually offensive. It's just, I don't know, tragic? Unfortunate? DNF is "offensive" only in the sense that a child playing with a gun is an "offense". It's simply the terrible threat of power in the wrong hands. "Wrong" by way of ignorance and inexperience: ignorance of the power held and inexperience with regards to how or why to wield it.

What it comes down to is, as I have shown before, that DNF apologism is anti-Duke to the core.

And for icing on the shit cake, The Redner Group posted a tweet last night in response to some scathing reviews and hatred directed towards them and the game (now deleted):

#AlwaysBetOnDuke too many went too far with their reviews...we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom

The guy who actually posted this was Jim Redner, who by several accounts is a unsavory individual.

Needless to say, half an hour later:

I have to apologize to the community. I acted out of pure emotion. I will be sending each of you a private apology.

Followed by a statement where he distances himself and what he said from anyone even vaguely related to anything ever.

I would like a quick moment of your time to humbly ask for your forgiveness. I made a major error in judgment. I acted out of pure emotion without any thought to what I was saying. It is with a sad heart that I come to you now asking that you forgive me. I posted a Tweet this evening saying that I was reviewing The Redner Group’s policy for future reviews of video games based on today’s Duke Nukem Forever scores. I must state for the record I was acting on my behalf. 2K and all other clients had nothing to do with my comment. I want to be very clear that this came through me and was in no way affiliated with any of my clients especially my former client 2K.

Though I didn’t name names, I did say that I thought some reviews had gone too far in tone. Meaning, that the tone of some of the reviews was poor. I respect the scores, it had to deal with the tone. I was unable to properly convey that in 140 characters. But that it beside the point. We are all entitled to our opinions regardless of score, tone or meaning. My response was a juvenile act on my part. I know better and my emotion got the best of me. I have worked very hard on this project. I want it to succeed. I just got upset and acted out.

I believe we are all allowed to voice our opinions and that opinions by their very nature are correct. Many of you quickly pointed out my error in judgment. For that I thank you and apologize.

I truly respect what you do. You have helped me achieve a little bit of success in this industry. I depend upon you. Your coverage is of the utmost importance to me. You have helped me secure coverage for all of the projects that I have touched. I have tried to treat you all with respect, dignity and honesty. Tonight I threw that all away, and I am extremely sorry.

The video game industry is an industry that I love. I have tried to dedicate myself to this industry. Tonight I failed the industry.

With much respect, I hope that when we meet again you will be able greet me with a smile and without malice. I will gladly do the same.

I am truly sorry for what I did. I know better than that. If I have caused you any issues, now or in the past, I apologize.

[Kail]

I can kind of see where he's coming from (though the comment was still insane).  Some of the reviews are a bit facepalm worthy.  You can practically hear the tinny ringing of a monocle landing on the flagstones as the reviewer is aghast that a game bearing the noble moniker of Duke Nukem would be, in some way, politically incorrect.  There's so much baggage in these reviews it's bizarre.  PC Gamer giving it an 80%, Gamespot with a 35%.

I dunno, I'm having a bit of fun with it, so far (like "rent it someday" fun, not "must get it at full price" fun).  Only played through to the end of the casino, but so far the worst thing I've run in to is that Duke's got this annoying "Duke Vision" power which acts as nightvision, and when it's turned on, the game makes this high frequency static noise, like a CRT screen when it's on but blacked, and it's SUPER annoying to the point that it was causing me physical pain.  I had to keep taking breaks because I was getting a headache in that section; though my brother said he couldn't hear anything so YMMV.

[Modern Angel]

Who gives a fuck what the "baggage" is in those reviews? You don't get to only send review copies to folks who give good reviews. Well, you do, but you get to be called a piece of shit afterwards. Because you are a piece of shit associated with what most aggregate scorers are showing is a terrible game. Christ, I hope maybe this is a wake up call for the video game press to stop being bullied by PR firms and develop... HAHAHAHAHA! Just kidding. Nobody's going to change.

Here's my deconstruction for why this game sucks: we are not 14 years old anymore. The End.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I am a filthy pervert.

Yet watching that play through video was just...sad. Wasn't funny, wasn't sexy, it wasn't really even immature. It was a bunch of grown men trying to figure out what teenagers would like and getting it horribly wrong.

[Margalis]

It seems a little silly to me to complain about vile, mean-spirited and offensive reviews when the game itself is quite purposely all of those things.

Like even if a review was just "this is a game made by fucking idiots for other fucking idiots" it would be fair game to me.