Full disclosure: 2K Games paid for my flight and hotel to see Duke Nukem Forever at a preview event in Las Vegas, NV.
The 2K representative asked me what I thought of the 90-minute demo I just played and told me not to sugarcoat my answer. "I don't think you're going to get very high review scores," I replied.
Duke Nukem Forever is no BioShock-killer, looking at it from a critic's perspective. Yet, it's quite possible that DNF might destroy BioShock in terms of popularity and sales. Let's take a look at why this long, long, long overdue shooter -- finally scheduled to hit May 3, 2011 on the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 -- might succeed or fail.
5 reasons why Duke Nukem Forever will fail:
1. The game shows its age
The consensus seems quite clear amongst the journalists I talked to: Duke Nukem Forever looks, plays, and feels like a shooter made in late '90s. The stages are very linear; many of the enemies are as dynamic as shooting-range targets; and the visuals, while not bad by any means, will certainly not wow many modern gamers. (The very first level -- a remake of a classic football-field boss battle from Duke Nukem 3D -- might be an exception, however. With the rain, an imposing and detailed stadium, and a full nighttime skyline, this stage is an excellent showcase to show how far graphics have come since the early days of flat first-person shooters.)
Nowadays, we have scripted events that would make Hollywood proud (Modern Warfare's nuke scene), emergent gameplay (creative use of weaponry and plasmid powers in BioShock), cooperative campaigns (Halo: Reach), and truly frightening foes (Big Daddies in BioShock). Ninety minutes of Duke Nukem Forever didn't really reveal any of those things.
Click on any image for a larger view.
2. Gearbox Software didn't do most of the design work
You could almost hear the gamers' collective sigh of relief when 2K announced that Gearbox Software (Brothers in Arms, Borderlands) would take over as the developers on this seemingly doomed project. Many people thought this game might turn out OK after all. Unfortunately, Gearbox inherited somewhat of a mess and is primarily just smoothing out the rougher spots. "When [Duke Nukem Forever] came from [original developer] 3D Realms, there was a full game there," says Melissa Miller, senior producer at 2K Games. "It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. [Gearbox brought in some of the original developers] who had been carrying the vision and the knowledge of where the game was going, to continue to do that work."
That's not to say the folks at Gearbox are completely hands-off. They are first-person-shooter experts, after all. "Gearbox was able to take over a high-level view of the game and say, 'OK, where can we add value?'" says Miller. "There were definitely full-on pieces of content where they said, 'We can figure out a better execution of this,' while keeping the spirit of what was intended for that particular scene."
3. Duke Nukem isn't that relevant anymore
Our buffed-out protagonist is classic action hero...in an age where classic action heroes are a woefully outdated concept. These days, we're used to vulnerable antiheroes (Daniel Craig's James Bond), gray-area vigilantes (Batman), or Jason Statham. The Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone mold died with the last century.
A balls-out, take-no-names kinda guy like Duke just doesn't seem to have a place in modern media except on a purely ironic level, and perhaps this game is going for just that. But knowing the development history of this title, you can just sense that this character was made for a bygone era.
4. It's more puzzle-y than you'd expect
Duke Nukem Forever is no Portal, but it does have a lot more puzzle elements than you'd expect for a testosterone-fueled shooter. In one scene, with no prompting from the game itself (though this is all subject to change, of course, as the product is not finished yet), you have to figure out on your own that you have to steer an RC car through a simple obstacle course to push a key item through a small hole in the wall. While I really appreciated the lack of handholding pop-up tips in the game's more puzzle-y sections -- hey, it feels good to figure stuff out on my own! -- I wonder if this would just stump a more...uh...simple gamer. You know, the kind who would still heartily laugh at any boob jokes this game spews forth.
5. Bulletstorm might have more balls
Unfortunately for all those involved with this game, it has to compete with Bulletstorm, which might out-Duke Duke in the crudeness department. Hell, Bulletstorm is so evil, it might cause otherwise wholesome Americans to start raping people.
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