Duke Nukem used to be a fun game :) Jet packing round the city maps nurfing everyone with RPG :D

BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASSSS

Ventrilo Harassment - Duke Nukem Style

GO GET YOUR MOTHER

I AM A CUP YOU IDIOT !!!

:-D

I GOT BALLS OF STEAL

ITS NOT A TOOMAAH

reraise

Fucking love that one :D

lol, never heard a woman talk like that :-)

Verbalizing/picturizing what DNF was...

wow, that article was actually very interesting :)

Dird bringing the goods (Y)

i read that a few weeks ago.

esr shouldn't be like slashdot, where they basically post last month's news on a regular basis

then perhaps you should have taken 2 minutes out of your busy, busy day and made a news post

[+] ain't a blowjob
it was a busy work day

a busy work day with time to read an article about the fail of Duke Nukem.

fuck, u nailed me
the blowjob thing still stands, though

That article makes out that broussard guy as an epic retard. Which I guess he was.

it more makes him a bad project manager, while having a really good eye for the skills of people and his ability to create a team.... but hey if he let someone else manage the project it seems (according to the article) that the team would've produced a really good game.

Its a common problem in game development with small companies like that. Especially when they are trading on past reputation.

When the leaders are the actually the wrong people to lead, it slowly destroys the company as the leaders do anything and everything to avoid fixing the real issue. Themselves.

How do they get away with it?

Because they're deemed as successful and right for the job and no matter how good the staff are, its a simple case of blood is thicker than water.

But all that does is slowly destroy a company because they pass on their bad habbits to other staff, who then either stop caring, or go and work elsewhere as what happened here and at many other studios.

George is to blame for what happened and what happened to with him is the perfect example of what I'm talking about.

But because he was in charge, nobody dared question him.
But there is only so long you can go against the grain.

you know it can't die

good that there's so many of them, since its known that for a good game you need a shitton of people.

TBH
Carmack = 5 coders
Romero* = 5 designers

* pre-[riches/ferraris/getting blown under the desk by Killcreek/talking on IRC or playingWoW instead of working]

Ferraris didn't have anything to do with it, he was still pumping out new ideas even after he became a celebrity. The problems began when he decided to do something he wasn't capable of, lead.

talking about romero?

yeah

After he got fired Carmack made a comment about him spending too much time on IRC rather than work, so it would seem the problems occured pre-Ion Storm.

cliffy b > romero
sweeney > carmack
4 man team = :o

Epic are just wannabe id and always will be B>

it's incredible to see how people can lose touch with reality so completely.

Then again, the whole article is apparently based on the words of people who weren't willing to go on record (And those who did seemed to be quite positive).

true, but working on a project that was supposed to be 2 years (or even the 2-4 year average in the article) and then needing 12 and not having anything final. And all that with still the same person in charge.

In my eyes the last engine change or even two where pure insanity, sure it might have been was what's needed for the best possible game. But anyone with some grasp of reality, that it won't ever finish that way and that investors will want their money back eventually.

I believe towards the end he was more in his all world where he believed it could still somehow work...

Sounds like they made 3 games anyway (So not so bad really :P):
- 1998 E3 (Looked good)
- 2001 E3 (Looked amazing)
- The recent one (Looked decent from the limited stuff seen)

It's more like they just didn't package it up and release two of them and the third took a little extra time, which is obviously George Broussards fault.

making three games:

cost: millions
earnings: 0


hmmmm

All financed by 3drealms owners :)

They can do what they want with it.

well, I would still not call the outcome "not bad" ;)

Not so bad as making one game in twelve years and not even releasing that.

They at least technically made three!

hmm ok.

worthless because unfinished games, though :]

Yeah, Broussard is an idiot, the 2001 E3 trailer was amazing, if he'd just finished and released it within a year it would have blown everything out of the water.

2000-2004 was quite dry on quality FPS games, I can only think of three:
- Deus Ex (More of an RPG than shooter)
- NOLF/NOLF2

+ rtcw


but yeah you are right.

and I did like Max Payne a lot, but I can see where it could be a matter of taste.

Max Payne and RTCW are what I would describe as solid ;) (Well RTCW MP is quality of course).

Well RTCW MP is quality of course

was about to knife you in the sweet spot in the back !

red faction :>

Terrible game :/

I'm sure all decent developers, if there were any to begin with, quit years ago. imagine having "Duke nukem Forever" in you CV. yeeesh!

one black dude and no womyns

I think the lack of diversity killed duke nukem

oh, I didn't know 3D Realms was busted :-(,
I thought they produced other good titles like Max Payne, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project or Prey ...
but like becks said, if a game that is supposed to be developed in 2 years takes 12 years, that is just insane ...
probably they played multiplayer lan and World of Warcraft all day over there

They still publish games.

how so if they are bankrupt?

... 3D Realms (3DR) has not closed and is not closing. ... Due to lack of funding, however, we are saddened to confirm that we let the Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) development team go on May 6,... While 3DR is a much smaller studio now, we will continue to operate as a company and continue to licence and co-create games based upon the Duke Nukem franchise. ... Take-Two’s proposal was unacceptable to 3DR for many reasons, including no upfront money, no guarantee minimum payment, and no guarantee to complete the DNF game. ...we viewed Take-Two as trying to acquire the Duke Nukem franchise in a “fire sale.” ...we believe Take-Two’s lawsuit is without merit and merely a bully tactic to obtain ownership of the Duke Nukem franchise. We will vigorously defend ourselves against this publisher.

Basically they aren't bankrupt, just seriously damaged.

In July 2008, 3D Realms announced they would revive the Apogee Games brand to develop and publish new games, as well as help distribute older Apogee titles. The Apogee name, logo and library were licensed to a new company, Apogee Software, LLC., separate of 3D Realms. The new Apogee soon signed a deal with Deep Silver to co-publish a trio of Duke Nukem games for the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable called Duke Nukem Trilogy. The company also released several Apogee and 3D Realms titles on the digital distribution platform Good Old Games.

Well, they took a long time, and they had to basically keep rewriting it when it wasn't done, and new generations of engines came out. They apparently had to remake the engine like 3-4 times during it's development.

It didn't help that, in a video tour of 3D Realms a few months ago, they were playing WoW instead of working. =X

you can still use things from the older game ...
you can still use most of the models and animations,
you can also convert the levels, you can use all the textures,
and you can also reuse the code to some extent ...
you know if you have done something right once,
you do it at least twice as fast next time.

There must have been someting entirely wrong,
I don't think they worked on DN4Ever every workingday in all these years ... How stupid some people are, Duke Nukem was a true cash cow, they just needed to release something decent and they could have done a hell lot of money, just because the predecessor was so famous (id software is good example for this, since quake 1 they haven't released a single really good game, but they made a lot of money with sucessors of legendary titles)

:O Quake 2 and Quake 3 aren't really good games? lol

quake 2 was only good in multiplayer,
quake 3 was a pure multiplayer game and not really an evolution,
it is a solid game though, but I wouldn't classify it superb,
quake 3 got a good community, that made the game big, that's all.
What does Q3 have what a mediocre modder could not transport to another game? And tbh., I think is far off perfection gameplaywise,
the gameplay is just a mix of doom and q1/q2 ... nothing really special, also id software does not know much about multiplayer gaming, if thresh, fatal1ty, etc. would sit their and define the rules for a standard fps and continously test it, boy, that would be something,
but saying's from carmak's like "I don't like bunnyhopping because it looks stupid" makes me doubt that q3a was really created from people who really understand something about the gameplay .

Yeah, well, both games are multiplayer games :) Community revolves around good game, so basically, Quake3 = great community = great game :)

"great community"

explain

once upon a time ...

It had tons of people playing it, it was a live game played on big tournaments, TDM was pretty popular etc..

Actually Thresh did have serious input when id was fine-tuning the multiplayer and some of his ideas were plain bad. It shows how far Quake gameplay has come since those days.

Check out this Quake 3 review by Thresh during the beta days:
http://www.firingsquad.com/games/quake3/page3.asp

yeah machine gun really saved tdm :P


Oh well, they were just predictions, everyone is entitled to a few bad ones.

ehm ID-software made a lot more really good games.
tbh pretty much every game made by the people at ID has been a succes (as well highly anticipated as a good game).
I mean... commander keen, wolfenstein, doom, quake...
there is not one game there that I wasn't happy with. (although in some cases the pc needed to run the game was kind of killing)
And even this orcs and elves thing won a couple of awards for good game etc.. so I guess that one is good as well :>

(and yes I liked doom3 and quake4 as well)

I'm glad I never payed a cent for Duke 3D

if they would have pick up the crysis engine this time, they could have stay with it for a few years by now

He could and should have done what all game studios do, release a somewhat unfinished sequel after sequal (different stages of DNF) instead of trying to keep upgrading the same game with no releases.

seemed like it was almost there and that broussard guy seems like a bit of a nut job =)

looked pretty nice from some of the material towards the end - http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/46948/Duke-...lot-Leaked

nice read! thanks esr :D

I wonder who the "17 year old kid" who created Duke3D's Build engine is. It sounds like he was largely responsible for the games success.

yeah, I wonder that too, writing such a good engine (for its time) with 17, although the quake engine was much more advanced and true 3D, but still it was the 2nd best 3D engine on the gaming market.

Jedi engine > Build

oh, I completely forgot dark forces,
these 2 engines are approximately equal from the graphical quality afaik, dark forces was released before, so you are right

Can't really tell the difference /o\

Name's Ken Silverman.

Thanks, 3DRelms should have offered him big money to create a new engine. Check out his website. The dude is a MASSIVE nerd. If you think about the nerdiest quake nerd you know, Ken is 10x as nerdy ;). http://advsys.net/ken/

another little known fact: he coded that website on a casio calculator

Interesting link, thanks. He quotes an interview with Carmack of pure truth about the topic of this thread:

"Carmack: Like Prey, there's a lesson to be learned, something a lot of companies don't really ever learn. You hear it from the fan base a lot. "Do it right. We'll still be here. We'll wait," and it's tempting to just let things slip. But that's really not OK. If you're doing something cutting edge, you're making fundamental decisions about your architecture, and if you let it slide for a year or two, then it's just not the right decision anymore. Even if you pile on all these extras, it's not optimal. It's not targeted at what you're doing. So I have some concerns about Prey coming out this late."

Year 1997, replace Prey with DNF (Prey wasnt done by 3DR)

Prey still sold better than Q3/Q4/ET:QW/Wolfenstein.

Prey was canned for ages though until they brought it back, it really bugs me when I see people say it had a ten year development cycle or whatever :(

Not that this has anything to do with our point :/

I think developers need to realize that graphics isn't everything. In hockey, what is more important? The banners on the boards or the quality of the ice? Fps games have delivered the same old crap over the years just packaged with prettier graphics. They should focus more on physics, character interactions, movements, meta-gameplay, game strategies, etc. The things that make us want to play over and over again regardless if the game is 10 years old. It's crazy when you realize a game like qw has better multiplayer than the majority of games comming out now (14 years later)!

I don't think much development is all that focused on graphics (only crysis or FF games really).

!!! DUKE WILL NEVER DIE !!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0zCD0fsec0

ive not been on esr for a while now until now, and the last thing i want to see is another fucking duke nukem forever post as to why it failed.