I'm shocked that it comes as a surprise to anyone. I've been reading the 3drealms forum to catch up on it all. It's really sad to see them talking about losing their forum.
Duke Nukem 3D was a fun game, but not earth-shattering. Outside of the small success of Max Payne and Prey, what else have they done? So many engine changes, so many scraps and redo's.
Supposed ex-employee quote pulled from The Duke Nukem Forever List (
http://duke.a-13.net/)
"The 2001 trailer was 100% scripted cinematic, and not actual gameplay. They built specific demo maps just to record video from to make a trailer. Everything you see in that trailer was phony.
The typical work flow there went something like this:
Designer would be assigned a task (build a new map, rebuild an old map, polish a bit of a map, etc.). Designer would work on said task for two, three weeks, a month, all the while lower management would be looking over it and making sure it was going in a "good general direction." Designer would move on to another task. A month or two later upper management would finally look at the work and say, "It's all wrong, do it again." Rinse, repeat."
Sad to see another developer go....but I don't think Duke Nukem Forever was ever going to come out. Or if it did, it was only going to get coverage ala Chinese Democracy. I don't think it was going to sell Halo level numbers.
