Sanek, on 22 May 2019 - 08:59 AM, said:
Everybody have their own merits of what a "proper expansion" should be, but I think that the important part of doing it is to make the expansion that will stay true to its roots (in terms of level design, theme selection) and at the same time, become the new ultimate version of the game. Sunstorm's addons was a solid pieces of work, but none of it made the same impact as Plutonium Pak, and what we really need is a new Plutonium.
Personally I don't think that at this point, "officialdom" of the levels matters a lot. At some point in a game's life cycle, it continues through the community, not the original developers (who have moved on to other things anyway) or copyright holders.
Duke3D has been lucky to have been released with a great degree of moddability, a versatile level editor and the source code, all of which are great factors for preserving the game and keeping it alive.
It would be certainly an interesting experiment to try creating an expansion that would stick to the design principles of the original game, but at this point in time it would be more of a style thing to keep to the framework of the 90s level design, with many limitations arising simply from the performance limits imposed by contemporary hardware back then. I think that even from the start, creativity was mainly in pushing
beyond existing limits (as in trying to make the levels more interactive and realistic than what had been done before, for example), and the community mods and expansions that we have today are doing just that.
With this in mind. I'm not even sure that a new Plutonium Pack from any official developers could be at all possible. Alien World Order is probably the closest thing you can get (even if it isn't too close after all). But I agree with the sentiment expressed above, that an episode by Nerve Software could probably turn out very good, and if John Romero did some levels (after all he listed
Duke3D back in 1997 as one of his top ten favourite games) that would certainly be very interesting.