Doesn’t come out in the US for 4 days but it’s been out in the rest of the world.
I’ve watched a few videos. TotalBiscuit’s review/criticism/whatever does a decent job of explaining why it appears to suck - apparently it has fallen into the same rut that every other modern shooter has. It holds your hand the whole way through - there’s one path, every little thing that can possibly happen is scripted, the game highlights (with glowing orange aura and everything) everything you have to do in case you’re too dumb to realize you have to press the OPEN GIANT DOORS button after the NPCs all keep telling you to find a way to open the doors, etc. It’s essentially a shooter on training wheels, or an interactive cutscene. This image about map design isn’t even exaggerated.
I don’t always hate “cinematic” type shooter gameplay, sometimes it’s done well enough, but I hate that every fucking shooter made today has to be one. This one in particular draws comparison to the original, which was a fast paced run and gun shooter that featured no hand holding and let you explore and solve things on you own and take your own path. In doing that, it’s shown how far FPS design has been dumbed down and slowed down and made easier and made uniform and forced and scripted. The part in the video where he talks about how they force you to go through a game in a very specific way so they can say SEE! LOOK AT THIS! WE DID THIS! SEE HOW COOL THIS IS! instead of discovering things on your own is insightful.
You can probably guess what I think the driving force behind these changes in the shooter market is, but I’m not looking to get into a flame war over it.
So anyway - one path, extreme scriptedness, carrying only two weapons (and they always give you what they think is the appropriate weapon for the section, removing choice even further), regenerating health bar (which actually slows down the game - instead of running around and killing everything like duke in duke3d, you spend half the game hiding behind rocks, waiting), no secrets or exploration… it’s a modern shooter through and through, and appears to be crap for it.
I’d like it if we could actually have a real or spiritual successor to games like duke3d sometime, but apparently we’ve just lost the ability to make games that don’t hold your hand the whole way through.
I forgot to make the point - who exactly is the game targeted at? The whole point of doing another Duke Nukem game is that you want fans of the first one to be interested, right? But people who were playing PC games since 1996 most likely have a completely different idea of how games can and should be, and they’re probably going to hate the new dumbed down hand holding modern shooter genre anyway. Whereas all the kids that you’re targeting with the way the game plays now haven’t even heard of Duke Nukem because they were 4 when the original game came out, so the brand has no sway with them.
Don’t listen to those guys’ shticks. Neither of them know what they’re talking about. They just make lame jokes. Buddy is enough of a burden after worming his way into the SC2 scene.
I’ve found in my limited experience TotalBiscuit is pretty reasonable if a little spazzy/impatient. The footage I’ve seen seems to confirm his assessment for the most part, especially how blatantly and rigidly scripted and one tracked the game is.
Feel free to discuss whatever you want about the game, by the way, this doesn’t have to be my rant about modern shooters, I’m just giving my own first impressions to start the discussion.
I am not interested in this game but PC Gamergave it an 80 so it’s probably decent. I think the target audience are people who like the character and humor of the original and want it packaged in a competent game with modern graphics. If the game delivers that, and the review suggests it does, it will make a decent profit.
It should be, but I’m leery about that too. Apparently they had it designed too so that all the objects you could/had to interact with also glowed, so instead of figuring things out for yourself you had big beacons that said GO HERE, DO THIS, THEN GO HERE AND DO THIS!!!
Apparently there was enough outrage after people viewed gameplay videos with that glowing that they removed it or gave an option to remove it from the game. Which is good. But it’s worrying that they thought it was good design in the first place to assume you’re too stupid to want to figure out things on your own and wanted to play with training wheels.
Well i got a rental copy over the weekend. Just played it for about 2 hours. It’s going in the envelope and back in the post.
I found it distinctly mediocre. Dull level design, puerile humour, wierd design descisions. Well you can go read the reviews if you want a detailed analysis but yeah it’s just not very good.
I will be tomorrow. The nostalgia, in addition to the 14-year buildup of anticipation, has me going against my better judgment. From what I’ve read so far, it’s a perfectly serviceable game that suffers from the protracted delay and the memory of the old games. In other words, it could never have lived up to expectations (as I surmised earlier in the other thread).
I suspect I’ll enjoy it, but I also suspect I’ll still favor Black Ops over it. What the hell, I’ve spent more for less.
I still want them to go real old-school and make a Duke 3D platformer along the lines of Ratchet and Clank. I thought the side-scrollers were more fun to play anyway.
It’s pretty fun. It’s obviously an unfinished game that’s been sitting on a shelf some four years and it starts out incredibly slow, but as you get closer to the end it starts to feel like a real game. The ratio of puzzles to combat is much better balanced in the latter half of the game, which seems a bit odd, usually you want to polish up the first couple of levels to lure people in.
A lot of witless dolts have whined about how the game is too linear. Yeah, it’s not an open world game, but neither was Duke 3D. Compared to a lot of other modern shooters, Forever has quite large, open areas in its levels. Of course, the levels are also quite confusing messes at times, especially the darker maps and boy, there are a lot of those.
Duke’s “humor” or character has never appealed to me, but he has one or two witty comments. Not a whole lot, though.
Also, apparently the console versions have terrible load times. Avoid those. This is a PC game.
