And it only took thirteen years of development.
3DRealms has shutdown and that’s pretty much it for the longest running gag in the gaming industry. Honestly until recently I expected something to eventually escape the company but unless someone is willing to pick up the thing (and I don’t see that happening at even fire sale prices) it’s gone.
Was there a person left on earth who believed the game would ever be made?
Man, there’s a company that blew an advantage. Duke Nukem was huge for a while. But they let any advantage that they had wither and die.
I wasn’t sure I understood entirely: Did they only shut down Duke Nukem or is all of 3D Realms shut down?
Haha, I had just posted something on this myself, I’ve asked for mine to be closed. Personally, my hopes were starting to get up again after that Christmas teaser trailer had come out. I think DNF had the potential to be something great- a politically incorrect shooter in fully interactive Las Vegas with all the strippers and sin that go with it. Shame all that work will probably be lost, though one wonders how they were allowed to go so long without anything to show for their trouble. If I’m even a week behind on a programming deadline I’ve got 3 managers on my back.
I doubt there was ever really much work put into it; it ws probably a marketing or investing bait and switch.
If one reads the history of this, it doesn’t take a lot of reading between the lines to see that George Broussard has been selling bullshit the entire time, supported with the odd short sequence of “Duke Nukem” themed skins slapped onto whatever the most available and recent game engine is. It’s particularly telling that 3D Realms made a FPS in the meantime (Prey) and it’s sort of hard to explain how you can claim to be unable to release a 3D shooter while you are, in fact, releasing a 3D shooter.
It’s been vaporware the whole time.
It’d be nice to see a good developer leap in and snatch up the IP.
They didn’t develop that, they only published it. Human Head Studios did the legwork, if I recall.
I agree in general though; if there was ever more than a fifth of a game completed I’d be amazed.
This is a shame. 3DRealms made some of the best first person shooters ever, in my opinion. Not just Duke Nukem 3D but also Shadow Warrior. Those games had two things that are utterly lost in many of today’s games: 1, a SENSE OF HUMOR, and 2, COLORS. Not only are all today’s games so goddamn unrelentingly serious, they’re also, for some insane reason, all more and more leaning towards this trend of everything in the goddamn game being either brown, gray, brownish gray, grey, brown-grey, or grimy. Resident Evil 5…Fallout 3…Metal Gear Solid 4…Assbandit’s Creed…a large portion of Far Cry 3…I’m sure I could think of others if I had the time. What is this obsession with this ugly, BORING color palette they keep on using?
Halo’s pretty colorful.
Fallout 3… Everyone talked about how great the graphics were. How great is a screen of nothing but brown and grey pixels?
I don’t think that’s fair at all. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, for instance, is tan and heat-blurred. Call of Juarez is… is… earth-toned! Yeah! That’s the ticket! Seriously, though, what the hell is up with that? How did the last Rainbow Six title, which was set in freaking Las Vegas, manage to have such a dreary palette? I am not sure if it is out of some unflinching desire for “realism” (forgetting that a) real life is not that bland and b) people seeking an unflinchingly realistic experience already have other options, some of which even pay for college) or just that somebody set the trend and everyone else followed.
But I’m sad about DNF for pretty much the exact same reasons you are. Damned shame.
Prey was also delivered way late, didn’t deliver on most of its claims, (destructible terrain) and was completely underwhelming when it finally came out four or five years after originally intended.
Rainbow Six Vegas is pretty damn colorful.
As was mentioned, Halo is colorful.
Bioshock is colorful.
Assassin’s Creed was well…set in the desert but nonetheless was fairly colorful.
Mirror’s Edge use a gleaming Macintosh future city palette, but it is shocked with vibrant colors all over the place, vibrant reds, blues, oranges, purples, greens.
Half-Life is pretty colorful despite being set in an urban wasteland.
Gears of War is very colorful though the palette is is very grim.
And the mack-daddy of all vibrantly colored recent games: The Force Unleashed is so colorful it’s downright trippy.
Basically, the idea that games today aren’t colorful is well…bullshit.
Overstated? Maybe. Bullshit? I disagree, although perhaps it’s a matter of aesthetics.
For my money, although Crysis and Bioshock were reasonably colourful, an awful lot of games seem to have succumbed to a muddy, washed-out world of grays and browns. I haven’t played Gears of War, but browsing the screenshots at Gamespot I don’t see the colour. Is this a special-case scenario or is Gears just set in a world where the trees have been covered in a thin layer of grime? Similarly, although the first time you come up over the hill to Damascus I was literally so blown away I loaded from my last save to experience it again, I wouldn’t call Assassin’s Creed especially colourful.
Rainbow Six: Vegas? It was vibrant, yes–when you were actually in a casino, instead of in Mexico or wandering through corridors. For being set where it was, Vegas seemed to have more than its share of levels like that (YouTube link), where you get back to the wonderful world of greys and browns that GRAW was so fond of. Far Cry looked like that; Far Cry 2 decided that was more appropriate. For that matter, the original Unreal Tournament was not especially colourful to begin with, but what the hell happened to its most recent incarnation? Even the icons at the top are washed out.
For what it’s worth, although neither Argent Towers nor I are the first to express a lack of enthusiasm, I do think it may have just been a fad that people went through. Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, for example, managed to avoid the Spielberg “screw with the colours” conceit, which one might’ve otherwise expected. I don’t, however, think it’s a complete fiction to suggest that, for a period of time (and actually, given my examples, maybe just a single publisher) first-person shooters seemed to have turned their contrast knob down for some reason.
I must note that the 1st attempt at a Hohn Carter of Mars movie was in 1931, and still nothing. The latest Pixar attempt sounds promising, but I won’t bevile it exists until it is shown to the public.
But I won’t give up on it, nor will I give up on DNF - someone could buy the rights.
Brian
Duke Nukem Whenever
Alex Osaki Dingy colors are still colors. When I hear ‘colorful’ I think broad palette not ‘deep saturation’. In which case Gears of War definitely has a lot of colors.
So are people complaining that the colors are not cartoony enough or what?
FarCry 2 is wonderfully rich in colors. They suit the locale and you should find a screenshot for FarCry 2 that takes place at sunrise. You really trying to say that this game is not colorful?
Basically I would argue that your examples of ‘more colorful’ games are actually less colorful, in that they use a narrower color palate. FarCry 2 is far far more colorful than the first one.
Like I said, perhaps it’s a matter of aesthetics. For example I would have preferred Rainbow Six spend more time in or around casinos and less time in brown and grey places, though in part that’s just because I would’ve thought “Vegas” would’ve given them license to have more neon and less dust.
And I think at times Far Cry 2 can be quite gorgeous. What I am saying, however, is that while some photographers would envision a road in Africa as looking like this, when I leave my safe house I see that. And while some people see trees on the savanna as being that colour, Far Cry 2 presents them as this shade.
I do think there is a certain low-contrast, low-saturation aesthetic and that multiple games have adopted it, at least in part. I’m not a game designer, so I don’t know if that’s some new hardware trick that somebody discovered and people latched on to, or if was just a certain way of doing things that people liked, or what. Perhaps a better question is, ok, fine–call it dingy. Why have so many games adopted a dingy colour scheme?
As I said, maybe it’s aesthetics, but I don’t think it’s completely unreasonable to comment on the prevalence of games that seem to be “made up of three colors (brown, gray, and muzzle flash)”.
Oops, missed the edit window.
Anyhow, I see what you’re saying, in that the palette is definitely broader, and certainly the graphics in Unreal Tournament 3 are more technically impressive than in the original. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that 1) I, personally, do not enjoy the lack of vibrancy, and find it neither terribly realistic nor terribly compelling and 2) I certainly agree that not all games use the “32 bits of brown and grey” colour scheme, but there are enough of them that do that I can see where people who say they’d like more “colour” are coming from.
