“Duke Nukem Forever is finally here!!”
Look around the internet this week and that’s the mantra you’ll be seeing on pretty much every video game website. These various articles will tell you about Duke Nukem’s legendary development cycle, how it survived the death of 3D Realms, and the acquisition of it’s rights by Gearbox Software, only for it to finally hit store shelves this week.
But while some sites will follow along with the same old song and dance, acting like they’re really excited to “finally” (you’ll see that word a lot) get their hands on Duke Nuke Forever, those that have already played the game are less than impressed. Take a look at the game’s various Metacritic rankings so far, and you’ll see everything you need to know about this game and why it’s bound to be a disaster before it’s even released.
But long before the first review of Duke Nukem Forever was written, we should have known that any hopes regarding this game’s quality level were essentially dead on arrival. Even when the game was recently pushed back to it’s current June 14th release date, the humorous video cut by Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software to mark the occasion focused completely on making a joke of the game’s somewhat insane development cycle and various setbacks, and didn’t speak about the game itself. When speaking about the game, Gearbox has gone on in detail about their love for the character, but tended to gloss over the finer points of the gameplay. They’ve even gone so far as to say that this is 3D Realms’ game, and they’re just putting the finishing touches on it. When someone praises something while disowning it, it’s generally hard to take them seriously.
So this made us ask ourselves, ‘why has the hype machine for this game kept us strung along for 15 years?’ Even in the wake of everything that went wrong in this game’s laughably long development cycle, why did anyone expect this to be anything other than a very mediocre game?
We decided to take a look back, even just through recent memory at how this game was being marketed to us. What we found in retrospect should have set off the major alarm bells in all of us. We saw some old press releases informing us of the ultra ridiculous “Smack the Babe” mode. We’ve been constantly reminded about the game’s nudity, and strip club gameplay locations. We also were reminded of this trailer promoting the use of feces as a projectile weapon:
Then there was this next trailer, titled “Shrinkage,” as an obvious ploy to get our attention with a little penis humor:
And how can we forget about the cleverly titled “Babes,” trailer:
Now don’t get us wrong, we’re all open to a little adolescent humor from time to time. But it should have been obvious from the way the game was being sold to us that adolescent humor was all this game had to offer. And while Duke hasn’t grown up much over the years, we have. We’ve come to expect more out of our games these days than blood, gore and potty jokes.
More than anything else, we want solid gameplay. We gamers have expectations now of what is possible in a game, especially in a shooter. We’re talking about a genre where bad games are a dime a dozen, and the creme of the crop are the top selling games in the industry. It’s not good enough anymore to just have the biggest gun and an even bigger attitude; the gun has to work the way we want it to. The levels have to be well designed. The gameplay has to be balanced. If a game doesn’t have these things, it becomes an afterthought in an already crowded market. Throw in a “legendary” 15 year development cycle and it becomes a cautionary tale…..or worse yet, a joke.
And that’s where we are at now with Duke Nukem Forever. The game that took “forever” to come out, won’t take nearly as long to be forgotten, except by those few diehards that waited half their lifetimes for this game to disappoint them. That’s generally not the way you want to be remembered.
Will Gearbox Software rebuild the brand from here? We’ve seen some of their other work (such as Borderlands), and based on that you have to believe that they’re up to the challenge. But one has to wonder if the public will have any interest in a future Duke Nukem game after the trials and tribulations associated with Duke Nukem Forever. We’re afraid that this may be a franchise that can no longer be saved.
