Still, you can't help but feel sorry for those fans who quietly whispered to their collective circle, "Don't worry guys, just a couple more years..."

Now their dreams are SHATTERED.

According to Take-Two their dreams may not yet be shattered. Take-Two said they could hand the development off to someone else. Of course we all know how that story goes. Just 2 more years...

I'm still confounded as to why it would, under any circumstances, take 12 years to develop a freakin' Duke Nukem sequel.

1. Guns
2. Tits
3. Aliens
4. Smarmy one-liners

That's it... that doesn't take 12 years.

My best rationalization for them, is that the development cycle is slower than the progress of technology. They have said that they wanted to play the best game they possibly could. So perhaps when they started developing in DirectX 4, then saw the neat things DX 5 could so, so put out the schedule, and converted to DX 5, then saw the neat things some new framework could do... etc, etc.

That's just speculation, and I'm not saying that even if it is the case, its a good idea, but that's my best thought as to why it took 12 years.

I've heard from people who at one point or another worked at 3D Realms that basically that's exactly what happened. They'd fall behind the curve, and then have to port everything to the next new thing.

But the thing is, fundamentally, the only game that's really "changed the game" for FPS's in the last 13 years is Half Life, because of the way it told its story in a relentlessly first-person fashion.

But with Duke, that's not the case - explicitly not the case, or Duke himself wouldn't be much of a character. So, a HUGE amount of the work can be done up front - you can script the whole game, design the general layout and look of the levels, and there's no way that technology can keep outpacing you over the years.

Not if you're competent at your job. I mean, a designer has to be part futurist - you have to be able to anticipate those changes in technology, or the upcoming trends. If you can't, then you get caught flat-footed. And I can understand it happening once - particularly when Duke Forever was supposed to be coming out, you had Quake, Q2, Q3, Unreal all in the span of a very short time. So "keeping up with the Joneses" was probably a huge pain.

But to have it happen for 13 straight years, and for the last three years or so with a clearly dominant toolset/engine (UE3), to have not gotten DNF out shows a tremendous failure of planning on the part of the company. Like I've said in other posts - I'm sure some of the artists, programmers, designers, etc. were great, and worth hiring, but I'd never hire someone who managed their project schedule - not in a million zillion years.