Halb Mensch. Halb Ding.
10 years. That’s how long Duke Nukem Forever has been in the works. I have no more humor to throw at Duke Nukem. 10 years!… That’s not Sparta, that’s madness!
I look forward to reading the book about this, the biggest fuck up since Daikatana, it should be quite entertaining.
What were you doing 10 years ago? I was in high school… Feels like… forever :)
PS: You can read reviews at Amazon.
Don’t worry. Put down that chair! Duke is still coming! Phew; thought they’d cancelled it or something. Close call there for a moment. Man, I can’t wait for this to come out, it’s going to be so great! I mean, how could it possibly fail?
So I’m looking at Symphony, a new CMS of sorts, and I almost choke on my own spit as I read their header. I’m sorry guys, but I’m going to have to call you on your hyperbole:
Bull. Shit.
You all know that one of my favorite passtimes, is poking fun at 3D Realms and their lack of progress on Duke Nukem Forever (the most aptly named game in the history of the games industry).
Well, some guy decided to compile a list of events in the DNF development cycle (or lack thereof), including a long list of games that have been released in the interim, a small selection of UseNet posts, one for every year. Oh yeah, and this:
“The Voyager 1 spacecraft has travelled approximately 2.5 billion miles since the announcement of Duke Nukem Forever.”
Update: Rumors are abound that at some point development has switched to the Doom 3 engine… Heh, sorry, but I’m laughing my ass off here.
“That there Quake II engine looks pretty cool! Colored lighting and everything!”
“Yeah, it ain’t bad, we’ll take it!”
A couple of years later…
“Hmm, that Unreal engine is pretty good!”
“But… We’ve already built a whole bunch of levels and models. Set up lighting, designed encounters, written massive amounts of new code…”
“Bah! Naysayer! Nice engine, we’ll take it!”
“But levels are constructed in an entirely different manner on Unreal! There is no way we can just port our levels!”
“You’re fired.”
The unreal engine is continually updated, but then at some point the dear Brussard (CEO of 3D Realms) finds out that id Software is working on a new engine:
“Uh, per-pixel-lighting!”
“Sir, I don’t want to poke a pike in your pie. But we’re 6 years intos development now… Our competitors have all released 3 games each in the interim, and we’re only just now about done with rebuilding out levels for the Unreal engine, remodelling our models to current standards. And I don’t even want to tell you how many times the coders have rewritten their code, I think they may be wearing down a bit on this whole thing…”
“Bah Nigel, you were always a pussy! CHANGE ENGINE!”
“Sir, the leads are all wearing t-shirts that say ‘Time to chew bubblegum and burn out on the endless self-perpetuating game development cycle, and I’m all out of gum!’. And while I know that the plan was to lengthen development so much that a new Evil Dead movie could be released and we could once again rip it off, that just doesn’t seem realistic anymore! We’ve got to ship something!’
“Doom 3 it is then.”
“But the Doom engine isn’t even capable of handling the outdoor scenes that we have been rebuilding several times already!“
“F”
“Not to mention that we’ll have to rewrite all the code again!“
“I”
“We’re the ridicule of the games industry!“
“R”
“Will you be switching to the Half-Life 2 engine once that’s released? I mean why not? We’re already rebuilding everything for the third time, so what’s a third?!“
“E”
“I quit!“
Update Again: So it turns out that Gamespot was a bit hasty, and that they aren’t using the Doom engine, but rather their own in-house engine. Changing very little of the above conversation :)
You can argue back and forth about whether or not this leak will hurt sales or not. Personally I think it will. Assuming that the April date is correct, that’s 7 months of time where gamers will be looking elsewhere. Most people probably had the money put away for buying it now and some might end up getting annoyed at the delay (especially considering the massive quantities of hardware sold for this particular release). And then of course there’s Christmas. Christmas sells games by the bucket loads!
Also you have to take into account that the increased development time of 7 months is about half the time that most ‘normal’ games take from start to finish. 7 months of rent, wages and degrading hardware on your hands is expensive for Valve, very much so.
On top of that Half-Life 2 had the advantage of a head start with its original September 30th release date. It would have been out ages before Doom3, Halo 2, Duke Nukem Forever (heh) and Painkiller, allowing it to dig itself thoroughly into the marketplace. Especially in terms of mods and let’s not forget that mods for HL1 are currently still selling HL1 copies!
Granted all these games will still sell tremendously, but with the new April release date it now looks as if all these heavy hitters have bunched up in the same quarter. Half-Life 2 will in fact be late! Both Doom 3, Halo 2 and Painkiller are set for March release dates.
For the consumer the first quarter of 2004 and the beginning of the second quarter is going to be a great time to be a gamer, but for the companies it’s going to be publishing hell. I’m putting my money on HL2 and though there is no way to find out, I’ll bet you that this is going to cost a lot of sales for both Valve, id and Bungie. It’s a bit harder to predict Painkiller, it’s getting good previews, but it’s not exactly a prove company; and Poland? Heh.
But guess who benefits from this? Everyone set for release before christmas :) — Max Payne 2 just went gold, I bet they’re happy little ducks right now…