Looking back on DNF

[Coraline]

Okay, so I recently re-installed Duke Nukem Forever on my hard drive and started replaying it...and you know what? It's REALLY not as bad as everyone said it was!



I was one of the people who got the BoS edition at midnight on launch and I really loved it (I still have my DNF hat and statue, dice, cards, and poker chips). It had great humor, great shooting mechanics, interesting level design, and fun multiplayer. I really don't get why people hated on it - it wasn't as engrossing as Duke Nukem 3D, but it was still really fun.

Then the DLC came out (The Doctor Who Cloned Me) and I had a blast with it! It seemed public reception of the DLC was more favorable than the initial campaign (maybe because Triptych and Gearbox had more time to polish it) and it really returned Duke to his roots.

But that was all in 2011, when the world was obsessed with realism and Modern Warfare and all that shit. Replaying it now, I find it even more inviting because it doesn't take itself too seriously, and honestly, it has a lot of throwbacks to the earlier games, and has mechanics in it people are going wild over now (Fatalities, etc). Even the Steroids are a hearkening back to DOOM's berserk pack! It has realistic environments but offsets them with plenty of ridiculousness and humor...something I'm not finding in games anymore. And if you ever got the Icons DLC, there's a level that's clearly based on DOOM (14 min mark)! The weapons are fun to use, the vehicles are a blast, and it had solid level design.

Now, the PC version did patch the game to allow for more of an inventory and things from Duke 3D (like the freezethrower behaving like the original). Now I'm *really* getting into it because A) it's been awhile and I've forgotten most of it, and B) because it's actually a good game!

It did have a rep to live up to, which it failed to hit in my opinion as compared to 3D, but treating it as a sequel to the original instead of a remake really does it justice. The shotgun is very satisfying to use, running in between different enemies and dodging, executing, running again, reloading, etc...it really nailed the gunplay and movement down. The levels are far more interactive than I remember them being, and the graphics are really pretty.

Maybe I've been soured over the years of shooters becoming more and more realistic and basic, I don't know. Shadow Warrior's remake really did it right. Speaking of Shadow Warrior, there's a few parts where you remote-control a vehicle and use physics to get to some items, and that was a total throwback!

I think you guys should definitely replay it if you haven't, and if you never did, give it a shot now! I did get the 360 version as well on launch to play with my friends, but the game really belongs and shines on the PC. Playing with it patched definitely helps. I've also heard of people using SweetFX to re-color the game to make them a little richer, sharper, and more saturated, and it really looks good, though I don't use it personally.

It also helps a little to fool yourself into thinking it came out in 2006 (which it really should have) but regardless, it's more engaging than it ever was. Time was definitely good to this game in 2015, especially in this era when shooters are either going overboard with realism (Call of Duty) or re-inventing themselves (DOOM 4, Shadow Warrior, etc). DNF fits happily in between and doesn't need to do any of that stuff, even if they were trying to go for that back in the day.

So...opinions on how it holds up today? Like I said, I really do believe that giving it another chance will make it fun for you guys.

edits: fixing bb code

[SavageCorona]

From the confessional thread said:

It was a guilty pleasure of mine.

[Stygian]

I haven't really played many games that came out in the last decade, so I can't form a proper opinion.

I chose the third option for reasons.

[pavera]

I don't think I enjoyed anything about DNF when it came out. I joined Tarnsman when he streamed it a year or so ago, and it was just as unbearable then. All around it's just a huge disappointment of a game to me.

[FireFish]

To me it was, and always will be a great simulation of duke nukem 3D but with updated graphics. I realy do not get why people are acting as if somebody forced something up their pooper with this game.

In duke nukem 3D you ;

- shoot pigcops, irritating aliens zapping around the place, noisy tentacle things.
- jump around from platform to platform in canyons and space ships.
- Take a piss in a toilet, watch and pay strippers, press action on the pool table, etc.
- crawl trough weird vents, holes, sewers, and tunnels.
- references to doom, alien (the encapsulated woman and alien hive styled ship), etc.
- use Shrink rays to travel trough tiny vents and other tiny locations.
- listen to the macho duke comments.
- walk around at a decent speed.

In duke nukem forever you ;

- shoot irritating aliens zapping around, pigcops, weird tentacle things.
- jump around from platform to platform in city and expanded locations.
- Take a piss in a toilet, watch woman, press action on stuff to see what it does.
- run trough very 90's styled level designs with construction iron beams and stuff.
- references to other franchises.
- Need to use shrink rays to complete a level.
- listen to the macho b class movie storyline instead of just quotes.
- walk around at a decent speed.

I am starting to think they emulated the original 90's design and gameplay so much it backfired...

[Deleted_Account]

I've never played Duke Nukem Forever. I'm pretty indifferent about the whole thing actually.

[kristus]

I never really cared for Duke as a character. He was somewhat amusing. But I didn't really care if there were another game with him or not. But Duke Nukem 3d was a really good game.

Duke Nukem Forever was a pale copy that only superficially mimiced the predecessor without actually carrying over the things that made it a good game. It was like the game didn't have faith in it's own history, or the developers didn't understand why the game they were following up on was good to begin with.

DNF is a shallow game play experience without much fun to be had, an important part for a game like Duken Nukem. With Duke's quips and bad jokes, the whole just gets worse as it's more like the game is resting on Duke's quips to take control of the experience, rather than anything actually meaningful like (again) the gameplay. Especially since time has moved on, and TBH it seems like Duke himself actually moved backwards. Some of the jokes are especially offensive. Rape jokes? Really?

[SavageCorona]

I fail to see Duke as a "character" more like a 90s meme spewing ass kicker.

[FireFish]

SavageCorona said:

I fail to see Duke as a "character" more like a 90s meme spewing ass kicker.

I also agree with this.
By the time i was a teen duke nukem 3D already was an old game purely feeding upon its meme like status... Yet i liked DNF.

[Ed]

DNF was the first 'modern' game I had played since the early-mid 2000s. I made it to maybe the 1 hour mark before I closed and uninstalled the program without looking back. It felt incredibly lazy, uninspired and tedious. No amount of nostalgia stroking can mask the insult of assuming the player won't mind a few obvious shortcuts and tedium for the sake of expanding play time.

[SYS]

I made the mistake of buying the PS3 collectors edition. I got ps3 because it was the only way me and my friend could play multiplayer. And I paid full price for the collectors because bad decisions :)

Multiplayer was pretty good. It was the one thing they got right. It was entirely outsourced to Piranha studios so 3d realms never touched it in the first place lol. I even met one of the guys that worked on it. Shrinking someone, having them escape into a wall up a tiny jumpad and fragging them by tossing a pipe bomb in was so dope.

Loading times were ridiculous (yes lol console) Single player was this mish mash that had it's moments. I never beat the game because it locked up while loading. It would take at least a minute to load but it kept going. I left it for ten minutes and I had no choice but to restart. The save file became corrupt. So I said fuck it, and have never bothered with it since.

[Mr. Freeze]

I never managed to enjoy Duke that much because I see it as an inferior Doom. DNF was not only inferior Doom, but inferior Half-Life 2 with edgemaster writing.
Fuck George Broussard.

[geo]

The first 2 hours just isn't what I wanted to play. Everything but a shooter. Boss battle, driving, first person platforming, enemies getting thrown into a room, a giant Duke museum that just wasted time. All I wanted was a first person shooter. Later in the game I'd want to mess around with that stuff. Like when that strip club happened, I wanted to explore. Yes I know strip club ha ha. Well even if it was the Duke Museum, I think that would be the right part of the game after I've enjoyed it as a first person shooter.

I didn't exactly like the Half-Life 2 tower idea. I kinda felt like the theme of levels wasn't paced that well. Alien underground was one of the first areas. Climbing a vine. I think when Duke was shrunk in the Burger joint I really started enjoying the game instead of I like all FPS, therefore I like this.

I went through the game, I was fine with it.

[Aliotroph?]

I couldn't get into it at all. Why did it have to do all those other things form the start? DN3D was fun because I got to wander around levels, decide which order to defeat things in many cases, and discover lots of jokes. DNF forced me to follow one path, play mini-games, and endure slow scripted sequences. There are games that do those well and it wasn't one. I didn't play more than a couple hours and I'm not interested in it now. I have a backlog of interesting things to try.

[DoomUK]

Too wordy for my awesome thread, I suppose? :p

Ed said:

DNF was the first 'modern' game I had played since the early-mid 2000s.

I hope it hasn't ruined modern games for you. There's a ton of good ones out there.

Anyway, pretty much what kristus said. Plus it looked like ass, but I guess that's a consequence of it being stuck in development hell for like 10 years.

[Phobus]

I voted "the same" because I liked it when it came out and I still like it now. However, it does have flaws. It probably doesn't help that my two times playing through it were first on hard, going for the "keep the pistol the whole way through the game" achievement (which I succeeded in) and second on insane... both on an XBox 360, so the load times were awful. That was the major flaw, exacerbated by things like the turret sections, which were crap and involved frequent deaths. The rest of the game I honestly quite enjoyed - particularly playing on insane when I allowed myself to swap out both weapon slots rather than always keeping the pistol.

Whilst I would have preferred a game with levels more akin to Duke 3D and the ability to carry all weapons, I did like the vehicle bits and I do appreciate that making a modern game takes enough time that you're better off putting almost all of your energy into making just one path as good as you can. I would actually argue that, even on the XBox 360 with it's crappy loading times, DNF as it first came out is something I actually prefer to Duke 3D as it first came out, because it had a proper control scheme. I had to wait for Duke Nukem 3D Megaton Edition before I could experience the original levels (and expansions) with any real sense of joy, as the inability to free look using a mouse in the standard engine made the game unplayable. Of course, having played Megaton Edition, it's now my favourite Duke Nukem game. I've not played the DNF expansion (The Doctor Who Cloned Me, IIRC), but from what I've gathered I'd enjoy that too.

[Blastfrog]

I'd have to play DNF myself to really have an opinion, but I'm more open minded to it than I used to be. It certainly isn't DN3D, but going into it expecting that will only result in disappointment, so why not approach it in a way that's likely to net some enjoyment out of it? I might like to bask in negativity and bitching, but I'm also kinda getting tired of it as well...

geo said:

I kinda felt like the theme of levels wasn't paced that well.

This is just speculation, but I suspect that they had a laundry-list of desired locations/themes that had built up over a decade of development, and they just kinda slapped the list contents together in the UE3 version's script without regard to how well it meshes, only to avoid wasting ideas.

I think something similar happened to Thief 4. That game clearly had a Thief 2 knockoff storyline before being rewritten, but all the weird steampunk bot assets had already been finished so they remained a part of the world despite serving no purpose.

[Touchdown]

The first time I played it, I enjoyed it for what it was. It doesn't change the fact that it's overally poorly designed and sloppy modern shooter wannabe. It feels like its developers made a list of their favourite games and decided to copy random elements from them without understanding what made them work in the first place. Broussard is a huge fan of Half-Life 2 and it shows: DNF has equally broken pacing and disconnected levels. A mandatory vehicle section where you stop every couple of minutes (but instead of disabling a force field, you look for a gas can). Health regen and two-weapon system that came from another one of his favourites: Halo. Duke is a complete douchebag and gameplay makes him a total wuss that instead of being a badass action hero has to constantly hide to regen his health.

Very mediocre product, but nonetheless not a 2/10 material that most reviewers were pushing on it out of spite.

[Ed]

DoomUK said:

I hope it hasn't ruined modern games for you. There's a ton of good ones out there.

It took all of two hours of game-play for me to realize Bioshock Infinite would end up being one of my favorite games of all time. I'm not a total lost cause :)

[Philnemba]

Duke Nukem Forever was a guilty pleasure of mine that I played often on my Xbox 360...especially my constant hosting team King of the Hill multiplayer lobbies with fists & unlimited pipe bombs only :P

Also just bought the PC version on Steam summer sale since my Xbox no longer works.

[Clonehunter]

I never got around too it, and it just never seemed to interesting to waste time with.

[DooM_RO]

kristus said:

I never really cared for Duke as a character. He was somewhat amusing. But I didn't really care if there were another game with him or not. But Duke Nukem 3d was a really good game.

Duke Nukem Forever was a pale copy that only superficially mimiced the predecessor without actually carrying over the things that made it a good game. It was like the game didn't have faith in it's own history, or the developers didn't understand why the game they were following up on was good to begin with.

DNF is a shallow game play experience without much fun to be had, an important part for a game like Duken Nukem. With Duke's quips and bad jokes, the whole just gets worse as it's more like the game is resting on Duke's quips to take control of the experience, rather than anything actually meaningful like (again) the gameplay. Especially since time has moved on, and TBH it seems like Duke himself actually moved backwards. Some of the jokes are especially offensive. Rape jokes? Really?

This.

Duke Nukem Forever was a complete and total failure. Extremely depressing.

[baronofheck82]

Honestly, I never played DNF and really and truly I don't want to.

[Mithran Denizen]

DNF is a fun little diversion. It's certainly not a perfect game, and it's not worth anything close to full AAA game retail price, but at a discount, it's a decent romp. I'm glad I played it. I haven't touched the DLC expansion yet, but the positive reception has me thinking about giving that a shot now.

Honestly, I was never really a huge fan of Duke Nukem 3D, anyway. I've tried to like it as much as I like Doom, but something about the art and gameplay just won't click for me.

[Caffeine Freak]

DNF looked exactly like a game that spanned many years---there were hints of design and cultural references that were years old when the game came out, and hints of newer things as well. The game had places where it was fun, and others where it was just fucking awful and mind-numbing. Overall, I agree it wasn't AS bad as most people made it out to be, but it was still pretty shitty. They focused so much on crass humor and interacting with insignificant objects that they seemed to forget that those aspects were the icing on the cake in the original game, not the focus. The real meat of the game was always the gunplay, enemies and multi-route level design. The former two were executed horribly in DNF, and the latter (to my recollection) wasn't present at all.

I mean, they took a page out of Halo and did the two-weapon system, for fuck's sake. Why did they want to put that in a game that *prides* itself on being oldschool?

Even that wouldn't have been a kiss of death for the game, were it not for the fact that the individual enemies soak up enough bullets that continually going around for more ammo is basically a requirement. You could easily use up 1/4 of your full chaingun ammo on a single Pig Cop.

One of the worst examples of this flaw was the part (fairly early in the game) where you fight the oldschool chaingun boss monster in the street. They can only be hurt by explosive weapons. Okay, fine. But you're limited to holding 10 RPG rockets at a time, and the boss monster takes a comparable number of RPG rockets to kill him as he did in the original game (around 30-40, if I recall). So you spend the entire fight emptying your RPG and then running back to the ammo crates to refill it. It just becomes a tediously repetitive exercise.

[geo]

I started playing it again for the first time in maybe 2 years. I still stand by my "first two hours is something I don't want to play." Especially with the bosses and the rooms that flood with enemies. The turret mothership boss is just almost intolerably long. The casino has two rooms that keep filling with enemies and that feels harder than it needs to be.

Some of the textures are laughably low resolution even on ultra high resolution, especially with the mothership.

After the casino, in the parking lot it turns into a CoD parody. Lots of swearing, hiding behind bags with an optional turret shooting at an open area with abandon cars in yet another arena that keeps flooding with enemies.

Duke is being interviewed for a talk show in his own hotel, with his own museum in it, with his Duke Cave underneath of it. That makes me think he's not being interviewed, but its a nightly ritual this man gets interviewed. For a talkshow called Damn its late, they film at around 2:30 pm.

Why can't I zoom in one of the game's unskipable cut scenes? Like ooo look Duke its our video on the TV! I can move my head, but I can't zoom in on the TV when I can zoom in when shooting.

Having to drive through the casino then having to hot foot it back through the casino. Duke's Duke Cave is bullshit, a lot of the world revolving around Duke is bullshit too, but I guess the man did save Earth single handed. Now everything is named Duke this and Duke that. Very little creativity.

To the game's credit it has one of the better AIs. Pigs leap and lung, standard enemies can teleport around and flank you, but they end up teleporting right on you in a lot of cases. They hover, which is nice to have that variety.

I started shooting all the NPCs, because I remember "pro reviewers" putting up a stink for Aliens: Colonial Marines for not being able to kill the NPCs. Well you can't in this game either, so why was it an issue in ACM?

[Deleted_Account]

As I've stated earlier, I never played Duke Nukem Forever. Is it really that unbearable?

[Johnatone]

I went back to it last year or the year before - I get on weird kicks where I think I'm going to Platinum all the games I never did - and honestly, no, it wasn't the 1/10 or 2/10 everybody was giving it. It's nothing special, but it's at least a 6/10 for me simply because I did enjoy it to a certain extent. I still need to go back and finish the game and The Doctor Who Cloned Me on Insane, but like the last two trophies on RAGE it'll come when it comes.

I think the best way to look at this is to remember the same year DNF came out and failed miserably, Modern Warfare 3 came out and was a huge success. But if I compare the two... (Yes, there were more and better games that came out that year; I had a couple of them.)

Both have linear, uninspired levels, shitty on-rails segments or scripted story events that artificially extend playtime and QTEs (I don't know about you, but I fucking hate QTEs; at least DNF had bosses I could pump full of ammo until they died, the way nature intended lol).

At least DNF had a decent story that made sense in regards to it's history, a nice variety of weapons with different uses and abilities (even if we'd already seen them in previous games; most games nowadays have generic guns with piss poor balancing - I'm looking at you Destiny*, you sexy bitch), a sense of humor about itself, differently things to do in each level, and colors! Lots of colors in the environment, or at least varied enough not to look completely bland.

The gunplay wasn't so horrible, although there never seemed to be quite that punch that I want out of my weapons. The only way I can describe what I mean in this regards is "SSG vs Pinky" like punch to the weapons. But I usually had enough variety in firepower with what was laying around to have some fun; the two weapon system did suck though.

Plus, in hindsight, DNF is kind of a parody of modern game mechanics and in the regard it succeeds in showcasing the shortcomings of gaming "evolution." However, I don't think this was intentional. Too bad; it makes the point well.

Honestly, the game should've come out by 2007; it has a very early to mid 2000's vibe about it. I don't feel it would have been received nearly as bad then. But while I don't hate it completely, I'm not going out of my way to play it over and over again nor am I recommending it to anybody.

P.S. - As a side note, TITS! More games need bare tits in them. It's not juvenile; I'm just tired of seeing a bare nipple being treated as millions of times more horrible than torture, gibbing, decapitating, burning people alive, disembowling, getting shreadded, et cetera, et cetera, all things that are perfectly acceptable to have on network TV, games, cartoons and comics these days. But god forbid you show tits. In 1994, sure, censorship standards were higher, but while we've lowered the bar incredibly low on violence, people loose their fucking minds over tits. The fact that there was a strip club scene shouldn't have been a selling point. I also encourage the showing of bare wang and ass for the same reasons; bodies are bodies - sometimes their fun to look at, but they're really no big deal. As long as we keep treating them like a big deal, they'll be controversial.

And based on a few comments I've seen here but refuse to quote because I've got places to be:

Holy shit, are we really at the point where everybody has forgotten dual wielding in games has been around many, many years before Halo? Eh, I guess it could be worse. There could be a whole generation of kids whose first FPS had Modern Warfare or Black Ops in the title...oh, fuck.

TL;DR - I don't hate it, it's just an average game, I wish it'd come out in 2007 so it would've been received better, and tits are awesome and meh at the same time.

*I still play the hell out of this game even if it is crap, and the buffs on some of the exotic weapons and a couple of the legendaries do make them stand out from the rest, but they've nerfed and rebalanced almost everything to hell because of whiny PVP players who are complaining about weapons but not the real issue of Destiny's PVP, which is that it's based on matchmaking and compensates for people with shitty connections. Which is why I'm still on BF4 - not many console games with a server select option these days. So hundreds of shitty weapons and the Thorn and Gjallarhorn - SMH Bungie.

Hmm, walls of text. I've gotta knock that shit off.

[FireFish]

Johnatone said:

P.S. - As a side note, TITS! More games need bare tits in them. It's not juvenile...

Holy shit, are we really at the point where everybody has forgotten dual wielding in games has been around many, many years before Halo? Eh, I guess it could be worse. There could be a whole generation of kids whose first FPS had Modern Warfare or Black Ops in the title...oh, fuck.

Yeah, extreme gore has become more acceptable than nudity. I swear a mother in a chat i visit wrote the following ; "my 13 year old kids are not allowed to watch The game of thrones, they need to become decent people so no sex. But i am OK. with violence in movies and shows."

And yes again. This seems to have become normal in this day and age... People claiming they, or others where the first to do something while actually getting the recognition for it while many years before them others did it first while some even received awards for doing it. Its as if the media is feeding this warped perception..

But i do not agree with the last, you cant complain about children not playing a 20 years old game while preferring current day media... As an example, it would be severely abnormal to trap a child in 1993 just because the parents have some mental condition preventing them from accepting change and the fact that their childhood media became near irrelevant for the youth of today. This even reminds me of how hard some parents fought against pokémon during the early 2000's because it was not fitting into their dated ways of thinking... lol

----- excuse this side-tracking, though... its a forum not a chat.

[geo]

Piper Maru said:

As I've stated earlier, I never played Duke Nukem Forever. Is it really that unbearable?

There are only a few sections that are that unbearable. I deal with a lot of shitty games. The sections that are that unbearable are the rooms you get locked in and flooded with enemies. Because of their AI and aggression they can make short work of Duke. The teleporting enemies will teleport on top of Duke so you need to be jumpy. Pig cops leap in from far distances. I also laugh at the fact 3 pistol bullets can take them out sometimes. Not all the time. In fact the pistol seems to have some lucky shot mechanic.

These enemy spawn rooms happen far too frequently and they do make for a good cat and mouse with the AI.

The first turret boss section is a bit unbearable, because of the boss's health and just death after death turns into an excessively long time to be at a turret. I can't even call it difficult. You shoot down enemy drop ships before two of them shoot you back to back, because that means you die and it only becomes an issue later in the boss fight.

Again, its only the first two hours that are the worst. Having the first 30 minutes of interacting with things before you really get guns and start killing things. Well they give you a boss fight quick so you know its a first person s hooter, but two minutes of that versus 30 minutes of interacting with things.

There are worse Unreal shooters from indie studios. Things like 5 minutes of nothing followed by overpowered spiders that spawn in on your exact location. So apparently Duke isn't king of the bad. I prefer ACM to Duke's first 2 hours.