3D Realms Won't Rush Duke Nukem Forever 310
WeAz writes "GameSpot has news that 3D Realms has no plans on rushing Duke Nukem Forever. Despite the $500,000 bounty that Take-Two Interactive was found to be offering for the game after a filing with the SEC last week, George Broussard, President of 3D Realms, has given his official response: 'We're certainly not motivated by that amount of money, after all this time, and getting the game right is what matters. I would never ship a game early (even a couple of months), for 500k.'"
Nice Try but... (Score:5, Interesting)
5 years != 10 years.
Something doesn't add up (Score:5, Interesting)
Use common sense for a moment.
It takes 3-4 years to write, cast, design, film, edit, and release a major Hollywood picture like a Star Wars or an X-Men, which can cost $100MM or more to develop.
It takes 3-4 years to concieve, design, manufacture, and ship a new console like a PS2 or Gamecube.
Rockstar developed and released three new hit games with a new engine and tremendous amounts of content since 2001.
But it takes nine years to program a knockoff Doom clone? Really? Are they coding it on a loom?
Things I would love to know:
1) Exactly how many programmers are working on DNF.
2) What percentage of their days are spent on DNF versus other tasks.
3) Why management keeps an obviously defunct product on the books when normal business practice would suggest writing it off at this point, having missed at least SEVEN release years in a row.
4) I am dying to see the balance sheets for this project.
There is no game, there never will be a game. But there may be an audit.
Re:Something doesn't add up (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Something doesn't add up (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF? Talk about uninformed (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The problem is (Score:3, Interesting)
So, of:
- Music
- Sound effects
- Plot
- Code
- Graphics
Two of them, Code and Graphics, have an "expiration date" and they comprise "almost all" the content?In fact, if you look at their timeline they went from Q1 to Q2 to UE1 to UE1.5 to UE2 to UE2.5. Well that means there's had to be some significant updating of grpahics assets to keep pace with that.
So it's totally unheard of and impossible to make source art resources at a higher resolution and quality than is possible to render in real time and scale down for the engine implementation as needed? So they couldn't have had high-quality resources to begin with and re-generated the art to be used in-game over and over (at higher quality levels as the engine and modern hardware allowed?
So when development starts to stretch in to the 5+ year bracket you are losing a lot of work.
And that "expiration date" is around 5 years? And Quake1 in a FEAR market would be an example of this?
I think DNF faces a similar problem. Either they have been updating their engine and assets, in which case they've been wasting colossal amounts of time and money, even if it is their own, or they are talking about releasing a game with Quake 1 graphics to compete with things like FEAR.
Quake was released on July 22 1996.
F.E.A.R. was released on October 18, 2005.
FYI That's more than 9 years.
Well, that was an interesting post. I'm still confused about a lot of things, especially things related to DNF. But now there's one thing I'm sure of -- you're not a game developer, and you couldn't even play a convincing one on TV.
Re:The problem is (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, the two things off the list comprise most of the work. Just because a list has 5 items does not mean all items are equal. If my weekend todo list was "Replace burnt out light bulb, buy a new garden hose, vacuum living room, wash the car, and rebuild my car engine" you can't very well say they are all equal. The bulb replacement is a 1 minute job, rebuilding an engine is a major operation.
Code and graphics are the biggest part of a game. They require the most time and effort. Code is espically intensive hence the intrest in purchasing a working engine, which they did. That takes a lot of the effort out of it, but of course at a high monetary cost.
My point about years was that in the 5+ span, it gets difficult to use assets, be they engines or graphics at all. On a shorter span there's still possibilites. Games don't have to have the latest greatest look to sell, though it helps, and technology doesn't change all that much. However over longer times it gets to the point where you are talking major redesigns. The assumptions you made then aren't valid now. Just look at the changes in 3D cards. Shaders are now what it's all about. It wasn't until 2001 that a consumer card with any sort of real programmable shaders made an appearance. That forces you to change how you are doing thigns. It's just not "more polygons, bigger textures" it's more advanced ways of rendering scenes.
The reason I was comparing Quake 1 to FEAR is that's the timeline on which DNF operates. It's orignal development was on the Q1 engine, so if they had not upgraded, that'd be time kind of graphics we are talking. Now as I noted they have, several times. They've repurchased engines which is quite expensive, not to mention time consuming in terms of re-porting their modifications to the new engine.
No, I'm not a game dev, I never claimed to be one. I suspect you aren't either, you are just a troll trying to look smart. Sorry, but regardless of what you think it's not a trivial (or cheap) process to just update assets to modern technology. That's one reason you will see games pushed out even though they aren't ready. They've taken too long and are risking falling in to obselence before release. Publishers opt to cut their losses since not only is there more time to get things working, but also potentially time to get it up to snuff.
The point is there seems to be this misunderstanding that all the effort spent on DNF over these years is making it better. Nope, sorry, took too long on that. A significant amount of effort has now had to go to update what they had to work with new technology. This is evident from teh engine repurchases. You think they are doing that for fun? No, it's because they engine they were on was getting dated so they got a new one.
That's comming again, I might add. UE3 is nearing it's debut with UT2007, and from the look of it it's a real step up from 2004. So if they want to stay current, they'll need to get UE3, and then update the art assest to match, and rework the gameplay to deal with the new physics and so on.
Sorry, but my bet is in the unlikely event this thing ever does see release, it's a huge peice of crap.