
Duke Nukem Forever.. is back on. - e1ven
http://blog.pikimal.com/geek/2010/09/03/piki-at-pax-the-duke-he-has-returned/
======
bd
More details in The Wall Street Journal:

 _The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by
Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series._

 _The game is currently expected to ship in 2011, although given its history,
Pitchford [CEO of Gearbox Software] is understandably reluctant to be more
specific. "We’re in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not
make a promise we can not fulfill," he says. "We need to get past the shock
and awe and then we can go to all the retailers and first parties and work out
a launch plan."_

[http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial-
long...](http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial-long-awaited-
duke-nukem-forever-will-finally-be-released/)

\----

Edit: And some more from Kotaku. Here is a video of people actually playing it
at PAX:

[http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem-
fore...](http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem-forever-in-
action)

Few screenshots:

[http://kotaku.com/5629778/the-duke-nukem-forever-pax-
demo-a-...](http://kotaku.com/5629778/the-duke-nukem-forever-pax-demo-a-
not+for+kids-photo-gallery/gallery/)

First impressions:

[http://kotaku.com/5629782/duke-nukem-forever-impressions-
two...](http://kotaku.com/5629782/duke-nukem-forever-impressions-two-girls-
one-duke)

------
sliverstorm
This is interesting. Modern graphics is beginning to make his character look
dated, rather than stylized. (Not because we are 'used to better', but because
of a more realistic background) They can't really change how he looks much
either, because everyone and their brother knows what he is supposed to look
like.

That's really an interesting puzzle. What do you do when graphics outstrips
your content?

~~~
eavc
You either up the realism on the character model or scale it back on the
environment, physics, sound, story, gameplay, etc..

The Team Fortress 2 art style would be perfectly appropriate to keep him
looking smarmy and impossibly perfect.

A grittier character model like what you see in most modern war games would
work too. You can still give a guy blonde hair, huge muscles, and dark glasses
without making him cartoony. You'd just make him look like Ivan Drago or
something.

~~~
JanezStupar
I think that Dolph Lundgren has all the necessary qualifications:

In January 2009, Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three
masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted
a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[Wikipedia]

~~~
dagobart
Full link to the passage:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren#Personal_life>

------
wazoox
I knew it! Duke Nukem forever couldn't really die. It must remain The Ultimate
Vaporware for decades to come :)

~~~
sliverstorm
Naturally. Without Duke Nukem Forever, how would we know what vaporware is?

~~~
kingkilr
Perl 6.

~~~
chromatic
We've released 34 versions of Rakudo. As well, I've had publicly available and
working Perl 6 code since 2005.

~~~
viraptor
Building current trunk weekly != release. It was acknowledged that those
"releases" are not what people in the "real world" are waiting for
(<http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411>). It was fixed with Star which
is a release for "early adopters". It's polished alpha by another name. It's
only one little step ahead of vaporware. Can we get over it now?...

~~~
chromatic
> Building current trunk weekly != release.

I agree, and that's why we've had a documented and polished release process
for almost three years now.

Existence is a binary condition, and binaries have existed for (almost) three
years. A claim of vaporware is trivially dismissable FUD.

------
keltex
It's supposed to be a fantastic game according to the review:

[http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-
punctuation...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-
punctuation/1968-Viewers-Choice-Duke-Nukem-Forever)

------
philcrissman
Well, it has to be. How could it remain eternal vaporware if someone isn't
continuously claiming that they're working on it?

------
blahblahblah
Let me guess... it's now going to be a skateboarding game with a turtle as the
main character. ;-)

~~~
pclark
great book.

------
sliverstorm
It will be strange to live in a world where Duke Nukem isn't vaporware. It's
status as vaporware has always been one of the basic tenants of the internet
as I know it, up there with Rule 34.

------
shaunfs
Anyone get the feeling this game is going to sell like crazy. It's like an
urban legend you can purchase. They should embrace the jokes and try to
leverage it to build suspense and PR before the release. I was awaiting this
game as an 8th grader for crying out loud, and now I'm 28!

~~~
zavulon
I'm with you. The first ever issue issue of PC Gamer I bought in 1997 had this
game on the cover as "coming next year". I was psyched!

------
electromagnetic
Forever is how long I'm willing to wait to play this game, in that I have
little to no excitement and don't care if I don't play it within my lifetime.

I loved Duke, he was a hero of mine. Now, because of fucktardRealms his
franchise has died, he's now associated with the most successful money-hole
ever invented and it's going to have to be a complete reboot to even hit
relevancy now.

Seriously kill Forever and start a new game called 'The End' and release it in
2012. (Edit: I'm serious, do a parody alien-Mayan end of the world, cash in on
the popular hype, sell it to a new expanded market and _then_ do Forever)

~~~
Swizec
Parody alien-Mayan Duke Nukem ... didn't Serious Sam already do that?

------
eavc
I guess it's because I'm slightly too young to have enjoyed it in its prime,
but I don't get the excitement over the Duke franchise.

It seems like a standard FPS with some cheeseball bravado, sexism, and sex
wrapped around the mechanics. Also, I can't imagine why anyone would think the
same people could make a modern game, which is 1000x more complex and
expensive to produce than the games of old, with the same success that they
made the old, relatively simple one.

So what's the major excitement here? Humor? Pure nostalgia for the days when
the cheeseball stuff was really satisfying?

~~~
Vulture
I think that the major point here is that you consider Duke Nukem 3D to be a
"standard FPS". You have to understand the 1996 context in which it was
released. Prior to that, the "best and most advanced" FPS was Doom. There was
no "real 3D", whole maps where flat. You could never stack monsters and
players and items over a Z axis.

Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the
mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID
Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS
have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells,
more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast
majority of large studio productions.

This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for
modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but
where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".

Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations
tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!

~~~
barrkel
Duke Nukem 3D used a 2.5D engine; it was like Doom, in that the map was
strictly 2D with ceiling and floor heights:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_engine>

I can't agree with you that FPSes haven't changed since then; it's only true
if you are very selective about what you consider important about a FPS. What
you have said implies that you don't care about story line, realism of physics
simulation, gameplay, etc., which I'm quite certain is simply not objectively
true of the gaming marketplace. Even if you think it's the "3D" that matters,
then things were vastly better in Quake than Duke Nukem, where you could look
directly up and down without bad distortion etc.

And then, one needs to ask, what quality is it of the 3D that matters? Simple
things like decent texture scaling (trilinear filtered mipmapping, anisotropic
filtering etc.) and antialiasing make a big difference, but are often only
viable at high resolution in 6-month old games with the latest hardware, such
are the demands of the processing.

~~~
mryall
> I can't agree with that FPSes haven't changed since then

Yeah, I found Portal by Valve Software a couple of years ago the same
groundbreaking experience in terms of gameplay that I felt with those first 3D
games. Some of my friends said the same about HalfLife before it.

------
sutro
Does anyone know if any of the original developers are still working on the
game? I'd like to believe that this is the story of a few intrepid programmers
overcoming great odds to ship a release that everyone had given up on. But I
suspect that all remnants of the old team are gone and a whole new team was
put in place when the IP changed hands recently.

------
shaunfs
In the spirit of Duke here is the best web comic ever:
<http://www.pidjin.net/2010/01/25/iwish/>

------
alttab
I was at a mutual gathering and I ran into someone who had worked on an
iteration of Duke Nukem Forever. He seemed genuine about the product and he
definitely said it was still on... even though he wasn't actively working on
it.

We all want it to be coming, that's the point. :)

------
dschobel
Any word if George Broussard is involved at all (or any other ex-3dr people)?

------
Revisor
You can relive the nostalgia here
<http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/duke_nukem_3d_atomic_edition>

------
ancornwell
Shake it baby!

~~~
ciupicri
I think this is Tanya's line from Red Alert.

~~~
dsteinweg
That was Duke all right.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D#Controversy>

~~~
ciupicri
It seems that we're both right according to "Top 10s: Best In-Game Quotes" [1]
and this making of video [2].

[1] <http://www.armchairempire.com/Features/Top-10s/quotes.htm>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE46xsJ11GU#t=0m47s>

------
mcgraw
Please don't delay this product another 10 years... This should be a good one!

------
malkia
The real enemy of the Duke: "Rest in pieces 3DRealms!"

------
gamble
...and it will run on a new line of Amigas.

------
lurkinggrue
I never gave up hope.

------
jkantro
This is a joke right...riiiiiight??? Who knows it could be real. Look at
Chinese Democracy, that eventually got released.

