I’ll take it as granted that DNF and SC2 will have had rather different levels of success both commercial and critical.
Both were sequels of original, enjoyable games which built great expectations and spent a very long time in development.
From what I understand, the developers in both cases were able to self-finance.
Why did they turn out so differently?
Starcraft 2 spent like 10 years less in development, didn’t involve the company going bankrupt, did involve a company with near limitless resources, was in a different genre with considerably lower gameplay standards, wasn’t taken over at the last minute and thrown together to get it out the door, and was made by an entirely different group of people, and focused on the easier-to-do multiplayer gameplay instead of single-player gameplay.
Any similarity between the two titles is superficial at best.
Hmmm, well first off, they both might have been able to self-finance, but that doesn’t mean the dev budget for Duke was anything like SC2.
Also, SC2 stuck to the original formula where it should have, and deviated and improved where it made sense. Probably a result of extensive beta periods and just good development and design philosophies.
Duke on the other hand completely deviated from it’s roots. It wen’t from an old-school shooter with expansive maps and where exploration was rewarded with some raunchy stuff thrown in, to an over the top, borderline offensive, linear corridor shooter.
So SC2 brought us the same oldschool gameplay we loved, along with some innovation or just improvement to the single-player formula which worked very well.
Duke brought us, the same old, same old we’ve seen from modern corridor shooters, and not much of anything else.
Uhm, what?
I think Blizzard would have to disagree with you there. They spent a huge amount of resources just trying to get the game play right. It’s one of the biggest eSports out there.
One factor is might be the huge popularity of the Starcraft multiplayer. Blizzard probably got a lot of constructive feedback from the gaming community, who had played the game for years, and were able to use that in making SC2. Blizzard probably also had a much clearer vision of what they wanted SC2 to be and had the finances to back that up.
How long was Starcraft II actually in development? It seems to me that we didn’t even know there would be a Starcraft II until a couple of years before it was released. Before that, it was just “Wow, Starcraft was a great game; they should make a sequel”. And when Blizzard finally announced a release date, they stuck to it (mostly by making it a point to not announce anything until they were absolutely certain).
With Duke, by contrast, Forever was announced shortly after 3D came out, and missed at least a half-dozen different scheduled release dates.
One RTS title comes out every 18 months. Three FPS titles come out every day. It’s easier to look great when people can’t point to something else.
Starcraft 2 isn’t the biggest eSport. I thought it was, then I saw a League of Legends stream with 120,000 viewers.
I said ONE of the biggest.
I guess I kinda agree. There’s so many FPS games out there, that if you don’t do something interesting, and unless you are part of an established franchise, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle.
But, at the same time, the smaller RTS crowed tend to be pretty damn discerning about the quality of the gameplay.
Two different things to overcome, I guess.
If three FPSs come out a day, isn’t that instead evidence that the standards are lower for FPSs? That FPS players are willing to accept just any old piece of garbage?
Wikipedia says it was announced in 2007, but production actually started in 2003.
Duke Nukem was announced in 1997, and had been in production since 1996.
To answer the OP’s question: the development of SC2 hasn’t been covered in as much detail as the development of DNF, but I expect that, once the development team had nailed down a basic concept, they spent years continually refining and perfecting the game experience. DNF, on the other hand, repeatedly threw out every thing they were working on and started from scratch. I’ve read (I forget where, possibly here on the boards) a description from one of the game designers of his work process, which involved spending months creating a designing a level, having it approved every step of the way, and then showing the almost finished level to management, who’d tell him to scratch the whole idea and start over. And this happened over and over and over again.
The difference, in short, was between one group of people who knew exactly what they were doing, and were willing to spend as much time as necessary to get it exactly right, and another group of people who had no idea of what they wanted or how to get it, and spent more than a decade dithering over it until their company folded and the game sold as scrap.
One game is pretty much the national sport of an entire country
I think this is dead wrong. RTS gamers are amongst the most serious gamers about quality. RTS games often have dozens of patches over years of support tweaking everything about the balance. They have extended, long betas where they take extensive feedback. There are extensive metagame discussions around minor changes to the game.
Very few people will accept and play a shitty RTS game, whereas shitty FPS games find audiences all the time. If anyone put COD-like effort and rehashing and stagnation and imbalance and sameness into the RTS genre it would never sell, whereas in the FPS genre it gets a billion sales.
Part of the reason that there aren’t as many RTS games as FPS is because people know it’s hard to make a good RTS game, whereas you can shovel out crap in FPS and it’ll sell.
Anyway, Kinthalis covered the differences well. Duke 3d was an old school shooter with lots of weapons and exploration and fast paced run and gun violence. DNF is a slow, recharging health, completely scripted, completely corridored, slow paced piece of shit. Their target market was people who recognized/liked the original duke games, yet they designed the game for people who’ve grown up on modern shittastic corridor shooters who are too young to even know what a non-corridor shooter is. The people who thought “hey, cool, duke nukem!” will be dissapointed that it’s the same as any other modern shooter, and the people who are interested in modern shooter are all just going to be playing COD anyway.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Also, the part about “easier-to-do multiplayer gameplay.” 
I’m not a game developer, but it sure seems like balancing a multiplayer RTS like SC2 would be a pretty significant challenge compared to putting together a single player FPS that doesn’t even have an open world.
Those viewer numbers for LoL at Dreamhack were insane, though (actually, viewership for esports in general is surprisingly high, especially when you put it next to, say, viewership for regular season NBA or MLB or NHL games for comparison). I’d love to know if those numbers are real, though. The LoL numbers were high enough to be a little suspicious. If they’re real, I’m really impressed.
It’s definitely harder to create a well-balanced multiplayer game than a good singleplayer game. The trick is that releasing a poorly-balanced multiplayer game doesn’t hurt critical acclaim nearly as much as releasing a game with poor writing or story or other singleplayer execution. Reviewers just play the multiplayer at press events against other terrible reviewers or against the developers after being told how to play the game in its intended way. There isn’t enough time for imbalances to manifest and the balance of the intended-style is usually decent enough for everything. As such, it’s far easier to make a critically-acclaimed multiplayer game than a critically-acclaimed singleplayer game. Dawn of War II is a great example of this, with its absolutely broken balance, but innovative singleplayer gameplay.
Given Riot Games buying their way into WCG, probably DoSing HoN’s servers, and that fake anti-DotA 2 whistleblower thing from one of its creators, I think your suspicion is well justified.
Also, since the FPS market is so large, you can still make money off of a mediocre game compared to what you can do in the RTS market, so in that way the standard is lower. However, because of the quantity of releases, an FPS needs to be a better example of the FPS-ideal to achieve critical acclaim than an RTS needs to be of the RTS-ideal, which was my meaning.
Well, that depends on what you’re trying to balance. In any FPS without classes, balance is, on some level, automatic, due to symmetry: All players have exactly the same capabilities, so there’s no imbalance. The same could be said, of course, of an RTS without distinct races/nations, but I’m not aware of any such game in the RTS genre, while classless FPSs are pretty common. Now, one could say of an FPS that the different weapons aren’t balanced relative to each other: If the rocket launcher is too much better than the shotgun, say, then that’s a problem… But it’s a different sort of problem, since you can switch weapons in the middle of a match, while you can’t switch race or class. And it’ll also tend to be at least somewhat self-correcting, since if the rocket launcher is too favored, then you can just camp the location where the rocket launcher spawns (or somewhere leading to there) and kill anyone who tries for it, thus forcing the use of other weapons.
I’ve played sc and sc2 since they came out. from being a pretty serious(but shitty) player and following most everything blizzard since 96 or so, i think most people are unawae that after the original blizzard was going to make a fps called starcraft ghost. it was released that they were gonna do this and most avid sc players were all for it. but they kept pushing the date farther and farther til the suspended it indefinately. i think that “flop” of a project and essentially a waste of money is what really made sc2 take so long. it was gonna be released like 5 years but they just kept moving the date 6 months again and again. bastards
Bastards? Duke Nukem Forever is exactly what Ghost would have been like had they not dropped it. And then there wouldn’t have been a SC2. Really, what happened with Ghost is about the best it could have been since 2002.
Edit: If anything, the comparison between the two illustrates the importance of scrapping a project before it comes out if it just fails utterly.
I spit my drink all over the screen reading this.
Really?
REALLY?
I don’t want to go all Pit here, but you, sir…well, let’s just say I disagree strongly with you and find your opinion to be absolutely contrary to mine.
It’s hard to say if Ghost had any effect on the production of StarCraft 2. Blizzard has multiple design teams. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the people working on Ghost would have other wise been working on a different StarCraft title. Seems more likely that the production of WarCraft 3 was a bigger distraction.
It’s easy to say that Starcraft Ghost had no impact on the development of Starcraft 2 because Blizzard didn’t make Starcraft Ghost. Some other company was making it. Starcraft Ghost is to Blizzard as Left 4 Dead is to Valve (just not terrible.)