Recently it was announced that Gearbox Software will be finishing and releasing Duke Nukem Forever, in 2011. This has again ignited the forums with debates about whether it’ll be great, or useless. Here’s my two cents.
There are two kinds of people on the internet. People who hold a special place in their hearts for Duke3d, and those who give out stink that anyone still cares about it.
To people in the latter group, Duke Nukem 3d was a game about shooting aliens, and giving money to strippers. It was fun when it came out, but games have moved on, and we’re all sick of killing aliens, right? Can’t we just forget about this old fossil and move on with our lives?
To people in the former group, Duke Nukem 3d was a game about having fun with the environment in a way that had never been done; about ridiculously cool guns; about both mocking and paying homage to so many dodgy 80s action flicks (evil dead, total recall, they live and aliens to name but a few); about chucking pipe-bomb after pipe-bomb and setting them all off; about setting laser trip mines on cans of c9 and then sitting back to watch the carnage. But crucially, it was about adding to the experience by writing your own mods, creating your own maps, adding your own weapons.
User created content was not new of course. It was something which had been possible with the Godfather of 3D games, Doom. However, Duke made it easy – and fun. There was an entire library of cool stuff to use in maps. You could recreate your whole town with all the urban textures and sprites that shipped with the game (and many people did). A simple top down level editor allowed you to draw out a map, and then you could raise or lower sections while in 3d mode. You could import your own art (I’ll never forget the gack shade of pink required to set transparency).
Just writing about it brings back so many memories of mods. I remember one that turned the freeze ray into a flame thrower. I remember a total conversion set in Vietnam which had a sniper rifle and allowed you to call in airstrikes – two things that shouldn’t have been possible with the engine, but people found ingenious workarounds to the limitations. I remember a hilarious and actually pretty useful mod, which would drop a duke turd when the player crouched and pressed ‘space’. This turd would then explode if stepped on by an enemy. It was a simple combination of the laser trip-mine code with a blood spill sprite with the hue altered to a lovely greeny-brown colour, but it added so much to the game.
I myself made an aliens Total Conversion that combined 3 maps from other mappers (after I got permission), along with a mod someone had made replacing the lizard troops with aliens (also with permission), and a mod I made myself which replaced the RPG and machine gun with the Pulse Rifle / Pulse Rifle grenade launcher, and added replaced the freezer with a flame thrower. I only wish I’d kept a copy, it was uploaded to a few duke mod sites as Xeno TC, and I’ve googled for it now and then over the years but I can never find it (There are a few aliens mods out there but none of them are the one I made).
However, my proudest moment was crafting a detailed map of my school, filling it with various easter eggs and putting exploding walls all over the place. It was probably the first and last time I put that much effort into mapping. Sadly, I also don’t have a copy of that map either. =(
During my last year in school (1998), I was getting a bit tired of waiting for DNF so I decided to buy a new game which also shipped with a level editor – Unreal. I played around with unrealEd, and while it was easy to use and light-years ahead of Build (and went on to form the groundwork for half of todays games) it never really pulled me in like duke mapping did, and nothing has since.
I’ve been on and off the 3dr forums since 1997, posting and reading, contributing, wondering, imagining. No game can ever live up to the hype that we all built for DNF, and I don’t expect it to. However, it still needs closure. A whole team of developers at 3dr have been working on DNF for the last 12-13 years, and it needs to finally see the light of day.
I look forward to the day Duke gets released, and I look forward to buying a copy, and I look forward to playing it. I don’t expect it to live up to the hype, but I’ve waited 13 years for this game, and I owe it to my 17 year old self to play it.
Does it take a long time? Yes. Is it worth it? Hell yeah.