[OpenMaw]

*RICKETY SQUEAKY SOAP BOX*

So it's... 3:41 AM. I have a 7 hour shift ahead of me starting at 10AM... Haven't slept. At least I have time to get a few hours of sleep... But at this moment I am fucking wired and I have things to say.

I think there's something wrong with my brain. No, seriously. I don't have a medical diagnosis or anything, but... Something just didn't come out right in my developmental process. Certain things I just can't bother to care about, while others I borderline obsess over. It's weird... Granted, this community has had it's fair share of weird personalities crop up.

When I think about Duke Nukem... I get angry.
PREAMBLE

No, I know. I know. It's stupid. But I do. I get fucking furious. There are so many people out there who actually love this character. I was just browsing some YouTube videos, looking at comments, and what do I see? "Man I love this character." "Duke is a badass." And these are not members of this little community. These are just randoms on the internet who feel this way.

So would somebody, please, tell me why in the fuck is this community the size of a thimble? WHY IS IT SO QUIET IN HERE!? Why doesn't GEARBOX DO SOMETHING WITH THIS CHARACTER? And by something I mean other than stick him in games they didn't make, or shoe-horn him in some retarded cameo spot where he get's blown up after vaguely being on screen for two seconds.

Not only that but I was just talking with someone on facebook about Doom 2016... And it made me even more angry. Because, there it is. There's your template. I'm not saying Duke has to be exactly that, but there it is. That's how you do an update to a classic like one of these 90s FPS games. You stay true to the core tenants and then build on top of that. Why is this so fucking hard?

THE PAST

I don't think i'm being particularly erratic here. I'm pretty focused emotionally on what i'm feeling right now. It's like... I'm 30 now. Fucking 30 years old... and I think back to the 90s... You know everyone likens Nostalgia to rose-colored glasses, but it can actually be an incredibly sad place to be. What if the only meaning you perceive is behind you? Is that a mid-life crisis talking? I don't think so...At least, not when it's about one particular facet of life. For Duke I don't see his future anymore.... I remember vividly, going into my friends house. My next-door neighbor, Perry. He had his brothers computer in his room, he had the CD for 1.3 of Duke Nukem 3D. I remember the yellow and black of the radiation symbol, I remember the mess on the old cherry-colored wood-grain desk. I remember the hum of the fucking beige boxed computer tower "GRRDDR BRRRRR."

I remember being mesmerized by Duke Nukem 3D. The gritty, mean, aggressive Adlib score in the Abyss, coming out of those speakers. I suppose it helps that a lot of the CRT monitors didn't light the game up like modern LCD's tend to. The difference is Batman The Animated Series compared to Tiny Toon adventures in some respects. The game had me. I needed it for myself. At some point I convinced my mom to let me get a copy of Duke Nukem 64 used for my allowance... That was probably late into 97 or early 98. I convinced her, because her primary concern was the violence, and shooting people. I convinced her with the immortal legalese "But they're aliens, not people!" "Oh, okay."


At some point I got my hands on Duke Nukem Time to Kill. That was a fun game, and it was my first chance to dip into playing a more "adult themed" Duke Nukem game. That intro, man... That intro. Even though I can tell that the blood splatter coming out of the Pig Cops in that CGI opening is just an explosion colored red... And there are all kinds of graphical glitches and goofs I can spot now... The style, the grit, the anger. That's Duke. Fired up my imagination, and my Night Strike Duke and Pig Cop would fight it out on my living room couch. I'd build ruins out of K'nex, legos, drap dot-matrix printer paper over the back to darken things out. At the time I was also subscribed to Nintendo Power. That was always a blast. I wish I still had those. I was really rough to mine. A lot of them fell apart from my roughness. There was one issue of Nintendo power though... It featured an ad in it that had me grinning ear-to-ear. It was three postage stamp sized images of a new game, and above them a bundle of wired dynamite with a timer reading 00:00. Duke Nukem Zero Hour.


Honestly? Duke Nukem Zero Hour has a deeper held place in my heart than even Duke Nukem 3D. Zero Hour was a game I waited for. I checked in with the local Gamer's Edge weekly for the release. Everything about that day, when it finally came out, was amazing. I didn't even get it home before I had taken the wrap off the cardbox and started thumbing the manual.
Played it. Played the shit out of it. It pissed me off. The lack of level saves makes it a controller throwing nightmare at certain points... But I was gonna beat this mother fucker... and you know what? I still loved every moment of it. I would argue, if not for that one flaw... It's just as good as Duke Nukem 3D. It's got a lot of diversity of design, lot's of great one liners, a great score... Jon St John is in top form. The side characters are fun. Duke is Duke at his very best. That opening is fantastic writing. "Who the Hell are you, my evil twin?" "I'm you, genius..." In one respect because it's referencing things without being a direct reference to anything in particular. Just being clever and funny. A lot of Zero Hour is like that. The jokes are not annoying, overbearing, or overly perverse. Though, Duke does get some good James Bondian ones in there. "I was hoping i'd get some head." "I'm an ass-kicker, not an aviator...!"
The rest is history... I played Land of the Babes when I was in middle school, but my whole life was pretty miserable at that point and Land of the Babes didn't help. I tried to play that one a few years ago again and... No. It's a cheap cash crab, and it's poorly made.
Around 2000...2001, I got my first computer. Oh, we had three in the house prior to that. My mother's ancient Tandy 1000 that she used for medical transcription. Used to play Hangman on that one... And then we had a 486, no sound card. My dad used to sneak into the basement and play solitaire on that one. That thing.. It was called a 486, but it couldn't do much of anything as I recall. Later my mom upgraded to this black behemoth. A Compaq Presario... Some 2000 dollar box with a huge monitor with built in speakers. Mom was always terrified of breaking computers. Still is, point of fact... But basically I had to wedge myself in there to actually get to use it. One day I was going through all the CD's that came with it, because mom just shoved the whole lot in a drawer and never touched any of it. One of the discs was Rage's "Incoming." That was a neat game.
My first personal box was an emachine. People can say whatever they want about those computers, but I was damn happy to have it. That, a dial up internet connection, and I found myself joining the PC master race. My first three games, Half-Life, MOTYR(ew), and Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition. Thank you Comp USA...
Finally... Probably four or five years since I had first played Duke 3D on a PC, I actually had a copy for myself. The rest is history. I stated coming on line, browsing the Internets, getting into conversations on ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, via PMs... Got into modding, found the huge mapping community that existed for Duke at the time. I stayed mostly as a lurker. I was on the 3D Realms forums, but only as an observer. Where I did actually become a member, places like TenFourMaps, Hangar 16, and the ol' AVPNEWS website... I can't remember the name of the forums they had at the time, but it wasn't just for AVP... I know I went by the moniker "StevieWonder" and I had the tenancy to type in all caps with no punctuation. I made an ass of myself. Spouting homophobic dribble, and just generally making myself unpleasant to be around.
But the whole modding seen. I worked with Hudson on one attempt at a TC back in those days, around 2002/2003. We had a Geoshitties web page. It was terrible. My art was ripped out of AVP 1999... and by ripped I mean I took in game screenshots, bit maps, and cut them out with a copy of Jasc Paint Shop Pro that my mom had gotten me for my birthday. Seriously, I love PSP. It's incredibly limited when compared to Photoshop or GIMP, but... I've known it for two decades and it's ever-so comfy. Anyway, yeah, if you can imagine taking a game screenshot, and then taking a default brush tool with Duke's default transparent color set, and just coloring out the scene so you can get the pistol out of AVP Classic... That's what I done did. Our little "Colonial Marines TC" was just like so many other Aliens themed TC's for Duke. A failure.
I continued to dabble with BUILD... But as other sage-like personalities, specifically in the Half-Life community, told me to tone down my aspirations and focus... And that is probably some of the best advice anyone can give in life. Focus. Find your objectives and stick to them. Don't feature creep, don't take the whole mountain on. You'll fail.
Continued in part two...

[OpenMaw]

THE PAST : PART DEUX
At some point I upgraded my computer. I have that tower... In pieces... Somewhere.... I think. I know I gave one of my older towers to VinsaneOne.. But that was the one after this one i'm talking about. Am I even making sense? I don't fucking know... I want a drink.
Anyway, It was a DELL. I have no idea on the specs. It was modest. I never upgraded it. It had an integrated video card. Most of my computers have been fairly modest DELL machines. My recent model is the first self-built one I've ever had.... Anyway, newer computer, had a sizable hard drive. The emachine only had like... 20 gigs or something. It was decent. I can't exactly remember, some of those memories are a blur. I do remember constantly having to delete shit to make room for new stuff though.
With the upgrade I also got some new games. Quake II, Unreal Tournament... Man... I just gotta stop there for a minute. Unreal Tournament. I have so many good fucking memories playing Unreal Tournament in LAN settings with my brother, and just... Just playing against the bots. Wow do I miss those times... Anyway, that was around the time I got Duke Nukem Manhattan Project. It's a fun game. It's alright. I don't think it's the best game in the series. I'd probably put it in 4th place behind Time to Kill, Zero Hour and 3D. It's got a great rendition of Grabbag, and Duke is still himself, and hasn't been lost to stupidity.

What it came with though... Well, it... it changed everything. Forever.

You know where this is going. You know it.




The word "arrested" comes to mind when I think about my reaction to this trailer the first time I saw it. I was literally holding onto my desk. Imagine, 14-15 year old me. white knuckling my desk. Holy SHIT. Within a couple years I did eventually become active on the 3D Realms forums, as many of you know. I earned my sub-title as "Judge Mental" for an unfortunate goof. I keep it cuz I earned it. Ups and downs, the endless political debates, the Prey demo thread, the talk about the Duke Nukem movie (the first one), arguments about the best and worst levels.... In that respect not much has honestly changed. The names have changed, the pace has changed. As much of an ass as he was I do miss Joe. I miss people like Kristian and others. I miss Nacho. I miss Hudson. Last time I spoke with him at all was on the 3D Realms forums many years ago. I sold him my Atari Jaguar with five games for a hundred bucks... I wonder if he still has it. That would have been sometime around 2007 or 2008 I think. Probably 2008. That long period between 2003-2004 to 2007 was tough being a Duke fan. No new Duke games. Barely a peep from the 3D staff or developers about Duke. George even made a really shitty comment about something coming regarding DNF in the Prey demo thread.... Well, let me put my lawyer cap on for a second. He never said "Duke" "Nukem" "Forever" but the winking emoticon and "Something special coming soon after the Prey demo" Kinda sorta basically gave everyone a big Duke Nukem shaped erection and we were left, once again, with big ass blue balls of disappointment. Thanks a lot, you assholes. Backing up slightly, around 2003 myself and another man named DxFx worked on a project called Duke Nukem Half-Life. It was coming along nicely, then we got a message from Joe basically telling us to stop. Bummer. Not unexpected. I later learned about the infamous Aliens TC which was shut down by Fox, and found out it was not unheard of. Thus began the education on IP rights and copyrights/trademarks... etcetcetc*snore*. We thought about repacking what we did in some fashion, but DxFx went off and joined the service. Back around 2011 or so I got in touch with him ever so briefly to see if he still had the files. He sent everything over to me except for the source code. Too big.
During the Duke-drougt we did get other games with the 3D Realms label on them. Max Payne, Prey. Good stuff. I really liked Prey. It had a 3D Realms feel, a feel I attribute to influences from Scott, Joe, and a lot of the ideas dating back to previous incarnations of the game. It would be the last game they ever had their fingers on that actually felt like it belonged to their catalog. 2007 rolls around. Now let me put my Duke-related emotional state into context. At this point I was playing a lot of the old mods and TCs, being blown away by some of the work starting with the HRP, and as we did in those days, partake in a lot of vacant discussions about what we expected to be in Duke Nukem Forever.... Every once and awhile George or Joe might have something to say. Usually cryptic, vague... Then...Christmas... An image.. Something is coming...
The teaser broke the internet. 3D Realms went down for awhile. I can't remember if it was Gamespot, or whatever... They went down. People were going APESHIT. OH MY GOD HES BACK. HOLY SHIT LOOK AT HOW RIPPED DUKE IS. HOLY FLUCK-A-CHUCK look at that pig cop, he's like a werepig! Look at that reflective blood! Holy DOF batman! Watched it a hundred times... But that first time. When the music kicked up, and Duke takes that drag, and the smoke blows over the screen, and you get that glimpse of Duke F*ckin' Nukem with that GRIN on his face... That was a grin of victory. FUCK the haters. FUCK the naysayers. Duke Nukem is alive. HE'S COMING BACK. Things got better. We had Jace Hall open his show with a trip to 3D Realms and some actual gameplay footage. YES! YESSS... It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. WE ARE GOING TO SEE DUKE NUKEM FOREVE-

"3D REALMS CLOSES IT'S DOORS."

I... No. No... It can't end like this.

5:12 AM. Bed time.
TO BE CONTINUED
Commando Nukem Will Return...

[Mark]

Thats a lot to read. I'll wait for the audiobook version.

[Outtagum]

Why Are We Still Here? Just To Suffer?

[hismasterplan]

/\/\/\

Nice write up! Why isn't Duke here? To make us suffer?

[Redxplatinum]

What about seeing DOOM 2016, Shadow Warriors and Wolfenstein series flourish and nothing for Duke? When we take a look at what happened to those classics, we see that Wolfenstein evolved into a cinematic shooter, Doom with its homage to classic style fps, and then we see Shadow Warrior 2 with coop-rpg elements like Destiny. This might be the minority's opinion but I think Duke Nukem should take the place of what Half-Life left behind. Linear shooter, simple story/puzzles, some driving segments. The player should have almost complete uninterrupted control of Duke, and the story is told mostly through scripted sequences seen through his eyes. Sound familiar? This was what DNF was going for and turned out to be. Even in the 2001 trailer you see hints of this. Another reason I suggest Half-life because of Gearbox's debut title, Opposing Force. They made their company with a Half-life expansion so I think they should just follow that formula. Yeah, don't make him mute like the other Half-life protagonists though. If not Half-life then maybe SiN Gold.

Should they use DOOM as a template for Duke Nukem? If they did, they would have to compete against DOOM and I'm pretty sure Gearbox couldn't.

[OpenMaw]

THE PRESENT, AND BEYOND...
Looking back I now realize I grew up as the internet grew up. In my life time it went from the simplistic BBS's of the 1980s and early 1990s, to the "Information Superhighway" of the 90s, to what it is now. I remember things like the Yahoo message groups that used to be popular. I remember AOL. The birth and incredibly rapid rise of YouTube. MySpace. All the classic messengers, MSN, AIM, ICQ... I remember when STEAM went online and how exciting/painful that whole process was. The growing pains of what is now basically a large PC gaming "super community." People can say what they want about STEAM, too, but I honestly think it's strengths and positives outweigh it's detriments.
I'm not sure of the relevance of that to this excessive diatribe, but at some point I intend to take these ramblings and flesh them out further. I do think there is some merit to the experiences of those of us who lived through all that evolution. The younger generations who came after don't really know the dramatic changes that came during the 90s and swept up through the first decade of the 21st Century. Technology really did reshape our cultural landscape in a lot of ways.
As to Duke in the present. What hits me most of all is we have now had a huge booming resurgence in the old school shooter. Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Maiden, Warlock, and several others. Even next gen monsters like Doom 2016, returned to the gameplay-oriented roots of their forefathers.
It leaves me wondering, again, why is Duke a beached whale? He should be slipping right in like a comfortable, well-worn, baseball mitt. But he's practically nowhere to be found. And I think we all know the fundamental reason why. The people who have their hands on the IP simply do not know what to do with the character, and it shows every time they do put out some morsel. The tone is all wrong, the aim is all wrong, the general execution is all wrong. Alien World Order, while it does have some very nice level design, is tonally just off from the rest of the Duke Nukem experience.
One of the first new things Duke has to say is "I'm getting too old for this shit...!" Well, yeah, on the surface that fits Duke. He's quoting Lethal Weapon, of course. Classic cop movie. Very fitting of his character... But could someone on the inside be trying to tell us something? Is this going to be one of those Rian Johnson "Let the old things die."/"It's time for the Jedi to end." things? One of the things I read from detractors a lot is, Duke is worn out, old hat, could never work in this climate. Somehow these two separate elements seem to rub and mesh together, and I don't like it...
My strategy for a Duke Nukem revival has always revolved around the core concept of embracing the "has been" aspect of his character and using it as a strength to push him into something new. Instead of doing a reboot, or something silly, ball up this entire legacy and turn it into the clay to form a rebuttle.
Let's spitball an example here... Imagine if Alien World Order had been DLC for Duke Nukem Forever. So that is, take the themes of the levels and just imagine them through the prism of DNF. All the enemies, weapons, and mechanics are DNF's though. So all the inherit issues of DNF are present in the levels. We do away with the keycards, reduce the pathing down, add in some scripted nonsense. No secret-blowable walls. etc... The maps suddenly feel a lot more at home in certain respects, because everything that is off kilter about AWO tonally "fits" the bizzaro world of DNF. Because they've forgotten the fundamental tone that made Duke Nukem work in his 90s outings.
With DNF it becomes a two-pronged failure. We have, on the one hand, a failure to understand the character. On the other we have a failure to understand what made the gameplay of Duke Nukem 3D a success. Either one of those on their own is bad enough. Both together is a disaster. It wasn't just DNF that had those problems though. Critical Mass demonstrates both failures as well. The gameplay is horrible, and the character is just off... Though in CM's case I think the whole thing was duct-taped together left overs shoved out the door ot make a quick buck.
AWO had the benefit of leaning on Duke Nukem 3D's gameplay to save it from the off characterization.
Then of course we have Bulletstorm. That entire project was an ill-fated mess and i'm still scratching my head over what exactly they were thinking with that one. Duke doesn't fit Bulletstorm. He just doesn't. If it had been me. I would have simply re-released Bulletstorm, with some slight graphical tweak and improvements, and simply stuck in the Duke Nukem and Borderlands references as gags. (IE: The lil holoduke.). No need to try and draw in people with something that was quite frankly doomed to be half-assed.
I'm going to take a moment here to talk about Ion maiden. I want to say up front to the developers of Voidpoint that I mean no disrespect with the words i'm about to say... Ooh boy I can already retroactively feel the eyes on my words.
I love Ion Maiden. It's great. I can't wait to play the whole thing.... But as the 1998 trailer for Duke Nukem Forever put it... Duke is the real deal, and like many of the retro-FPS games to come out lately, they're playing at being Blood, Quake, Duke, Shadow Warrior etc... But they're not those things. They are their own beasts. Now, like I said, I love Ion Maiden. It's incredible to me to think we have a modern retail product on the BUILD engine, and it's amazing to just stare at some of the level design work being done in it. The art style is fantastic, Shelly was saved from an early grave. I wouldn't change a thing. Well, okay, maybe Shelly's design, but that's... That's a debate that has been had and had again. The Voidpoint guys know what they're doing.
But it's still not the same. It's a love letter. A well written, carefully penned, love letter.

So, let's talk about a hypothetical "vertical slice" of a new Duke Nukem game. If someone handed me the keys and I was able to hire up a bunch of people to work on this my first thing to them would be to point at Shadow Warrior and Doom, the rebooted versions. Ask them what they felt worked and what didn't. I would then look at Duke Nukem 3D, and setting aside some of the inherit jank that came with BUILD, I would start drawing some lines. Duke isn't just some parody of action movies. He's also a celebration of them. He revels in those sorts of action set pieces that make those movies so much fun. So how can we translate some of the action-movie stuff into gameplay?
Other games, like FEAR, did it specifically by pushing weapon feedback. You can fuck some shit up in that game. Destroy rooms, take out lights, leave your enemies as hollowed out carcasses on the floor. It's glorious. That would fit Duke great, of course, but that's primarily cosmetic. What we need would stem deeper into the core loops of the game.
A movie scene that always sticks out to me when I think of a modern Duke game, is a scene in Live Free or Die Hard, where John McClane is escaping from the kid's apartment and he's in a shootout with some thugs. He's in the hallway, yanks a fire extinguisher off the wall, tosses it down the hall, and shoots it. The resulting explosion knocks a terrorist through a window. It's one of the few "proper Die Hard" moments in the movie... But that's a digression. What really stuck with me was the idea of dialing up the environmental interactivity. Not just in gimmicky "heh I can stick my virtual penis in a glory hole" ways, but in those very credible "i'm an action hero" kind of ways.
Duke 3D gave us lot's of opportunities to do things like this. Like taking down the building in Red Light District, or destroying the reactor Those are bigger examples of what i'm talking about. I'm talking more down to the moment by moment gameplay. Think about all the classic action movies where the hero pulls some doodad off the wall and just skewers some mook with it. "Let off some steam, Bennet!" A lot of this would come down to programming inter-interactivity. IE: You blow up a car, it sets fire to some trees, you shoot a fire hydrant, it puts the fires out with a jet of water. As was described in one of the early Prey videos, make the player an agent for change in the world. Generate all these potential moments and let the player make it happen. Some of these things can be seen in microcosm in Deeperthought's work with Alien Armageddon or Duke Plus; Shoot an alien in his jetpack and he goes flying off in a random direction and explodes. The goal would be to take all of those funny inter-actions, and cascade the potential for more things to happen as they chain together.
There was a phrase, probably slightly hyperbolic, that was used to describe DNF 2001 as "Deus Duke." I think that also rings somewhat wrong for the character. Duke should not be standing around fiddling with customization. That doesn't really fit his persona as I see it. His interactivity should be much more on the fly and befitting of a man thinking on his feet. Those moments of spontaneity are the ones that, to me, feel the most Duke. The surprise moments where you the player and Duke both exclaim "Holy shit!" at the same time, and then spend several moments laughing at how awesome and hilarious the moment was.

[Tea Monster]

Commando Nukem, on 17 November 2018 - 08:09 AM, said:

...If someone handed me the keys and I was able to hire up a bunch of people to work on this...

[OpenMaw]

Well, what you're alluding to there is actually in my next chapter. But, let's just say in that instance the keys are still on their wall.
To do something on that scale, that i'm describing there, would require a very large budget and a sizeable team. I'm not talking in the same scale we were working on behind the scenes. That was small potatoes by comparison.

[Jimmy]

Commando Nukem, on 16 November 2018 - 05:09 AM, said:

So would somebody, please, tell me why in the fuck is this community the size of a thimble? WHY IS IT SO QUIET IN HERE!? Why doesn't GEARBOX DO SOMETHING WITH THIS CHARACTER? And by something I mean other than stick him in games they didn't make, or shoe-horn him in some retarded cameo spot where he get's blown up after vaguely being on screen for two seconds.

Not only that but I was just talking with someone on facebook about Doom 2016... And it made me even more angry. Because, there it is. There's your template. I'm not saying Duke has to be exactly that, but there it is. That's how you do an update to a classic like one of these 90s FPS games. You stay true to the core tenants and then build on top of that. Why is this so fucking hard?

Gearbox is, to be frank, an insecure company that is concerned about what the public thinks. Pitchford is obsessed with what others think of him and Gearbox. Regardless of the legitimate love I believe he has for the franchise, Duke Nukem is... how should I say..... problematic. If you don't think this is the case, if you don't think that Gearbox was worried about this, don't forget that they literally hired two women to write DNF. They kept that in their back pocket and brought it up whenever possible, perhaps to gain praise, but I guarantee to dodge criticism. Let's not forget in 2011 how poorly received the character was by some. Duke Nukem is a misogynist! Now think of how people are accusing id Software of being Nazis because of multiculturalism jokes in a trailer for Doom Eternal. To sell games, cornering the gaming "press" is key. Doom has the benefit of being a STRONG franchise. Duke has been sullied for 20 years. If the press got ahold of a new Duke Nukem experience that was authentic to the character, it'd be a fucking bloodbath.

I'm calling it right now, Gearbox not only wont, but can't do anything serious with Duke Nukem until the culture wars blow over.
Just keep humming the Bigot Song until it's all over.

Commando Nukem, on 16 November 2018 - 05:09 AM, said:

I convinced her with the immortal legalese "But they're aliens, not people!" "Oh, okay."

Worked on my mom, too.

Commando Nukem, on 16 November 2018 - 05:09 AM, said:

Honestly? Duke Nukem Zero Hour has a deeper held place in my heart than even Duke Nukem 3D. Zero Hour was a game I waited for. I checked in with the local Gamer's Edge weekly for the release. Everything about that day, when it finally came out, was amazing. I didn't even get it home before I had taken the wrap off the cardbox and started thumbing the manual. [/left]
Played it. Played the shit out of it. It pissed me off. The lack of level saves makes it a controller throwing nightmare at certain points... But I was gonna beat this mother fucker... and you know what? I still loved every moment of it. I would argue, if not for that one flaw... It's just as good as Duke Nukem 3D. It's got a lot of diversity of design, lot's of great one liners, a great score... Jon St John is in top form. The side characters are fun. Duke is Duke at his very best. That opening is fantastic writing. "Who the Hell are you, my evil twin?" "I'm you, genius..." In one respect because it's referencing things without being a direct reference to anything in particular. Just being clever and funny. A lot of Zero Hour is like that. The jokes are not annoying, overbearing, or overly perverse. Though, Duke does get some good James Bondian ones in there. "I was hoping i'd get some head." "I'm an ass-kicker, not an aviator...!"

Same. Our experience with the franchise is very similar, my friend.

Commando Nukem, on 17 November 2018 - 08:09 AM, said:

[/center]Looking back I now realize I grew up as the internet grew up. In my life time it went from the simplistic BBS's of the 1980s and early 1990s, to the "Information Superhighway" of the 90s, to what it is now. I remember things like the Yahoo message groups that used to be popular. I remember AOL. The birth and incredibly rapid rise of YouTube. MySpace. All the classic messengers, MSN, AIM, ICQ... I remember when STEAM went online and how exciting/painful that whole process was. The growing pains of what is now basically a large PC gaming "super community." People can say what they want about STEAM, too, but I honestly think it's strengths and positives outweigh it's detriments. [
I'm not sure of the relevance of that to this excessive diatribe, but at some point I intend to take these ramblings and flesh them out further. I do think there is some merit to the experiences of those of us who lived through all that evolution. The younger generations who came after don't really know the dramatic changes that came during the 90s and swept up through the first decade of the 21st Century. Technology really did reshape our cultural landscape in a lot of ways.

I count myself lucky. I shouldn't have experienced all this, I'm only 26. But I experienced it anyway. Eternally grateful.

Commando Nukem, on 17 November 2018 - 08:09 AM, said:

So, let's talk about a hypothetical "vertical slice" of a new Duke Nukem game. If someone handed me the keys and I was able to hire up a bunch of people to work on this my first thing to them would be to point at Shadow Warrior and Doom, the rebooted versions. Ask them what they felt worked and what didn't. I would then look at Duke Nukem 3D, and setting aside some of the inherit jank that came with BUILD, I would start drawing some lines. Duke isn't just some parody of action movies. He's also a celebration of them. He revels in those sorts of action set pieces that make those movies so much fun. So how can we translate some of the action-movie stuff into gameplay?
Other games, like FEAR, did it specifically by pushing weapon feedback. You can fuck some shit up in that game. Destroy rooms, take out lights, leave your enemies as hollowed out carcasses on the floor. It's glorious. That would fit Duke great, of course, but that's primarily cosmetic. What we need would stem deeper into the core loops of the game.
A movie scene that always sticks out to me when I think of a modern Duke game, is a scene in Live Free or Die Hard, where John McClane is escaping from the kid's apartment and he's in a shootout with some thugs. He's in the hallway, yanks a fire extinguisher off the wall, tosses it down the hall, and shoots it. The resulting explosion knocks a terrorist through a window. It's one of the few "proper Die Hard" moments in the movie... But that's a digression. What really stuck with me was the idea of dialing up the environmental interactivity. Not just in gimmicky "heh I can stick my virtual penis in a glory hole" ways, but in those very credible "i'm an action hero" kind of ways.
[left]Duke 3D gave us lot's of opportunities to do things like this. Like taking down the building in Red Light District, or destroying the reactor Those are bigger examples of what i'm talking about. I'm talking more down to the moment by moment gameplay. Think about all the classic action movies where the hero pulls some doodad off the wall and just skewers some mook with it. "Let off some steam, Bennet!" A lot of this would come down to programming inter-interactivity. IE: You blow up a car, it sets fire to some trees, you shoot a fire hydrant, it puts the fires out with a jet of water. As was described in one of the early Prey videos, make the player an agent for change in the world. Generate all these potential moments and let the player make it happen.

I'm reminded of the bit from the DNF 1998 trailer where Duke shoots a grenade at this shack on a cliff, and it causes the shack to fall off the side of the cliff, killing the enemy shooting at you. If you had just used your pistol, you'd have never known you could do this. But you get a bonus moment of badassery for being creative. The big problem with the released DNF is all the interactivity was just copied from old builds. "Well, you could put a rat in the microwave in 2002, so we're gonna do that here too!" There was no thought to the interactivity, just "We have to fulfill promised interactivity." The key to good interactivity is 'unintended consequences', wherein the player creates scenarios in the game world that no one ever intended. Early DNF development tried to account for this kind of thing a lot. When you microwaved the rat it was a "holy shit" moment in that you never thought it would actually work. Another example would be fishing a turd out the toilet. Gearbox turns it into a fucking feature of the core gameplay, when instead it was a throwaway gag. "Holy shit, I can grab a turd. This game is nuts!"

Commando Nukem, on 17 November 2018 - 08:09 AM, said:

[left]There was a phrase, probably slightly hyperbolic, that was used to describe DNF 2001 as "Deus Duke." I think that also rings somewhat wrong for the character. Duke should not be standing around fiddling with customization. That doesn't really fit his persona as I see it. His interactivity should be much more on the fly and befitting of a man thinking on his feet. Those moments of spontaneity are the ones that, to me, feel the most Duke. The surprise moments where you the player and Duke both exclaim "Holy shit!" at the same time, and then spend several moments laughing at how awesome and hilarious the moment was.

You must not have played the original Deus Ex in a long time. You can literally play DE however you want. DE, SiN, and Unreal are the spiritual successors to Duke Nukem 3D.

[Zaxx]

Redxplatinum, on 17 November 2018 - 06:00 AM, said:

Linear shooter, simple story/puzzles, some driving segments. The player should have almost complete uninterrupted control of Duke, and the story is told mostly through scripted sequences seen through his eyes. Sound familiar?

CoD? I wanna shoot shit in a Duke game instead of experiencing scripted sequences, thank you very much. And linearity sucks monkey balls, even Half-Life evolved from strict linearity over time.

[Redxplatinum]

Zaxx, on 17 November 2018 - 08:17 PM, said:

CoD? I wanna shoot shit in a Duke game instead of experiencing scripted sequences, thank you very much. And linearity sucks monkey balls, even Half-Life evolved from strict linearity over time.

I did say I wanted it to be like Half-life, you're the one comparing it to CoD. If you just want to shoot stuff you're better off playing Serious Sam. Duke3D was more than just shoot everything on sight, at least for me; there was exploration and some button pressing. In a sense, Duke3D was also linear; you had to do stuff in certain order to beat the map. It just had slight deviations here and there but there's almost always a strict order of sequence to be satisfied. Why do people think otherwise? Can you finish the Red Light District without getting the red keycard that you had to get the yellow one first but after the blue? I also mentioned SiN, which I heard, that has many different methods to end a level. But the exploration is a big deal for me. The fun of a Duke3D map is exploring what you can do and where you can/have to go, not go gun blazing shooting aliens.

The thing about Deus Ex is that the character choices are based on your choices. Basically the character is you. I don't think there should be a Duke game where YOU make his choices; it takes away his unique character. Duke should have his own character and ways of doing shit. "It's my way or.. Hell it's my way!" Therefore, I feel linearity is the best way to flesh out Duke's character. I mean not like small interactible choices, I mean like character/moral choices....