3DRealms is no more

[palibebeh]

well, it's true.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/58519
http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/69...ting-Down.html

and to think I'v been waiting for this damn game (Duke Nukem Forever) for over 12 years...
it makes me feel very sad...

mainly because in the last year or so there were a few screenshots, videos and wallpapers, which kinda proved it was *really* real.



time to grow up i think

[Neilg]

It wasnt that real - the trailer from 2001 was all scripted and had no gameplay. And recently a couple of models/renders dont make a game.

Theres a couple ex-employees posting on another forum I go on. He wasnt saying it was going to be bad, just that management was so horribly incompetent that he knew in 2004 that it wouldnt get finished so jumped ship to infinity ward.
Apparently it was a complete mess, leading to people constantly re-doing work, management having people put weeks or months worth of work in to something they knew they didnt want (just hadnt told the artists yet) and generally nobody spoke to each other until meetings at the end of each month.


edit: oh my word.
Hahaha, I just found this from the 'jobs' second of their old website. Same text from 98-2005.

maybe their work ethic was less a 'work' ethic and more a 'george broussard lives in a fucking fantasy world'

"Apogee and 3D Realms are die hard game players who make games without marketing pressure, corporate management, or arbitrary release dates. We make games we want to play, and we work on them until they are perfected and done. We are hard working, hard playing, highly motivated developers with a mission to succeed at all costs. We hire only the industry's cream-of-the-crop talent--and if you've got the talent, you can join us.

If you visit other game companies' web sites looking for a job you'll notice a lot of talk about what *they* need and not much about what they will give you. At Apogee and 3D Realms we operate under a different approach: We do everything possible to make each developer a key partner in the company and a critical team member who has true creative control over the project's outcome. The TEAM approach is in real practice here--it's not just a buzzword.

As part of this approach, we give all developers a royalty-like bonus, a real percentage of all revenues the game makes, including all revenues from derivative products, such as strategy guides, novels, action figures, movies, ports, you-name-it! Try to find this deal from any other game development company (you won't--unless you're a part owner).

Why is our deal so sweet? Because we want to attract the best of the best. In this industry you're not going to go far with average developers working on average games. We know that exceptional games are made by exceptional developers and we do everything we can to both attract and keep happy the best developers in the business.

(In fact, we've rarely lost a developer that hasn't left to go start their own business, such as Ion Storm and Ritual. This is a testament to the quality of talent we've attracted over the years.)

In summary, here's what you get when you work for Apogee/3D Realms that you probably won't get working at another developer/publisher:

1. A royalty-style bonus that's a percentage of the games you help create, along with ALL related derivative products, including ports.
2. Real creative influence on your game project.
3. Freedom from arbitrary completion date pressures, which allows the game to be made on its schedule, and not some suit's schedule.
"

Giving developers who's past experience involves being a good generalist his first taste of creative control is one thing, but they gave creative control to EVERYONE they hired as a dev.
looooool

[palibebeh]

It wasnt that real - the trailer from 2001 was all scripted and had no gameplay. And recently a couple of models/renders dont make a game.

from offcial 3dr forums, posted by one of the ex-employees (Charlie Wiederhold):

Everything but the sandworm and the "talking" parts were just clips of gameplay from the game as-is, other than some effort to polish them up. The talking parts were written for the trailer, but were accurate representations of the story being told and were intended for real use.

So while those bits were "scripted" they would be scripted in the final shipping game too, but all the rest (vehicles, weapons, AI, games, etc) were straight from the production playable game.

so it seems that 8 years ago the game was actually playable

the other thing is that it comes from a guy that invented the 'chair' story
(http://gamingisstupid.com/2009/05/06...story-revival/ - recommended for a good laugh, mainly because a lot of people believed it), so it very well may be another hoax.
...or is it?


but you're right - their development style was totally not suitable for a project of that magnitude. and I still can't believe that so many people were waiting 12 years for that game, without any media whatsoever, apart from those few screenshots from 2007.

also - DNF = Did Not Finish
so yeah...

[Neilg]

It was another ex-dev who said it was scripted somewhere else, then weider called him out and said that.

Who knows, amazing when 2 devs cant even agree on the status of a project.