HiPolyBash, on 11 May 2017 - 08:52 PM, said:
Megaton is not a great release but compared to the effort put in to World Tour it's praiseworthy. I liked the new episode for the most part. Almost everything else about World Tour like the price, the WizardWorks expansions not being included, lack of workshop support, closed source rip off of Polymer, poor sound quality, Jon St. Johns poor Duke performance and more is lazy and worse than Megaton.
Randy has said on Twitter that he does not care about the Duke fan community and all that matters to him is the bottom line. He has also said that Duke4.net is a cess pool of negativity, Duke fans aren't worth doing anything for because they'd just bitch about the price or something, and disputes every single piece of constructive criticism aimed to him. When a Duke fan Tweeted to him saying that a lot of the fan community didn't like Jons recent performances as Duke and Gearbox is warping the character from what it originally was - a series of Tweets that George Broussard joined in to and AGREED with the fan after Randy said it was bullshit and just an individuals opinion Randy was linked to the Duke4.net forums and told there were thousands of similar opinions and to read comments on news and forums. He responded that he pays someone to do that for him and Duke fans aren't worth the money and he only does things like World Tour "out of love".
This is the guy who owns the IP. Someone so stubborn he cannot accept ANY criticism and ignores everything everyone tells him even when the IP creator comes in and agrees directly with what fans are saying. Let those facts fill you with hope. This IP is doomed with Randy leading the way. Maybe he'll let someone who actually cares work on it..
I feel like Randy gets away with a lot of things because he knows he's sitting on what's essentially one of the greatest games ever made and is trying to capitalize on it. Duke's gameplay holds up even today, although that's probably because FPS genre became dumbed down over time. I don't know if Steam reviews are separated by region, but at least in my region WT has a "very positive" rating on Steam, which might be enough for him in terms of publicity.
The reason I can't understand Megaton praise is the opposite of some of the reasons you listed. When Megaton came out, there was Polymer already and EDuke32 with Polymer looked much better than Megaton with Polymost. To my knowledge, you also couldn't turn Polymost off in Megaton, which was bad because General Arcade tied it to the bilinear filtering so you couldn't get the pixelated look of the original. Then there's the unofficial expansions. Charging big bucks for Duke these days is arguably a similar crime to making people pay for Nuclear Winter, IMO. Even though Megaton cost half the price of WT.
However, because Megaton was based on existing code and the assets weren't tampered with, a lot of issues that plague WT are non-existent in Megaton, which is a beefed up JFDuke which ran fine 12 years ago anyway so there wasn't much to do.
IMO the hidden goal of WT is to shift the balance towards Gearbox and away from the community, which won't be a good thing because EDuke32 allows a lot more freedom in modding and most of the relevant user content today was made specifically for it. Randy doesn't want to own just the IP, he wants to own the community as well.