NowGamer speaks to original Duke creators 3D Realms about what went wrong for Duke Nukem Forever...
3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks have suffered from a second round of layoffs following one that hit both companies in the middle of December.
The only news coming from Embracer is canceled games, closed studios and layoffs. That’s what happen when you accumulate to many studios at once. There’s another company that will be doing the same thing here over the next handful of years especially if daddy’s money doesn’t bail them out.
They're not crumbling specifically because they acquired so many studios. It's because they built everything up based on a $2B investment and didn't have any plan in place to pivot if the deal fell through, which it did. They were reckless and stupid.
More layoffs at Embracer Group, as the publisher as reportedly fired half of 3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks.
Hope that the ones fire are the Decision makers in Slipgate Ironworks and those responsible for greenlighting those decisions over at 3D Realms. Cuz they are mediocre at what they do...
Lol!! What am I even saying? Their just gonna fire all the people actually working hard on the games instead. Oopsie! My bad.
Monopoly and Consolidation of the game industry is Nooice!!!
Me and most of my concept art buddies got laid off as well a few days back –different daughter company though. Such a wonderful start of this magical month 🤣
Multiple future Gearbox Software projects, including Borderlands 4 and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands 2 have been spotted.
Hopefully, they fired the entire writing team after B3 cause that dialogue was truly atrocious.
doubtful... this is gearbox we're talking about.. Randy thinks everything the studio does is gold because he has a bad concept of reality
FFS make something else. If you can't make anything new, at least bring back Brothers In Arms or something.
I know it will never happen (for obvious story reasons that's happened) but I wish we could play the original Vault hunters again with new abilities you could choose to develop in a skill branch. Never really felt I could get behind most of them after the first game, especially move wise. Lilith's phase walk will always be the best to me.
Speaking of Lilith, I'm kind of wondering how they'll get around the whole Siren thing since they wrote themselves into a corner saying there's "only 6 Sirens in the entire universe" and now thanks to Borderlines 3 they apparently pass on their abilities meaning once we see each of 6 powers available that's it, no new brand new ones. I don't know why they don't just say there's more than 6 since all of them in the ENTIRE Universe just conveniently coming to Pandora is a bit strange.
That's super easy to get around. Each person that has the skill could have their own personal spin on it. There could be a new power that morphs them into something else. One of the weapon manufacturers could experiment on 5 of the Sirens and the 6th would have to fight a horde of siren powered bad guys to rescue the others. Fiction has been there and done that with power more complex or simple thousands of times before.
As for revisting the first game? That would be totally unlike the gaming industry to reboot a series...
I don't blame Gearbox for the failure of 'DNF'.. no, that lies squarely with the original design teams, who's lack of direction and ideas was clearly showing for all to see in the final product.
When Gearbox bought the 'Duke' IP from 3D Realms, I'm more than sure that they (Gearbox) were just as shocked as everyone else on how much 'DNF' hadn't progressed much over the years BUT to their credit, Gearbox took what they had, complied it to run on current gen consoles and the PC and released it it anyway.. I'm more than confident that Gearbox knew they were going to catch hell from the gaming press and gamers alike over this title and again to their credit Gearbox took it in stride and rode out the negativity.. sure 'DNF' wasn't the blockbuster (any) studio would like but it sold enough to show that gamers are still interested in 'Duke'
Gearbox are talented developers and I'm more than sure that they have a team working on the next 'Duke' somewhere deep in the bowels of Gearbox.. give it year and two and at a future E3 Gearbox will show a 'Duke' game that is fitting for the 'Duke Nukem' name.