Wirehead Studios

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPo054iNQK4

No naughty bits shown.  Not safe for work owing to some language and partial nudity.
Release date:  May 3, 2011.

Well looks promising, and nostalgic in a same time.

If ever there was a game that had big boots to fill...
Love the self-referential joke

I'm going to say this and i know it could piss some people off ( oh woodsman is an asshole, i cant believe it!) but Duke Nukem 3d was a better game than Quake. Okay we all know quake had better tech but Duke 3d was a better game. Better levels, better bad guys better weapons! and if it seems like i'm being overyly nostalgic trying to restart a debate from my late teens, its because my wife has gone insane and her and my son have moved in with her parents so she can get better medical care in a better county. Also i drunk on my home brewed booze ( remember my first batch of gut rott thread? classic).

and i had a custom forum title! where is it! i was icon of booze!

Whoa... off topic, but you're right!  I think it got lost when we had that little problem with the boards a while back.  Fixed!

I never really latched onto Duke3D back in the day.. but, you know.. I'll take anything that keeps the silly and simplistic spirit of the older games alive. Probably why I liked Serious Sam.

I like carrying around more guns and ammo than even the strongest of men would realistically be able to, and demolishing hordes of weird looking enemies.. be they demons, aliens, cyborgs, or just 'monsters'. Always fun. :)

Wow, this is awesome

Man..talk about overdue.

but I think Duke Nukem 3D was better than this ;)
ah good old times

It's about time! Always loved duke nukem, was alot better to play singleplayer than any other game during that timeperiod.
Doom had the speed, duke had the attitude ;)

Deathmatch was a ball too. Weird games in that stadium.

I still play Duke3d now and then. I think part of the appeal for me was the mods and convertions for it, some were really good. However it is 2011 and there are a lot of good games out now. I really hope Duke Nukem forever can make a comeback after all the hype.

Guess what?  Go on guess!  It has to do with Duke Nukem and its release date.  Go ahead and guess!

http://kotaku.com/#!5785237/duke-nukem-forever-delayed (http://kotaku.com/#!5785237/duke-nukem-forever-delayed)

I can hear it now:

"Damn!  Those alien bastards are gonna pay for screwin' up my release date again!"  :D

Always bet on Duke...




To be late.

You can now pre order a copy on Xbox360, may 6th release date.  Is it the same for the PC?

I don't mind playing Portal 2 while waiting for the Duke..

Damn those alien bastards have delayed me again.....now expected June14th...lol

When it comes to Duke there's one thing you can trust in for sure..it will be delayed ;) But i dont mind waiting abit longer, few months is nothing compared to years!

http://www.gearboxity.com/content/view/645/33/
IT'S GOLD, BABY!

Well aliens can still steal all teh copies and delay it even further...but yeah now it's gold for real :)

Just finished the demo. It made me happy. :)

I'm a little disappointed that they've opted to include a "hide to regenerate health" mechanic over traditional HP pickups. Furthermore, you're limited to carrying a maximum of two weapons (and pipe-bombs?) at any given time. An especially odd choice given the insane amount of weapons available and their highly varied uses.

Short demo, but very fun.  I'll have to get used to some of the ruder moments of the game, but that's always been part of Duke's humor.

I wouldn't mind having a full arsenal either, but I think I understand what they were going for here.  Playing old-style FPS games where you could carry 10 guns and all the ammo for them it's easy to become a one-gun wonder (Quake), or have every situation covered all the time (Quake 2).  Instead of having to think about which out of 10 different guns to switch to you'll be making the decision on which guns to use when you pick up a weapon.  If you run out of ammo you might have to pick up a weapon you didn't intend to use.  It switches things up a bit.  I've played F.E.A.R. and Legendary, both using this mechanic and it actually works decently in those games.  Besides, I'm sure if mod support is available someone will make a mod where you can carry all the guns at once.  ;)

The "hide and heal" mechanic seems to be commonplace now.  I blame Call of Duty and Playstation for making this popular.  I think the shift to this vs health kits is to keep the players moving forward.  Doubling back for a health kit is something us oldschool gamers are very used to but I think a lot of the newer generation doesn't have the patience for it.  Regenerating health keeps the game moving forward.  It makes it harder to "tank" on health and armor, or to get put down to 1 hp and then run into a tough fight that you have to do over and over because there's no health left on the level.  The checkpoint system makes it harder to avoid that situation since you can't go back and load a game from an older save slot, so the regenerative health was probably done to avoid that.  Quicksave and multiple save slots avoids that situation, but it seems a lot of devs want to keep the game mechanics the same across platforms.  Since consoles are the lowest common denominator that's where the standard is set.  Personally I wish the console market would die in a fire, but that's not my decision to make.  The hackers are doing a number on Sony though, so who knows.

Of course, this is a demo and not the full game.  I'm not sure what optimizations for the PC might be present so we'll have to wait and see on that.  I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the game.

Is the demo released? I gotta grab soon. Too bad, in next 2 weeks I have final exams. :( I will check it out later.

The demo is available to First Access Club members, which are those that have pre-ordered Duke Nukem Forever or purchased Borderlands during the promotion.  I don't think it's been released to the general public yet.

I've also read on the Gearbox forums that this was the demo that was shown at PAX, and some things may have been changed in the game play since the demo was released.  Maybe we'll get some extra weapon-carrying capacity?  We'll know in about a week once the real game is shipped.

As a man who like duke, has long lived with a great passion for booze cigars and firearms, i'm glad to see duke Hasn't  given in to the urge to modernize.  I would hate to here him say " don't shake it baby, your a person with your own opinions and dreams and i don't view you as an object ".

It has been if you know where to look. Unless someone has moral issues with torrenting a demo? :P

Haha!  Woodsman  :slippy_thumb:
Thank you Duke, thank you for allowing a respite from the trappings of civil society, for allowing me to wallow in elements rather more primeval...
Wait... should I be writing this?!

Woods: that's the thing about Duke.  Nobody tells the "king" what to do, and he makes absolutely no apologies for who he is.  While Duke may possess an ego larger than Mount Everest (which he climbed and then base-jumped to K-2) he's essentially completely honest.  Honesty is a virtue, as is saving the world from alien invaders, so if Duke has a few vices... well, so did Churchill, so you'll get no complaints from me.  :doom_thumb:

Vamp:  How can someone steal what is free?  ;)

oh and by the way duke and i also where the same size shoe, which means i also have a mighty foot.  :doom_thumb:

I still don't believe this game is actually coming out. In fact, I could be playing a copy I purchase myself in a few days, and I still wouldn't believe it...

Wow, long time no squawk.  You need to visit here more often!  :!:

I know the feeling, it will be kind of odd seeing that "wow, it's real".  I'll have pretty much zero time to play it right after I get it, too.  I've been waiting this long, a few extra days won't hurt much I suppose.  :surprise:

Well the reviews i've read so far has been less than kind to the new duke game, but then again i dont rly care i just want to play it for the fun!

I don't pay attention to review sites.  IGN and Gamespot absolutely ripped apart Legendary, giving it the lowest marks I've ever seen, and it's a fairly decent game.  It's no Doom 3, or Half-Life 2, but it was fun and I've replayed it several times and never got tired of it.  I've had other games I like get ripped up by reviews as well, and games that I've absolutely hated have gotten top marks at times, so I just ignore reviews unless they come from actual gamers that I know, like you or Tabun, or other regulars here.  :doom_thumb:

Considering the game has been in development for something like 15 years, I expect the idiot reviewers to look at the game as though it's supposedly been aging like a fine wine and will judge is on that basis. Which is stupid. I don't expect the game to be the best FPS ever made, but it looks to be a Duke-ish romp which is really all anyone needs from it. To even have the game coming out after constant delays, three developers and at least one lawsuit... the game is a service to the fans at this point.

Phoenix: I've been lurking for a while, which I'm sure you've probably noticed once in a while. Life, you might say, has been interesting for the last few years. Nothing bad, but a lot of enjoyment has been sucked away for a while. Things seem to be on the track of behaving now... so I hope to get back to some of the things I'd enjoyed doing before I graduated from college.

 I think alot of the bad reviews seem to be written by people who believe that gamers have somehow become more sophisticated since Duke Nukem 3d came out.  I would argue that gaming in general has become far less sophisticated, hell we don't even have to open doors for ourselves anymore. Regenerative health and limitless ammo have made first person shooters far easier for the 18 year old pot head rap listening, crowd who play world of warcraft and call of duty and call themselves gamers.  ( i spit on you! ).  Sites like IGN, who shout from the tallest mountain tops, the praises of any game that comes out of studios of Rockstar or Square Enix as if they dropped from the ass of God himself, are the same kind of retards who nominated 50 cent bullet proof for game of the year on spike tv.
  I say long live duke, and long live the old guard gaming geeks who remember when shooters were not just watered down idleness enablers for  worthless human beings too stupid to give jobs to. Oh and to hell with the two weapon carry limit, 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!.

Now I remember what I missed most about having you around, Woods!  Excellent rant.  I wholeheartedly approve.  :doom_thumb:

I just think it's sad that things that have been around in FPS games for years are now suddenly disappearing more and more. Things like the console and dedicated servers. Makes no sense to me, but I guess the console crowd wins the day in the long run. I hate having to rummage around through numerous .ini files to do something as simple as change the game to a proper fov.. HATE IT!

I haven't given Duke Forever a try yet, but as I said before, with 2K Games and Gearbox's names attached to it.. I wouldn't be surprised if those features weren't there.

As for the bad reviews, I see most of that centered on the console versions. The PC version got 76/100 on Metacritic and 80% on GameRankings. Considering how ratings are SUPPOSED to go.. those aren't bad ratings at all.
(As an aside, that's another thing I hate.. anything below 80% is automatically terrible and not worth playing).

I know what you mean.  I bought a game called Legendary, played it, thought it was pretty decent, and later found out IGN and Gamespot had given it 2.5 and 3.5 out of 10, and just about everything they ripped it on was not true or should not have been an issue.  I looked at the other games that were being released at the time (Gears of War 2, Bioshock, Far Cry 2, CoD: World at War, and Left 4 Dead) and I thought, hmm, who had money to pay for reviews... Microsoft, Activision, Valve, some big names there.  I got to thinking about how review sites make their money and I decided that since my experience with a game they ripped to shreds was pretty good that I decided to never look at reviews from said sites.  That's not the first time I've seen bad reviews of games I liked, but it's the most extreme example I've seen to date.  I remember absolutely hating PC Accelerator magazine because they ripped a few games that I really enjoyed and I was rather pleased when PC Gamer decided to shut down their "sister publication" a month later.

Dedicated servers and command-line consoles are something we do need.  I'll tweak an .ini file if I have to but I prefer to have access to the cvars from inside the engine.  It makes it a lot easier to tweak the game for maximum enjoyment, especially when you don't have to exit and restart the program every time you want to test a change.  I have to do that enough with development, I'd rather not have to do that just to tweak a game.  What I don't understand is why dedicated server is falling by the wayside.  I might bug LeeMon or Kenny about that one and see if they have some inside knowledge.  :!:

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.

 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.

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.

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

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.  :doom_thumb:

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.
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.

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.  :doom_thumb:

So far it seems that the majority of people who don't like DNF are people who don't like games...

Console gamers. :P

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).

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.  :doomed:

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.

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!

Ahh, wondered when the patch was coming out.  Downloading now!  :doom_love: