hismasterplan, on 29 March 2024 - 11:15 PM, said:
The temperature can be set by the developers of a well-crafted, fun game. Movies and merch always come after. If Randy Pitchford, or Take Two is afraid of an angry public, put a disclaimer and be done with it. Toned down Duke like seen in Duke 64 or Zero Hour worked well in my opinion and it was nice to see him helping people in Bullet Storm. Doesn't have to lean hard on being edgy all the time.
Advance also had a fantastically written Duke. Happy to crack jokes and banter with Graves, but knew when to be serious, such as rescuing the Jennys and getting information. He's also perfectly good at taking initiative when cut off from Graves on his own.
In short, Duke Nukem is a hero. He's always been a hero; directly
inspired by comic book superheroes. He's a hero with an ego (which has since come to define his heath), but a hero all the same.
Seeing a bunch of women captured in Duke 3D and even DNF rightfully pisses him off. 3D plays it off like he's dropping one-liners to lighten his mood since the aliens he's facing are played completely straight. Most games made in that era
got that aspect of Duke. He's jokey but he does so against the backdrop of villains that definitely aren't. He also wasn't an idiot. While he was more than happy to defer command to someone else and just do the killing, when left to his own devices Duke is still capable of giving himself direction on what to do and where to go next.
The thing DNF got completely wrong was writing him like a big dumb oaf who never took anything seriously. DNF represented the Duke people thought they remembered in their hazy memories without having actually touched those games in decades.
The problem is the popular zeitgeist only remembers the DNF version of Duke and thinks that's all he was. A disclaimer won't fix a decade-long smear campaign by people with way too much free time.
I would love to see the return of the actual Duke Nukem. The hero with a mouth and weaponized self-assurance. But I don't think anyone can be trusted to do it. Especially not in film. It's more overrun with said free-time people than gaming is.