Gearbox Claims Reviewers Were Unfair Toward Duke Nukem Forever

[ResonanceSD]

"Everybody should really be thankful that it existed to some degree at all."


I'm thankful for water and air. I'm not now, and never will be thankful for face-saving bullshit. To even dream of comparing yourselves to half life 2 shows that you can't win on facts, so you're going for a massive hail-mary pass to the bullshit corner.

 

[Strixvaliano]

Can't we just put the Duke's outing this time around to rest. It was a slow silent fart to finally come out but by god did it reek.

Thank you Gearbox for manning up and finishing this steamer, but you need to know when to count your losses and admit that it is unpolished, stitched together, rushed and tossed out the door. Nobody would be as up in arms if you would just admit you wanted to shove this out as soon as possible before it ate up your studio as well.

I don't think the reviewers are wrong but I will give you credit that it is a functioning game but the flaws are to numerous and to often to be forgiven while the game has absolutely no redeeming qualities about it.

Crying that it is just like Half-life is a bit absurd and if you are trying to use the old school style as an excuse that it didn't fair well at the hands of those dastardly reviewers (all reviewers please twirl your evil moustache right now) then maybe you should compare it to recent games that try and throwback to the old school play style. Hard Reset, maybe? That got fairly good reviews with an average of 75% on metacritic. I think that proves if your aiming at saying it was the "style" that you are dead wrong. If a game is well made and old school feeling it will sell and get good reviews.

 

[Ice Car]

As much as I like Gearbox, they really need to drop this shit. Stop trying to defend DNF. People thought it was bad. Just fucking accept it.

 

[Dendio]

Gearbox is right to feel their product was unfairly criticized. Reviewers took to writing more than the faults, they ventured into outright slander and sensationalism. Escapists reviewers took it as far as saying they would rather find themselves stranded alone on a forgotten island than play duke nukem. The game is not even close to being that bad.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

It's funny that I usually associate the acronym "DNF" with Did Not Finish. It couldn't be more apt in this situation.

 

[NotSoLoneWanderer]

I played the demo of Duke Nukem and wasn't at all impressed. Half-life 2 is much better and you know what? I still have to do that gnome achievement. What better time?

 

[BehattedWanderer]

I don't get it. I don't. Twelve years in the making, and they pick it up, knowing it was considered a lost cause. They built the remainder of the game, and had to see the rest of it, seeing as they kept it in. Loading screens that took forever, gameplay that chugs, graphics forming a living history as it went through the phases...there weren't a ton of game breaking bugs in the game, so the company had to know it wasn't the awesome pinnacle it was supposed to be...they said they would do just to get it out. And they got it out. It went from does not exist to existence, but it brought along a ton of baggage. It was akin to waiting a decade for whole night of passionate screwing, only to blow your load and passout in the first two minutes. The expectation could not have been met. They took the broken fragments of several other unfinished games with Duke Nukem Forever as their title and stitched them together--and a cogent game is not made from such things.

Oh, and Gearbox? You do fine. You do. But don't compare that Frankensteined mess to the slowly rusting Half-Life. Because, while it might not be aging perfectly, it's not already corroded through like Duke. A little polishing, some touch-up work, and Half-Life would be as good as new. DNF was DOA, and while we thank you for finding the body, you need to just let this one go.

 

[Treblaine]

You can't compare this game to something like Half-Life!

It's more like Halo with it's 2-weapon-limit, rebounding health and weak butt-whack melee!

This game FAILED to live up to the Duke-Nukem over-the-top exploitation game, with guns that are almost identical to the 1996 iteration. And this is in the time when we have had the likes of the Gravity gun, Painkiller-weapons, Cerebral bore, and a whole load of other weird and wonderful weapons.

DNF just ended up being a weak-sauce remake of Duke Nukem 3D.

You know what is objectively BETTER than Duke Nukem Forever? This:

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/duke_nukem_3d_atomic_edition

$6 for the original with this emulator to make it control like a modern game:

http://eduke32.com/

Geabox, you failed because in the most important aspects (i.e. beyond graphics) you failed to live up to your predecessor and this is reflected in metascores:

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/duke-nukem-forever DNF in 2011 = 49%

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/duke-nukem-3d original PC release in 1996 = 89%

http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/duke-nukem-3d Xbox Live Arcade Re-release = 80%, slipped only 9% in over a decade

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Gearbox is right to feel their product was unfairly criticized. Reviewers took to writing more than the faults, they ventured into outright slander and sensationalism. Escapists reviewers took it as far as saying they would rather find themselves stranded alone on a forgotten island than play duke nukem. The game is not even close to being that bad.

Yes it is.

At least there wouldn't be any rape jokes on a desert island.

 

[Asuka Soryu]

Yeah, it can't be the repetitive areas, repetitive bosses, two weapon limit, weak-ass regen health, long ass loading screens and textures taking a full fooking minute to come in. Nah, it's because it's a blast from the past with it's infusion of Halo and Gears of War style gameplay. I found this game... dull, boring and irritating.

I was soo annoyed by the fact that I couldn't keep guns because of the two gun limit. Then the whole needing to cower like a coward to heal my health, despite me somehow being the 'badass' Duke Nukem. You know, the graphics didn't bother me untill later on when the game had drained any pleasure I got from it. And man does this game feel half-assed. Why are all the quotes mostly from the first game? Was copying some other 80's movies to hard? Good job on not adding anything new either when it came to the guns.


Don't get me started on the driving stages. Only good part about the driving stages is when you crash it and Duke says: "aww, and it got such good mileage to"

Also, I don't care what your excuse is. If it took 14 years for Valve to release Half-Life 2 and it was inferrior to the original I'm sure people'd be pissed at it to.

 

[Anjel]

I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for this but I quite liked DNF - admittedly I got it at £10 during a sale and can't honestly say I'd have been happy paying £30 for it, but then I can't remember the last time I bought a game at full price. Was it a great game worthy of a place in my hall of fame alongside Diablo II, the Fallout series and a mish-mash of various genres? Nope. But was it as bad as people made out? Not in my opinion.

Another one I'm enjoying at the moment - aside from the dodgy multiplayer camera angles - is Dungeon Siege III.

Flame away.

 

[Dendio]

"Rather be stranded on an island" is something that should be reserved for broken games that are nigh unplayable. Game breaking glitches, unsightly graphics or mind numbing gameplay. Duke Nukem on PC at least looks good not great. Duke nukem on PC is not overly buggy, in fact I have yet to encounter a significant bug at all. The game play is average. Its a shooter that does not bring much new to the table, but its not the equivalent of watching paint dry.

A game that deserves the reviewer slander that DNF got was Superman 64. Play DNF then tell us how that compares to Superman 64's bountiful glitches, crappy graphics and gameplay consisting of broken controls + flying through rings ....

How about trying Saints Row 2 ( Which btw has many looking forward to the third game) on PC. Its nigh unplayable. The lag is unplayable. Driving is unplayable with the bad control and lag. The game was coded horribly for PC. Duke Nukem runs much smoother on PC.

DNF is an average game. Its not nearly as bad as reviewers made it out to be. As a radio host once said on people in the media" when criticizing material you can tell when they are just doing their job and when they have an agenda. Its obvious to me the Duke Nukem reviewers ( not just escapists) had an agenda in making the game the most poorly reviewed software since Big Rig ( no collision detection) racing

 

[Zefar]

I remember seeing someone play Duke Nukem Forever like sometime after 2007 and showed some weapons and such. It was posted on Youtube but pretty hard to find now. It wasn't long either. But he was playing it.

Though in this video I don't think you had health regen and you absolutely didn't have 2 weapons limit. You could carry all of them on. Like a REAL Duke.

So this mean GearBox thought it probably was a good idea to install those. Why? I have no idea. It's like they didn't knew what the fans of the game wanted. Well that's pretty much is a fact now.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Duke Nukem Forever was mediocre and largely forgettable. It commits the cardinal sin of being mediocre and bland in no especially unique or "unintentionally entertaining" way.
Really, it's nowhere near the mind-raping badness of a few other titles I could mention from the last year...(Kane and Lynch 2, Mindjack..), yet that's exactly how DNF was received, and still how it's largely perceived today.

So, is Gearbox just blowing off steam for the backlash? Of course they are. But perhaps we should look at this more closely.

Seem the game reviewers/critics (nevermind that most were probably in their teens when DNF was first announced) who did ANY research on its development or had any significant interest in the industry beyond "Buy game. Play game." would have known what a mess it was going to be; exponentially moreso by today's standards given its time-transplanted design.

Whereas most old franchises (today, think 'reboots') have a relative amount of "unknown" as to their quality pre-launch; DNF didn't. I had casually followed its development for years, and I've seen this sort of development trouble before (Daikatana, anyone?). By the time they officially announced a launch date, I strongly suspected it was a complete flop.

However, I'm neither vain nor stupid enough to believe I was the only one who figured that out.
Many of these critics and reviewers (that Gearbox is hating on) knew as well. They HAD TO. It's their bloody JOB to dig up this stuff! We had received an online "Farewell" letter the year prior when DNF had been originally canned; including screenshots and concept work.
If I saw, I couldn't had been the only one to notice how dated it looked.

Thus, by the time a release date was announced, it wasn't a matter of "How good/bad is it?", but "How bad can we make it look for those ad-hits and publicity?". It was an easy target after all, and they had months to prepare, gleefully hoping for worst.

I'm no stranger to this brand of "Nihilistic journalism" and it has actually become quite common these days; mostly applied to movies that are anticipated to be absolutely terrible.
I mean come now, please tell me I wasn't the only person who was actually looking forward Transformer's 3: Dark Side of My Ass? To the hilarious internet firestorm grilling Michael Bay's latest travesty to a cinder?
Or how about the upcoming Twilight: Breaking Dawn lynching? Oh it's going to be hilarious, and you know it.

So yeah...I actually see some merit in Gearbox's claim. They released a bad-mediocre shooter and it was treated like the anti-christ simply because it was an easy target.
Still, this public whining doesn't reflect on them well, not professionall.

And nobody likes a whiner.
...Unless they're a critic of course. XD

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

If Half Life were released today then most likely it wouldn't be received well. The difference is however that at the time when Half Life was released it was fairly groundbreaking in a market that favoured mindless FPS action.

Do yourselves a favour Gearbox and dont try and compare your mediocre realisation of what was a pretty good name to a game that came out years and years ago. Accept that the game could have been handled a lot better and relied less on the name to carry the sales.

I remember the song they used in the advert ("Stroke Me" by Mickey Avalon) more than the game, thats how forgetable the game was.

This. Half-Life came out years ago. Of course it would be received differently if it was released today. Just like any older game would. Poor rationalization is poor.

 

[Vrach]

Because DNF came out with new and innovative mechanics that fell out of the customer base's comfort zone.

 

[DivineBeastLink]

"Everybody should really be thankful that it existed to some degree at all."

Translation: Everybody should really be thankful that a pile of shit exists to some degree at all. You should TOTALLY be thankful for that pile of shit stinking up your house and giving the neighbors a bad impression.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

How was DNF in any way similar to Half-Life at all?