And the environments looked half-finished, textures were still in a very rough state, and the interface was inconsistent. That’s without going into how many model tests were part of it (this could be due to the source of the video). The game play footage for the most part looked like early tests.
The scene with the big boss alien guy on the football field, wasn’t that exactly from Duke 3d?
Well a shooter is a shooter, the format is somewhat limited. Quake kind of defined the basics of the genre. What I liked in particular was the Monster climbing over the building. Very few games have Monsters that are that climby.
Half-Life 2 (+ its episodes), Bioshock, and Deadspace had climbing monsters, and that’s just off the top of my head.
On the assumption I don’t have to post you collateral or similarly faff around, I’ll go over (I think - I’ll profit if it takes more than 30 months) at $50/month with you if you like. PM me.
Yes.
Almost 20,000 views in 2 days with I’m guessing zero mainstream media coverage. Nope, no interest in that game.
Shit, I’m no good at putting my money where my mouth is. Let me get back to you on that one :D.
That they did, and they were better (other than Deadspace) for it. I haven’t played Deadspace so I don’t know how it was.
Just to hijack slightly. It’s a fun game. Not particularly scary, but it has some good startle moments. (Though, the music swell every time an enemy shows up gets stale fairly quickly.)
If you don’t expect anything groundbreaking, it’s not a bad game. But it’s very derivative both in it’s gameplay and story.
And just for once I’d like the bad guy’s identity to actually not be predictable from the start in these types of things.
It took the Bitmap Brothers 7 years to finish Z, and it wound up doing just fine even though Command & Conquer and Warcraft had stolen its thunder by then…
For some reason, what you said reminds me of Doom 3. Please tell me it’s better then that/
It’s worse, in my opinion. It’s slower-moving and more boring. It has the same “lights abruptly turn off, loud hissing or crashing noise, then monster appears” routine, and the monsters are honestly pretty lame looking. Certainly nowhere near as cool looking as the Aliens from Alien. The “horror” element of it gets old pretty fast because it’s really predictable when the monsters are going to come out. And, for Christ’s sake, the whole “spaceship interior” aesthetic theme is SO played out. Note to game designers: putting a bunch of tubes, wires, pipes and electrical panels everywhere is not creative. You can just make that shit up; there doesn’t need to be any logical order to it; it doesn’t impress me to throw the same wires and conduits and ventilation shafts and random control panels all over every single room. The still backgrounds of the original Resident Evil for PS1 displayed more skill.
Blah.
Well, there’s a bit more strategy in how you take out enemies (severing limbs is recommended), and the mechanics behind the various weapons are much more varied in the advantages and disadvantages. There are 7 weapons in the game and each has a primary and secondary mode of fire, so you have 14 ways to kill the enemies with your weapons. You also have a kinesis module (with unlimited uses) that allows you to throw explosive canisters at the enemies, or even other dead bodies, but the dead bodies typically don’t give an instant kill like they do in Bioshock. And you have a stasis module (that has only a certain number of uses before it has to be racharged) that allows you to slow enemies and mechnical things down.
The enemies are nicely varied. There are exploders, that if they get close to you and suicide (or you shoot them at that point) will take out a significant amount of life. You can also shoot them from a distance near other enemies to take them out. There are “pregnant” ones that if you aren’t careful how you kill them will have other enmies burst out from them when they die. Most enemies have multiple forms of attacking you.
You also get to enter vaccuum areas, and so have to monitor your oxygen reserves which for the most part I found annoying. Not difficult (there’s usually recharge stations in these areas, or you are close enough to an exit that you can run out to refresh your air and then reenter; I never once used an oxygen canister from my inventory).
But the zero gravity parts are fun. And they make for interesting combats, especially against the wall crawlers. And I don’t think anybody’s done something like that in a game, so at the least the Zero-G was innovative.
So from a gameplay perspective, it’s better than Doom 3. The enemies are considerably more distinct, and there are frequently different strategies to kill them off. The Zero-G, as I mentioned, is fun.
But, as Argent Towers mentioned, the astethic is boring, and so is the plot.
But I did play through the entire game–which is more than be said for Alone in the Dark–and I had fun, but this is not Bioshock or Half-Life 2, both far superior games.
If the flashlight is attached to the helmet or the gun, that’s all it takes to be better than Doom 3.
Heh, heh.
All guns have a built in light attachment that activates anytime you go into aim/fire mode.
I find the idea of a space marine that has to hold a mag light extremely implausible.
Absolutely I believed them. This was a real company with some number of game designers working for them. They must have been burning through a lot of money over the the last decade and ate up most of the profits they had made from their original games. I have to think that at some point they wanted to see some return from all their effort.
On the other hand if the whole thing was some kind of smoke screen, what was the point?
To keep investor money coming in is the usual reason, though I don’t think that applied to DNF in the later stages of its life. The other common reason is ego; they’re the center of attention and want to remain the center of attention.
I’ve both witnessed and taken part in dozens of doomed projects over the years. Duke Nukem Forever’s development story is a common one. I will confess that I expected it to end with the game getting shoved out the door half finished and then the company folding a month or two later but they apparently couldn’t get it together that much.
The way I heard it, DNF had been funded out of pocket for years, at least since the Unreal build was scrapped. When you have a project that hundreds of thousands of people are going to be judging you on, and will be comparing your work to their memories of the original, that puts a lot of pressure on ya. I almost think that they wanted to get away from that attention, and that’s why they did those three reboots and fell into feature creep, rather than finish anything they started and release a game that wasn’t going to be the best evar. With no publishers pushing for concrete progress, they could tread water for as long as the money lasted.
However, it looks like there are definitely consequences to treading water forever: Take-Two Sues 3D Realms. Or: the company that paid $12 million for the rights to publish Duke Nukem Forever is hoping to get a little of their bank back. I especially like the ‘stfu imo’ quote from 3D Realms President back when Take-Two was pressuring them to get the game done in 2003.
I was never a big fan of the 3D Dukes, so it doesn’t really bother me that this one won’t come out. At this point, they’d just have to break all expectations or make the game a total parody of itself (e.g. Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard).
Just for fun and perspective, here’s a list of many major game/culture releases and events that have happened since Duke Nukem Forever was announced.