|
~Va^^pyrA~
|
Developers want to charge you access to their big server farms (think Xbox Live). They want control, and they want money. Giving players the option to run dedicated servers negates both of those goals.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Woodsman
|
There was a time when i was annoyed by pc gamers who by some kind of religious conviction would refuse to have anything to do with a console game. But this way back in the playstation 1 days when alot of truly original titles were being released and the pc market stuck to a few tried and true categories. Now i have to face the sad reality that the console market is bogged down with titles that are really more like playable movies rather than games. I'm not a believer in the school of thought that everything has to be streamlined and simplified for it to be fun.
I like the idea of open game worlds with non linear quest options, i just don't like when the quests options are simple one part chores like " tag all the walls in this hood so those bitches be knowing its our hood, else ill spork yo ass, no homo" ala GTA series. I think people like games like the more recent call of duties and gears of war, for the same kind of reasons they enjoyed eating at Mcdonalds. Sure its bland, but you know what your getting every time and that plastic cheese they put on everything is like drinking scotch from Aphrodite's boob.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Tabun
Pixel Procrastinator
Team Member
Elite (3k+)
   
Posts: 3330
|
From what I've seen of Duke Nukem Forever, I'm not very impressed. I'm not offended or annoyed by the machismo bollocks -- that's what the game is all about. There's also plenty of quasi-erotica around, and there should be. I do like the nostalgia-boost of the start and how they kept the voice, attitude and action duke-like.
But it feels like a bad port of a console game (no saving when I want to = pre-90s gaming) and it makes me motion-sick. The graphics look a bit dated even compared to source games and the action is very linear and limited (and somehow it all seems slow-paced).
Not worth the original price, but certainly worth checking out once during its bargain-bin days to come. If only for old time's sake.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
| Tabun |
?Morituri Nolumus Mori? |
| |
|
|
|
LunaG
Beta Tester
Baron of Hell
Posts: 94
|
...crowd who play world of warcraft and call of duty and call themselves gamers. ( i spit on you! )...
...to hell with master chief and his stupid fans who wear latex body armor at quakecon. Its sporking texas in august your gonna die retards!...
When you mentioned Warcraft, have you heard of a Warcraft 3 mod called "DOTA" ? It's actually pretty popular right now, and we call those fellas who plays DOTA = DOTARDS. And if those guys from Cyrsis showed up, those "master chiefs" would surely get their ass kicked ^^ I'm definitely getting this http://www.toywiz.com/necaduke.html |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
My thoughts on the game so far - and no spoilers included.
I'm only partway into the game, but so far I'm having an absolute blast. I'm playing on "Come Get Some" and I've died a few times as you can get overwhelmed in fights. It's difficult enough to be challenging but not insanely hard. There's plenty of action, loads of humor, and everything is working out well. Very first achievement I received had me falling over cackling so bad I couldn't play for about 5 minutes. Duke is completely over the top, and as far as the personality, Duke absolutely delivers.
Weapons so far feel pretty decent. The two-weapon system, surprisingly enough, doesn't seem to be as bad as I thought. Usually there's another gun laying around that's appropriate for the situation, and I have run out of ammo once where I was down to just fists and no pipe bombs, wondering if I was going to get killed. Found a 1911 laying around and it was relief. The lack of health kits has been replaced a bit with ammo management in some spots. As for the individual weapons, the pistol is, well, a pistol. Accurate, not too weak, not too strong. Shotgun is devastating up close as it should be, ripper feels just like in DN3D except it sounds more like a real weapon now. RPG blows stuff up nicely and the heat-seeking feature works well. Trip mines seem to work best for me tossed like a grenade so an enemy can do something stupid or for extra bang in a fight when set off by a pipe bomb. What's great is that anything that can be picked up can be used as a thrown weapon. I've killed aliens with some pretty odd stuff.
Enemies are downright groovy. The troopers and assault captains are visually a lot more developed than in DN3D and the special effects on the captains' teleport and jetpack effects are very well done. Pigs are downright nasty. They're not as comical as in DN3D. They're vicious, tough, and all-around mean. Yes, the assault commanders still poop rockets at you. If you thought bird poop was dangerous, stay away from those guys.
If I have to peg the game on one thing it's lack of quicksave and the old-style slot-based save system. If they had included that on the PC version it would have been huge. I can deal with the checkpoints but I've never been a fan of that system. Consolitis there, but I don't consider it game-breaking. There are some slower spots in the game play, but hell, wandering around looking for secrets in DN3D could be pretty slow too, and they don't feel like the break anything to me.
There is one problem with the game performance-wise that I discovered. I'm running a dual-core CPU, and it seems that steam.exe and DNF don't get along perfectly. Loading screen stuttered horribly. I read a tip that gets around this. Alt-tab, and bring up task manager. Find steam.exe in the process list. Set its priority to "LOW", ignore the warning, and set its Affinity to CPU 1. Alt-tab back into DNF and performance problem is solved. I'm not sure why the demo did not have this problem, but that's the only technical glitch I've found so far.
I haven't had problems with motion sickness, but then I am running the game at 75hz on a CRT at 1200x1024 with vsync on. Not sure what to tell you there Tab, but depending on what hardware you saw it displayed on the frame rate might be an issue. Graphics seem fine to me with all the detail settings turned to max. Environments are readable, and everything looks about as I expected. Some areas did get pretty dark but bumping the brightness helped to not have to use Duke Vision when I felt I shouldn't have to.
As for the "mature" content, there is a lot of sexual humor present. There's a lot of... what is the word for it... similarities in some things and resemblance to anatomical structures as well for lack of a better description. There is no option to disable nudity as with DN3D either. It is definitely not a kid's game nor does it pretend to be, and there's also severe language. I don't have a problem with this as I expected it.
Final thoughts to this post... I would not say there's anything particularly ground-breaking about the game. There's nothing that hasn't been done before as far as basic game play elements. You do get a lot of fun stuff in the world to play with, and you're rewarded for looking for secrets. I don't think anyone should be expecting this to be "the best game ever made". If the question is, as I think it should be, "Is this a good sequel to DN3D?" The answer to that is YES. It has almost everything I'd want to see in a Duke Nukem game, except for quicksave and maybe being able to carry a few extra guns. I wouldn't have minded another Duke game in there prior, but I'm pretty pleased with what I've been playing so far. Not perfect, but pretty darn fun. I have no regrets about pre-ordering, and yes, I have the Balls of Steel edition. Vaporware no more, baby. 
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
  I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
|
~Va^^pyrA~
|
I just finished the game and thought I'd add to the thread a bit. Instead of wasting a bunch of space, I'm just going to say that I agree with Phoenix's post up above 100%. While some of the design choices aren't ideal (regenerating health and two-weapon-limit) you do get used to them. I never had a problem with relying on the checkpoints, but I can see how it might be a hassle if you have something else come up in the middle of a level. The levels are generally fairly short though, and the checkpoints seem abundant. The only thing I might add to it is that the game is kind of short and perhaps not worth the full retail price on that front alone. I felt a little letdown by how little interactivity there was in a lot of the areas. Outside of some of the combat-free hub levels, the game is generally corridor shooting... to the point where some of the later maps reminded me of Doom 3. I think the Duke Burger "mini-man" area might have been one of my favorites, actually. It felt so different than anything else and was a lot more focused on platforming than shooting. It's not the best game ever, but I feel it's a pretty worthy successor to DN3, especially given all the title's been through. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
I just completed the area mentioned in the spoiler, and I have to agree it was very fun. It took a bit of thought to figure out how to navigate the area properly. I'm still having a blast so far.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
|
Kajet
|
So far it seems that the majority of people who don't like DNF are people who don't like games...
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
Yes to both, along with review sites that worship Modern Whinefare 2 and suck Master Chief's... erm, gun. It's not perfect, I'd say 7-8ish material but 3.5? Some review sites have also been caught outright lying. One site in the UK was claiming there were no new weapons from DN3D and no new enemies. Uh... there was that Railgun in the demo... which is also in the full game, along with at least 3 alien weapons in the full game, not to mention the Pregnators and Octa-babies which were also in the demo. After the initial hate and rage threads I've been seeing a backlash on some message boards as well by people that (surprise) actually bothered to play the game from start to finish. I include myself in this, even though I've not finished the game, but I'm just one among many that, while I don't think it's the best thing ever made, certainly don't think Duke deserves all the crap being thrown at him by the chimpanzees of the gaming world (bonus points if you understand the reference).
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
Having played through the single player until it's pretty much been beaten to death, I've been playing a bit of multiplayer. Finding servers is hit or miss, but I chanced upon a game of Hail To The King. You stand on a control point and your team earns points the longer you're on it and earns points faster the more people are on it. The control point teleports around the map periodically to mix things up a bit. I was playing on a map called Sausage Factory with infinite ammo enabled. It was insanely fun if you overlook the pipe bomb spam and shrinker spam. Ironically, nobody was going for the Devastator. After nosing around the map I found out how to get to it and it's not that hard. Using the Devastator resulted in me being insulted by one player, so I switched over to the railgun and railed him three times in a row at the end of the match. I guess I got a little QUAKE in his Duke. It seems the Devastator is a great counter to pipe bomb and shrinker spammers when infinite ammo is enabled, if you avoid the choke points and hit them when you're both out in the open. Being able to flatten people with rockets up close and hit them long range for one-shot kills with the rail is rather rewarding, if a bit lopsided. Obliterating four players with the Devastator feels great, in an oh-so-wrong BFG-ish kind of way, and pegging someone with the railgun feels great in an oh-so-right kind of way. I think my favorite kill of the game was getting a rail shot on a guy that just shrunk one of my teammates and was going to step on him.
As for basic play, all the mechanics that exist in the single player game, except for picking up objects and throwing them, exist in multiplayer. Guns must reload unless unlimited ammo is enabled, You can only carry two guns, four trip mines, four pipe bombs, and one of each special item, you use space to grab and switch weapons when running over new ones, and your Ego regenerates after not taking damage for about 3 seconds. Damage is stepped up though compared to what the single player enemies dish out. One explosive detonation near you is death, be it a pipe bomb, RPG rocket, or trip mine. One railgun shot is death. Close up shotgun blast is death. You can die pretty easily if someone has a good connection and can aim well. Explosives set each other off, too. You can blow up trip mines with pipe bombs or rockets, or blow up a pipe bomb thrown at you by throwing another one and detonating it in the air when they cross near each other, etc. Oh yes, the RPG rockets can lock on and home just like in single player. I nailed a guy like that on Hail To The King. Melee hits are pretty much one-shot as well. Beer does protect you for a bit but forget precision aiming, steroids make you run fast and do instagib punch damage, holoduke is available, and there's three other nifty items not present in single player. There's a statue of Duke that gives you double damage, a bottle of whiskey that makes you temporarily invulnerable, and best of all, the jetpack is back for multiplayer! Jetpack + Whiskey + Devastator is almost as bad as Phoenix with the Flight powerup and a BFG9000. Well, maybe not that dangerous. 
In addition to the actual game component, there's two areas accessible in the multiplayer menu. One is a changing room, the other is "My Digs". As you play, you gain experience for killing people and accomplishing challenges. Challenges are things like "get 25 kills with the Ripper", etc. The My Digs area is actually a map with crated up items. As you gain experience and level up, these items become unpacked. Some are static, like paintings on walls, others are interactive, like a punching bag in the gym. There are also babes you can unlock besides the default French maid. Duke can "ogle" them and in doing so he'll say something suggestive, with an equally suggestive reply from whomever you're speaking to, or you can ignore them if you wish or deactivate any item in the Digs room. The changing room allows you to customize Duke. Anyone that's played Team Fortress 2 knows about hats. Well, Duke has hats, shades, and shirt logos he can customize. You get these not by paying cash to some virtual store or finding crap at random, but by actually doing things, specifically, completing challenges. You can also customize your shirt color for non-team games. At present the only way to unlock items for My Digs is to gain experience, and the only way to unlock special outfit items is to complete challenges. I think that if you're going to have customized content that does not have a bearing on actual game mechanics, they did something very, very right here. You get rewarded for playing well and doing clever things during play instead of just playing or leaving a game running while you sleep and hoping something drops into your inventory so you can trade it for what you really want later.
I have played Team Dukematch, Dukematch, and Hail To The King so far, mostly Hail To The King since the server had the most stable player count and didn't shut down after one map. I have yet to play Capture The Babe. I haven't played more than a few hours worth, but I've had fun. I'll have to see how some of the other maps play and try out Capture The Babe next. If you have Duke and haven't tried the multiplayer, regardless of what you think of the single player, give it a shot. If you can't find a game, start your own server and people will show up eventually.
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
|
~Va^^pyrA~
|
I downloaded the patch today. It added four weapon carry, field of view adjustment, and the game runs much better. There's no better time to buy Duke Nukem for the PC!
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Phoenix
|
Ahh, wondered when the patch was coming out. Downloading now! 
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
I fly into the night, on wings of fire burning bright...
|
|
|
|
