By Jim Rossignol on February 2nd, 2010 at 4:11 pm.
Some Duke Nukem Forever footage has surfaced (and been posted below), via the all-seeing eye of the Big K. It’s got a fairly random soundtrack, although not entirely inappropriate, given the subject matter. There’s also some tumbleweed, which seems some somehow symbolic. It’s not clear what stage of development this was from, but I think we can assume it wasn’t the most recent build.
02/02/2010 at 16:14 Ian says:
If the eventual game would have had that music all the way through then I think we’ve missed something special.
02/02/2010 at 19:14 Vague-rant says:
This. With the music it would definitely be something special…
one way or the other…
02/02/2010 at 16:21 terry says:
That looked pretty underwhelming compared to the footage from that E3. Assuming this was the latest engine they were using, bleh.
02/02/2010 at 16:31 LionsPhil says:
Yeah, it looks terrible (“indistinct grey blobs in an indistinct grey blob factory”, to probably slightly misquote Yahtzee, and the wild-west bit is laugable compared to Call of Juarez 1), and the gameplay looks lacklustre.
Sigh, what could have been, etc. Hell, even the old ’90s Quake-engine trailer looked more interesting</a, and it's made of some laugably bad technical constraints and awkward animation.
I wonder if that Ego regeneration is tied to causing damage and other action film sillyness. Because that's how it should have worked—nicely abstracting out the old “slain enemies drop mysteriously unused health pickups” into something that actually makes quite a bit of contextual sense. (I suppose it was really regenerating health, to go with the Quick Time Events shown in some of the other leaked footage.)
02/02/2010 at 16:23 LionsPhil says:
Ah, so that was going to be the plot—sinister aliens flooding the world with cheesy music, and it’s up to Duke to fight his way up to their mothership and destroy the Atmospheric Polka Resonator. Much better than all that crap in the leaked documents about lapdances and sewer sequences.
I knew you couldn’t really be that clueless, 3DR.
02/02/2010 at 16:29 ddthesm says:
Gah! I don’t care, just release whatever they have! It’s over so just bleed the leftovers from any version of the game to death, release extra textures as DLC, just something!
I need….nay the world needs Duke Nukem!!!!!
….ok….I’m done.
02/02/2010 at 16:32 indirectX says:
What a pile of turd.
02/02/2010 at 16:34 oldFox says:
A la rueda rueda, de pan y canela, dame un besito y vete a la escuela! Si no quieres ir, acuéstate a dormir!
^___^
02/02/2010 at 16:35 coupsan says:
lol that music
02/02/2010 at 16:36 The Sombrero Kid says:
this is the quake 3 based tech, i remember seeing stills of the setting at the time.
02/02/2010 at 16:59 Kakksakkamaddafakka says:
Uh, they never used the Q3 engine.
02/02/2010 at 20:16 TheSombreroKid says:
yeah sorry your right it was unreal 1.5 or 2, the engine we saw most of, with the tentacle police pig cops and the f-14 firing the missle and the wild west guy.
02/02/2010 at 16:36 Real Horrorshow says:
Looks like shit.
02/02/2010 at 17:00 GriddleOctopus says:
Is that ring a ring o roses in spanish?
02/02/2010 at 17:09 Collic says:
“Shake it, baby” *spacebar* “Shake it, baby” *spacebar* “Shake it, baby” *spacebar* “Shake it, baby” *spacebar*
Ahh the memories. I’ll never forget you, Duke.
02/02/2010 at 17:20 Flameberge says:
Yep, that’s what always pops into my head when anyone mentions the Duke, lol.
02/02/2010 at 20:16 Nick says:
Come now.. he also said ‘You wanna dance?’
02/02/2010 at 17:16 manveruppd says:
@ LionsPhil:That 1998 trailer looks absolutely AMAZING for its time! Didn’t even know you could DO destructible scenery in the Quake engine!
@everyone saying this is crap: It’s just raw gameplay footage of someone playing on a very dark monitor. Obviously not a polished trailer with lots of boss fights and set pieces. And I’m sure all the cool set pieces from the previous versions will have made it into this one as well, but you can’t make a whole game out of set-pieces (otherwise what you get is Dragon’s Lair). You need a few bits of good ol’ fashioned corridor shootin’ too!
02/02/2010 at 17:27 Tei says:
manveruppd:
func_wall and such are really easy to make on the Quake1 engine. You just replace the bmodel by crap wen his heal turn 0. Much like the explobox on E1M1, but with crap all around flyiing. You can also animate such model, sinking, rotating, whatever… like in the youtube video.
02/02/2010 at 17:29 LionsPhil says:
I daresay the problem with the set pieces we’ve seen from U3-generation DNF leaks were very Dragon’s Lair. In particular, one with what looks like a relative of the football-pitch final boss from DN3D, which came down to: “Shoot at the boss a bit so that he opens up a vulnerable spot, then go and press ‘use’ at him to pull out a head-tendril, at which point you’re scripted to fall off. Repeat until bored or he runs out of tendrils.”
This is the peril of making games more “cinematic”: the design exercise seems to have gone from the Deus Ex-ian delights of “set up an objective, and a set of tools and obstructions to completing it” to “ok, so I’ve imagined how this awesome battle plays out, how can we make the player jump through all the right hoops in order to realise my vision?”. It’s like being a laboratory monkey punching the right button when it lights up to get a peanut. Woo. (Ok, so the peanuts are little animation sequences, and the buttons are sometimes a case of “click on these enemies…WITH BULLETS” if you’re lucky, but any sort of reasoning beyond doing exactly what you’re funneled into/directly told is dead in such games.)
tl;dr stop overscripting everything you bloody totalitarian developers
02/02/2010 at 17:53 Kakksakkamaddafakka says:
I’m sure the Q1 and Q2 engines were similar in that respect, but yeah, they didn’t use the Q1 engine for anything other than the very first mockups in PCG. The rest from then on was Q2 (until they changed to Unreal Tech).
02/02/2010 at 18:19 Bhazor says:
Reply to LionsPhil
The storyboard of the game, if genuine, shows they were going with the Dragon’s Lair approach to cinematic games. Alot of scenes seemed devoid of actual game, like a prolonged chat show sequence or about 5 seperate lap dances mentioned. Honestly, the whole thing just sounded like he was thinking about it purely as a film.
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/46948/Duke-Nukem-Forever-28-Hi-Res-Screenshots-Entire-Plot-Leaked (Storyboard and some screenshots I haven’t seen before)
02/02/2010 at 19:59 manveruppd says:
@ Tei: That’s interesting, really didn’t know that. Why can’t I think of any Q1-powered games that used that sort of thing?
02/02/2010 at 17:22 Demikaze says:
Yes, yes it is. And perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole video.
02/02/2010 at 17:52 Lord Bigglesworth says:
Ay yi !! No me gusta !!11
Thanks a lot (Dirty?) Sanchez, you ruined the whole video.
02/02/2010 at 17:57 Bobsy says:
Man. I used to love Quake. All those Scrags, eh?
I have no idea what I’m looking at here.
02/02/2010 at 18:12 Bhazor says:
This really looked like a Half Life 2 mod to me the, grenades in particular. The bit with the thing holding a grenade in the old west looked almost like a zombine reskin.
Yet again we fail to see anything a half competent studio couldn’t have made in two years in the Unreal or Sorce engines. I really feel sorry to the poor bastards who worked on it, they now have a 12 year gap on their CV and they’re not even allowed to show what they made in that time.
02/02/2010 at 18:14 MedO says:
Well, if you think he E3 trailer is so much better do a little experiment.
Download the music from the E3 trailer (Google “duke nukem forever e3 theme”), play this gameplay vid again but mute its sound.
Then watch the E3 trailer on mute and play the cheesy music in the background instead.
Compare, contrast & discuss. IMO Many scenes of the E3 trailer are pretty boring if you look at them soberly.
02/02/2010 at 18:30 Stense says:
Has Duke gotten cataracts in his old age or something?
02/02/2010 at 18:57 vash47 says:
This version is better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEqyj0vtWDg
02/02/2010 at 19:21 Shinan says:
No. I prefer the music in the one posted here on RPS.
02/02/2010 at 20:07 sana says:
Quick pipebombs? Yummy. What a shame.
02/02/2010 at 20:13 the wiseass says:
Necro Duke is back, haunting us with yet another video from his prolonged cellar of agony. But yes, it may be shit, but it gets me excited every single time, again and again, even after all those years. I’ve developed such a sick, twisted an masochistic relationship to this franchise I almost feel like a 40 years old Japanese businessman sucking on his thumb while wearing diapers and getting spanked by two smokin’ hot heavy-handed latex nurses.
Shake it baby ’til you drop.
P.S.: I luv’ the music in that video.
02/02/2010 at 20:27 SheffieldSteel says:
Not entirely unlike that slightly creepy older guy that won’t stop going to the nightclub, the story of Duke Nukem Forever seems to get slightly more pathetic with each new episode.
02/02/2010 at 20:28 SheffieldSteel says:
ooh-kay, so my imagery was one-upped by the post one up from me.
‘s life.
02/02/2010 at 21:03 RogB says:
I wonder why nobody has even attempted a duke multiplayer mod in a modern engine? sod the single player for now, the multiplayer was incredibly original for its time and im struggling to think of anything thats had the same level of gadgetry since!
pipe bombs, trip bombs, jetpacks, shrink guns, freeze guns, the mighty boot, holograms..
03/02/2010 at 09:45 roryok says:
Hear hear.
Actually there was a project to remake Duke Nukem 3d in the source engine, but it was shut down by 3DR’s legal team. I figured once 3DR were out of the picture someone would start up a similar project, but they are still up and running, and still retain the rights to duke. I’m sure they’d be just as litigious about it these days.
Having said that, I can’t see how they could stop someone writing an MP addon which mimics the features of duke – i.e. the pipe bombs, the laser trip mines, the holoduke etc. Most if not all of these have been recreated in other games, having them all in one place would make for a more dukey experience.
02/02/2010 at 22:16 A-Scale says:
How in the hell are any of you evaluating the quality of the game when the video is like 150×200 pixels blown up to 600×400? I can barely make out the enemies, much less what the quality of the fucking textures or destruction modeling is!
02/02/2010 at 22:45 Oak says:
So it was to be a first-person shooter. Interesting.
03/02/2010 at 10:05 bill says:
If that’s from the older build that it seems to be, if they’d just released it at the time it would have blown everything else away…
03/02/2010 at 13:15 LionsPhil says:
@Bhazor: Yeah, I saw that at the time. I’m pretty sure they must have hired a thirteen-year-old to write it. Hence my favour for this new Atmospheric Polka Resonator plot instead.
03/02/2010 at 13:50 Matt says:
I’m always bemused by why everyone was so excited about DNF, but I guess you had to be there. I was about a year too young for Duke Nukem 3D (it was Quake II wot was all the rage when we got a PC) so all I see in that video is a lackluster FPS that hasn’t learned anything since 2000. Obviously, Duke fans will see something completely different.
Now, in ten years when they announce Half-Life 3 I’ll be going “Gordon Freeman is back!” and all the young whippersnappers will be saying “Quh? Dude didn’t even talk, dude.”
03/02/2010 at 14:42 SheffieldSteel says:
I was a Duke fan, and what I see is completely different to Duke Nukem 3D. Which was great.
“I ain’t afraid of no Quake” was both funny and bold at the time. But since he spoke that line, they released four Quake games, and no more Duke Nukem.
03/02/2010 at 22:09 BeamSplashX says:
I think the 2001 version looked the best, personally. I think that era was a bit of a creative sweet spot for FPS games. Plus the early attempts at cinematics with wooden-looking faces will always be endearing to me.
06/02/2010 at 16:11 SquareWheel says:
But sadly, Duke is amazing for more than just the gameplay. The very essence of Duke Nukem comes from the character, and that cannot be reproduced.
07/02/2010 at 02:15 jay says:
@Oak
Goddamnit! Stop jumping to conclusions!
We need far more evidence to be sure. This could merely have been a cunning ruse.