Duke Nukem Forever is a game that could have been so much more. I, among pretty much all Duke Nukem fans, was really blown away by its 2001 Unreal Engine trailer and was really looking forward to it. However, and as we all know, the end product did not live up to the extremely high expectations.
Speaking with IGN, 3D Realms’ Scott Miller revealed some really interesting details about the game’s development. According to Miller, 3D Realms was a really small company that was always playing catch up. While the team had some cool ideas, it was so understaffed that it was never able to really finish this huge game before its competitors releasing their own games.
At some point, Scott Miller considered giving the game to Digital Extremes so they could finish it. Digital Extremes was well known back then for its partnership with Epic Games as they co-developed first Unreal game, so that team would be up to the task of finishing the game. However, George Broussard was against this idea as he wanted 3D Realms to finish it.
Ironically, Duke Nukem Forever was indeed outsourced to Gearbox when 3D Realms was unable to finish it but that was too little too late. Furthermore, Miller was disappointed by the work that Gearbox put into the game. While Miller believes that Triptych Games performed a miracle, he also believes that the team – which was also a really small team – needed more help from Gearbox, and that the latter should had put more effort into polishing and fixing some of the issues that were still in the game. Ah, it’s Aliens: Colonial Marines all over again or should I say… it’s Aliens Colonial Marines before Aliens Colonial Marines.
Anyway, you can view the whole interview below in which Miller also shares some ideas 3D Realms had about the fifth part in the Duke Nukem series, Duke Nukem Vengeance!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Its not about how big or how small the studio are but it’s about talent if you have amazing talented ppls they will do wonder so stop saying we are a small team
Specifically the people calling the shots have to be talented. You can waste the potential of great artists and produce nothing of value if some re**rd in a suit is making all the wrong decisions for them.
So yeah, if everyone on the team is talented then you’ll get a good game. Evidently 3DRealms had talented people, but not in the positions that mattered most.
Think again. Talented individuals have made entire games by themselves. But these individuals understood what is and is not doable in a certain time frame, and most game studios regardless of size do not understand this.
they can if they take their time, duke nukem devs just gave up after a while ,in jace hall show they admit they were playing too much wow.
Even team of people can’t make a good game if they dont have vision
Nah. 3DRealms’ problem was never manpower, it was always feature-creep. A small team can finish a game. You just have to STOP ADDING FEATURES. 3DRealms switched engines multiple times on DNF, that’s a red flag of incompetent management. If anyone could afford to do it it’s big companies, yet when was the last time a big Ubisoft or EA title “switched engines”? Doesn’t happen. Meanwhile a self-admitted small 3DRealms thought it was a great idea to just switch engines on a game with plenty of existing content. Whoever thought the best investment of their time was to subject themselves to endless headaches in porting all the content they already had to a different engine is the person to blame for DNF never coming out. Terrible, incompetent project lead(s). If 3DRealms just stuck with the original engine (+ minor improvements to squeeze more out of the hardware available on release) they could have released DNF in the early 2000s as an outdated looking but really fun to play game. Assuming they got the gameplay right they would have only gotten 8/10 reviews because the press was really obsessed with graphics back then. But a decent rating plus the huge brand recognition of Duke would have made for an okay selling game and since they’re a small studio okay sales would have been enough. Then they could have started on Duke Nukem Forevenlonger on Unreal Engine 2.5 or Source and released that in 2010 or whenever, and so on and so forth.
It’s amazing that this Scott Miller character is still in denial about the realities of finishing projects over a decade later. Just getting more people to work on it is not how you finish a game. Ask Chris Roberts. Finishing (anything, really) is about setting a realistic goal and that was always 3DR’s problem.
I remember how George Broussard kept seeing features in other games and wanted to shove them in the game….that held development back.
Gearbox honestly went downhill since the first Borderlands, because even back then, they had to steal from an artists animation style, right before they launched their game, because they knew their style at the time wasn’t unique or anything special.
All they do now is outsource and make shady deals, while having a guy at the top who talks utter crap each time he speaks.
Made B1 good? By making it DUMB teenage cartooney turd?
HAHAHA
I actually expected the original, I remember the trailers, how awesome it looked.
Borderlands just went worse with each iteration, more lame fart jokes, and just stupid humor in general.
some say most of this was faked for the trailer, others say the full game was playable needed some bug fixing, gearbox says it was a broken mess and the shadows didnt even work.
Looks like i’m in the minority who thinks that DNF is actually a good game lmao
Its not a bad game…but its not a good game either. Just very average….
Yeah, can’t say i played the game day 1
Every time this trailer is mentioned/posted, I have to watch it! Might’ve watched hundreds of times literally!