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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:26PM
... impressive.
Back during the era of Pentium 200s to PII-300s Half-Life allowed squad based AI throughout the levels.
Combined with the quicksave, you could redo the same section 5 times and have the AI attack you from 2-5 different directions with the same 3-5 guys. This was actually the only reason I gave it a pass at the time. The other games available, such as Quake2 and company were still using simplistic AIs with little or no teamwork, very rudimentary AI's that only really responded to 'visual radius', player position and maybe 'friendly fire'. Additionally, it was the first 'major' game to support NPC backups (albeit they gimped it so you couldn't carry them from one area to the next, which infuriated me since they often killed them off rather than giving them an avenue to escape. Similiar problem to the later Halo in fact!)
Steam is what killed off Half-Life for me. And their lack of support for upgrading the sierra era version to interoperate with the 'standard' half-life reissue they did when they became their own publisher.