Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Build Discussion

Ayup! Doctor Proton, who would've been the bad guy at this point, had infected most of the EDF with a virus. Honestly, it makes for a more intriguing premise than the final product.
In the trailer, the general says the EDF is compromised, and to trust no-one.
Intersingly spooky for a Duke Nukem game, feels very much inspired by They Live.



DNF is a classic cautionary tale of "the perfect being the enemy of the good". The game was announced in 1997 and was pretty close to being finished multiple times, but the head of 3D Realms (George Broussard) kept demanding the game be scrapped, usually for very trivial reasons, and work on the game started back at square one. This kept happening until 3D Realms eventually ran out of money and the company was bought out by Gearbox Software, owned by Randy Pitchford, the guy responsible for other infamous trainwrecks like Aliens: Colonial Marines and Battleborn, who then released a half-arsed, slapped-together version of the game in 2011 - nearly fifteen years after it was first announced.

Broussard wanted the game to be the best game ever. The game was first developed on the Quake Engine, but when Quake II came out he scrapped all the work up to that point and started again on the Quake II Engine. Then when Unreal came out he again scrapped all the work and started again on the Unreal Engine. Then Halo came out, and... you get the idea. The result is that DNF ended up perpetually playing catch-up to the competition.
From what I understand the reason it was such an obsession for Broussard was because when Duke Nukem 3D first released in 1996 it was state of the art, only to be usurped by Quake the very same year, this made Broussard determined it wouldn't happen again, forgetting that PC gaming evolved so fast in the late 90s and early 2000s it would have been pretty much impossible for DNF not to be dated within just a year or two, it was how every game wound up back then.

I imagine what probably sealed the game's fate was the first showing of Half-Life 2 in 2003, that probably blew Broussard away so much that was when releasing DNF in a reasonable time frame evaporated.

You can tell what parts of the game were made after certain games came out when playing the finished DNF. There's a crane physics puzzle that feels right out Half-Life 2. There's an out of place "power armour is for pussies" joke when someone offers Duke the Halo armour, which is all the more pathetic when you notice how much is lifted from Halo. Extended vehicle levels, recharging health, and a two weapon limit spring to mind. There were likely others, but most of the game is extremely forgettable.

The only original idea that game has is a level where you're tiny and fighting enemies in a fast foot place. It's one of the few memorable moments of the game.
The most noteworthy thing about DNF 2011 is simply the irony that it released the year before Sarkeesian launched her Tropes vs Women Kickstarter, it was truly the end of an era when a game could be as unapologetically "dude" as DNF was.

I remember even at the time people saying the game's tone was dated and calling out one particular moment in the game that was pretty creepily sexist (Duke saying "you're fucked" to the twins, at least in the other games the goal was to try to rescue the babes) because attitudes were already starting to change in 2011, but 2011 was the very last year the game could have released without causing a major controversy uproar.

I think that is one reason why the series has been dormant, you simply can't make a game like that anymore if you are a major developer or publisher and even Woke devs know there's no point in making a watered down Duke Nukem game.
 
Wow, there’s nudity? Would they really have tried to push the envelope that far back in 2001/2002? I can’t think of any other ESRB rated games from back then that had nudity.
Duke 3D had tits...

I think that is one reason why the series has been dormant, you simply can't make a game like that anymore if you are a major developer or publisher and even Woke devs know there's no point in making a watered down Duke Nukem game.
Duke Nukem couldn't be an AAA game, but it could be an AA level game IMO. Keep the costs down, don't try to be some 4K juggernaut cinematic piece of shit and just double down on the fun, there's enough of an audience for it.
 
Duke 3D had tits...


Duke Nukem couldn't be an AAA game, but it could be an AA level game IMO. Keep the costs down, don't try to be some 4K juggernaut cinematic piece of shit and just double down on the fun, there's enough of an audience for it.
Sure, in highly pixelated form, as some other PC games had at the time like Daggerfall I believe, pixel art had just enough lack of detail that nudity could fall into a grey area.

But by the early 2000s fully 3D, texture mapped naked titties would have been really pushing the envelope, name me a single ESRB rated game from 2000-2002 that had nudity.

Duke prided itself on pushing the envelope and they probably would have done it, but I could also see the publisher stepping in and demanding it be removed, this was before Grand Theft Auto really made adult content a safer bet in games and even then Hot Coffee caused a 100 megaton meltdown in 2005.

Had the game released and included nudity I'm sure Lieberman and Thompson would have added it to the pile of games that they hated.
 
Alright, I was trying to find this video from June 2011 since last night. I forgot about the search function "before:20xx search" command you can use to filter per year that Jewtube keeps hidden from the average person. Great listening to. The brother one of the guys on the podcast worked with 3d Realms for several years until the layoffs in 2009 occurred. But overall great way to understand what was going on in the latter years especially with George.
 
1652316109197.png


1652316156394.png


The absolute state of youtoob e-celebs.
 
George Broussard is a fucking mong for not finishing this version. It looks dated but not terrible, plus it play 10,000x better than Doom 3. If he had released it in 2001/2002, it would have won FPS of that year or at least been in the top 5 guaranteed, not to mention make a name for Duke and allow for more games before games got fagged up by the Sarkessian types in 2012. This is why you never become a graphics snob and why you use the right tools for the job, but not get overly focused on the tools.

Monetizing Youtube videos was a mistake. We should still be in an era where people make Youtube videos for fun rather if it pisses off corporate heads.
 
Last edited:
Cuckmanlives.

George Broussard is a fucking mong for not finishing this version. It looks dated but not terrible, plus it play 10,000x better than Doom 3. If he had released it in 2001/2002, it would have won FPS of that year or at least been in the top 5 guaranteed, not to mention make a name for Duke and allow for more games before games got fagged up by the Sarkessian types in 2012. This is why you never become a graphics snob and why you use the right tools for the job, but font get overly focused on the tools.

I think he could have released it as late as 2003/2004 maybe even 2005 and it still would have looked good. Okay, the faces would look dated but everything else would be fine for that era.
 
Last edited:
I think he could have released it as late as 2003/2004 maybe even 2005 and it still would have looked good. Okay, the faces would look dated but everything else would be fine for that era.
I think that was their plan at some point, just look at the 2003 version of the game.

It's the 2001 version but with graphics closer to Doom 3, but instead they restarted development at least 2 more times before we got the final shitty game.
 
Who is this guy?
That's the guy behind Valve News Network (VNN), he reports all things Half-Life and Valve - mostly 80% speculation and 20% facts. He did break the news of Half-Life: Alyx so he's more or less reliable, but still.

He recently uploaded his DNF gameplay running on period-correct hardware, pretty neat.

Screenshot_20220511_234551.png



And he tweeted that he'll be making a DNF video... what a chad.

Meanwhile, at 3DR's discord server...

1652324460139.png
 
Meanwhile, at 3DR's discord server...

View attachment 3272593
What a bunch of Nazi's.

Anyway, I have a question: Gearbox owns Duke. Got it. Randy is a shithead. We know. But if Embracer owns Gearbox doesn't Embracer therefore own Duke? Not unless there's some provision where Randy holds control over it or Embracer somehow didn't get the IP in the deal when they bought Gearbox.
 
I assume the patched version is designed for more up-to-date operating systems. Lots of old games (probably older than this one though?) require patches to run on Windows 10.
As an example, this site not only hosts a fuck-ton of "abandonware" games including ones for Win 3.x/95/98, but also includes x64 fixes for them to run properly, since back then you had to deal with things like the dreaded "256 colors" settings that even WINE on linux has issues with to this day. Virtua Fighter Remix and Bug! are just a few examples with exe patches.
 
Last edited:
Back