Still Life said:
You should re-adjust your expectations and do some research. Gearbox have had the game for roughly 18 months, finally completing a game that 3D Realms had been developing for over a decade.
The level of histrionics has reached a level of ridiculous proportions in this thread.
i couldve worded it better, and the incompetence of 3Drealms far outweighs that of gearbox i suppose, so ill forgive your ill manners; i wasnt trying to be dramatic.
Hardcore_gamer said:
They took over the game so it became their responsibility.
this guy knows what i meant; gearbox took over the project, had a decent development cycle of their own, but from what i can tell from the demo, all they added to the game were bland, basic elements from other shooters; its a dime-a-dozen FPS with the duke nukem IP attached to it. either they had something to work with leftover from 3Drealms but still couldnt make good on any promise of nostalgic FPS-ing; or 3Drealms' DNF was a mess and gearbox started over, but promised one thing and delivered another anyway.
duke nukem is not a complicated game to make; a functionally standard array of FPS weapons blown out of proportion to cause excessive gore, some aliens, some strippers, some corridors, some gore, and most of the dialogue will be one liners from one voice actor. its just mindless violence through colorful settings and things with alot of blood; by modern standards, a pretty simple game to make. im no expert, but im lead to believe the limited color palette seen in many modern games is due to advanced graphics or lighting of some sort, and if you want a colorful game, you go for simpler, more stylized graphics; a style that lends itself well to duke's over the top and ridiculous world.....a style that gearbox has done before in borderlands. they say you can only have 2 weapons because of console limitations, even though half life 2 allowed you access to all weapons at all times simply by hitting the d-pad; this isnt an RPG with hundreds of weapons, there only needs to be maybe a dozen unique weapons; we could cycle through them easily enough if HL2's system is somehow too complicated to reproduce.
borderlands went through a crazy development cycle, started off realistic and apparently boring, but ended up stylized and fun. gearbox said they learned alot from developing borderlands; judging from the result, alot of things that would make them a natural choice for developing a duke nukem game... and alot of things they apparently forgot when they actually did develop it. gearbox had all the skills to make a good duke nukem game even if they completely started over, and they failed anyway. that, to me, is incompetence.
its simple, old-school gameplay that really only has to carry the game from one outrageous situation to the next, but instead of developing that they spent their time on poo-flinging and a doodle board, so that its nothing but boring gameplay interspersed with a few amusing context sensitive button presses. im sorry, but it really seems to me like gearbox missed the point, and it was not a difficult point to get; "shoot your way out of crazy situations"....not "hide behind rocks regenerating health, and occasionally press a button to instigate a crazy situation". its a massive gameplay and humour segregation, and feels more like playing a generic modern FPS and changing the TV back to watch southpark for a minute on occassion than duke nukem.
3Drealms and whoever else might've developed it deserves the blame for holding up the game for so long, but gearbox deserves the blame for the final product.
