3D Realms shut down - Duke Nukem trailer leaked

[Domarius]

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/58562

 

Man, I want to play it after seeing that trailer Looks like after all these years they were finally going to do it right

[jdude]

ehhhhh... It almost sounds like it was some guy's side project he never got around to finishing. I never found the first Duke Nukem that great, I was always a Doom kinda guy

[Diego]

<sarcasm>

Oh no.. Duke Nukem Forever is not coming out anymore??

</sarcasm>

 

That video is really nice. It's such a shame what happened to this project... what happened to this project, anyway? I know it's hard to make a game, but it's not that hard!

[SneaksieDave]

What a curse that development has had. Well, if it's any consolation, whoever owns the stuff will likely hand it over to a new team, so it won't all be wasted.

 

It's hard to get a solid grasp on where they were from some of those clips. The scene early on with 'body awareness' (I wonder if it was persistent, or only for those arranged segments?) looked polished and great, but a lot of areas looked like they were just pre-scripted mini-segments, and there's tons of unfinished art. So I'm left with the sense that they had a solid graphics engine (of course), plus some scripters and a good animator or two. Lacking is a variety of opponents, much interface development, gameplay, or an obvious... point.

 

One is left wondering, what did they do for almost 13 years?

[peakish]

Well it's an animators reel so it's not to show off the game as a whole but the animations. I'd imagine it to be more polished than that one considering that, but ofc it wasn't "done"

 

A shame also, I think it looks very cool.

[HappyCheeze]

Sad

 

All the old game companies are dying out or already dead

[Ishtvan]

Maybe they spent all the project's money on stripper motion capture?

[SplaTtzZ]

I just wanna know how the hell they kept getting money and investors for as long as they did. They must have had a really fantastic marketing team and PR campaign to stay afloat for that long and release only 2 other games (Prey and Max Payne).

 

I heard the graphics engine they are using in that trailer is some incarnation of the Unreal Engine; but apparently the development process was taking so long that they changed the engine more than a few times over the years to keep current with other games being released.

 

Bit of a shame really because the 3DRealms team had talent, and they showed that with Max Payne and Prey.

Edited May 14, 2009 by SplaTtzZ

[Domarius]

If you read the brief history you can see what they were doing for all that time - pretty much all the things that can go wrong.

 

Some of the bigger reasons were starting with a game engine that was not very stable and buggy when they got it (some version of the Unreal engine) and then they took so long that they changed engines about 3 times and that takes ages in itself.