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Gearbox Software ruined one of the best running jokes in software when they brought Duke Nukem Forever to market. At a recent developer conference in Brighton, they talked about working with independent developers to revive the character.
From Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford:
"I did not acquire the franchise merely to make sure we could all experience Duke Nukem Forever," Pitchford said. "That was sort of the toll we had to pay." He then explained that while Gearbox has carried out some concept development for the franchise, they'd need to work with the "correct developer" to make a new game.
One of the pitches:
Sam Barlow (Her Story)
Duke Nukem goes into a Vegas strip club at 4am, and it's kind of empty, and there's only two strippers working. He throws some money at them. Then, because there's no one else around, they sit down and they talk to him, and Duke sits there and he listens to this stripper talk about her life, why she's stripping, her family back home and how they live a state away but she flies into Vegas for two weeks of the month to earn money, then she goes go back and looks after her kids.
Then after an hour of this conversation, of him just listening to the woman talk, she asks Duke about his life, and then it flips. It's the first time anyone's actually asked about him, and he's forced to look inside himself and understand why he does these things, why he feels the need to kick ass, and it's just a lovely moment that they share. He walks away from it feeling like he understands himself a little bit better, but the ending is kind of ambiguous. We see Duke leave the strip club and we don't know what happens next.
What's your pitch, Soylent?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gman003 on Saturday July 18 2015, @05:03PM
Me? I'd rework an old game idea of mine that was based on Duke and other 90's games, which I was calling "Sudden Death".
It bounces between several styles of gameplay. You've got 2.5D shooter levels, Road Rash-style combat racing levels, some shmup levels, maybe more. The story similarly goes through several genres - fighting invading Russians, zombies, aliens, and demons.
It would also focus on just doing stupid awesome stuff. A level where you fight a helicopter while riding a motorcycle up the side of Freedom Tower? Sure! Ride a bat into literal Hell, machine guns blazing? Why not?
This would, inevitably, make some changes to the Duke formula, but I think we all understand that that formula needs some changing. Nostalgia works best when it's stylistic, not just spewing quotes. So the entire thing was crafted to imitate a raft of 80s action movies - Red Dawn, Rambo, Alien, Mad Max, etc. - but it's an imitation of style, not a parody. There will be pop culture references, of course, but from a wider range, and less frequently, and less in-your-face. Less copy-pasting of one-liners and more copying what made them good.
There would be changes to Duke, obviously. I'd tone down the womanizing - not eliminate it, just tone it down. DNF definitely played that up more than it should have. I'd also tone down the bragging machismo - Duke should be a capable, confident badass, and a real badass doesn't care if the world knows he's badass or not. And yeah, make it less juvenile (again, compared to DNF in particular). It can still do dumb jokes, just not something as dumb as picking up and throwing your own shit.
And finally, make the whole thing more self-aware. My draft script of the major cutscenes has the protagonist bicker with the narrator a bit about how it makes no sense for all these things to happen one after another. The key to making that work is to make the characters aware that they're in a dumb video game plot, but have them use it as an opportunity to do cool, unrealistic things, like ghostride a Soyuz into space, rather than just constantly poke holes at the story.
And the key to the whole game is to make it fun. I actually have more notes on gameplay than on the story. Weapon lists, enemy notes, boss designs. The game needs to be, above all else, fun. That's why it bounces between styles so often - so it always ends a section before the player gets tired of that kind of gameplay.