There are more video games to play than ever these days, but at the same time, the sort of things we grew up playing and enjoying are now few and far between. Triple-A blockbusters used to release every couple of years alongside lower budget B-tier titles that allowed teams both big and small to experiment with new ideas that would push the medium forward.
Nowadays, the gaps are far larger between each major studio’s tentpole product, and are filled with smaller indie releases and live-service experiences. Developers who once stood on the top of the world now spend several years, millions of dollars, and time better spent doing so many other things on their next big project, which has a non-zero chance of being canceled years into development.
Take Naughty Dog, which continues to innovate when its games release, but has become so hampered by an unsustainable production cycle it helped perpetuate that the only games it has released during the current console generation have been remasters of games we’ve all played before. They also had a major live-service game, Factions, cancelled after years of work.
It isn’t alone either, with Bethesda Game Studios’ announcing Elder Scrolls 6 several years in advance and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond rebooting its development entirely in order to meet an avalanche of impossible expectations. The majority of triple-A games now take five years or more to make and once they finally break cover, so much of the industry has already moved, or they collapse under the weight of their own impossible execution.
Exceptions exist, especially in modern classics like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Baldur’s Gate 3 that showcase there are healthy and artistic ways to create excellent video games, but both of these have at least some claim to the ‘indie’ descriptor. After putting those aside, it is so hard to get excited about the biggest games in the world now. In fact, it reminds me of one doomed project that once felt like an exception.
What’s The Story Behind Duke Nukem Forever?
For over a decade, Duke Nukem Forever was the poster child of development hell. In a time when even the biggest video games in the world only took 2–3 years to make, this long-awaited shooter spent 14 years in development before finally seeing the light of day. A huge amount of its production was severely protracted as it underwent several ambitious iterations under the leadership of creative director George Broussard over at 3D Realms, until things were revived and rebooted by Gearbox Software deep into the ’00s.
The finished product was a mediocre facsimile of the masterpiece that was promised upon Duke Nukem Forever’s reveal back in 1997. It received incredible gameplay trailers that teased larger-than-life graphics and ambitious gameplay mechanics that promised to push the genre forward to places we never thought possible. This wasn’t too surprising after you consider how boundary-pushing Duke Nukem 3D was at the time. It allowed you to explore and interact with sprawling environments, many elements of which felt almost lifelike. Years later, it’s quite embarrassing to admit how groundbreaking it was, considering the character is a cringe-inducing, hypermasculine sex pest. But asking a stripper to ‘Shake it, Baby’ shortly after playing pool and playing with light switches was a huge step up from Doom.
It was likely this success that spurred 3D Realms to make Duke Nukem Forever into one of the best games ever made, something that consistently pushed the boat out and showed us things we’d never seen before again and again. But this ambition would inevitably result in a constant stream of delays, feature creep, and eventually years and years of silence.
After we stopped receiving regular updates, Duke Nukem Forever became a legendary meme. There is no way any game could ever take as long to make as this one, even something iconic like Half-Life 3 that became the butt of a very similar joke following the release of Episode Two back in 2007. Forever would finally launch in 2011 in a new form, but the final product was a sad, pathetic relic of a genre that had long since moved on. Duke wasn’t cool anymore.
And Why Other Games Can’t Repeat Its Mistakes
Despite its infantile subject matter and laughably protracted development timeline, I believe that 3D Realms truly wanted Duke Nukem Forever to be something special. This much was made clear in leaked builds that have emerged over the years, allowing players to go through iconic E3 demos and experience versions of the game that would never see the light of day.
Perhaps there is an alternate dimension in which it reached the finish line and transformed the shooter landscape forever rather than becoming a poster child for incompetence. But it isn’t alone in this mediocrity anymore. In fact, Ubisoft’s Beyond Good & Evil 2 has officially been in development longer than Duke Nukem Forever ever was. First revealed in 2008, it was never officially cancelled ahead of its re-reveal in 2017, meaning it now has the longest documented development of any video game ever. And I’ve got no doubt it’s still several years away at the time of writing, though it did allegedly survive the recent project cull at Ubisoft.
The Last Guardian is another infamous example of a game taking horrendously long to release. But considering it was first announced in 2009, its 2016 launch doesn’t seem all that ridiculous by today’s standards.
These are both extreme examples of excessive triple-A development cycles, but they also feel representative of the hole this industry has dug for itself. A medium where blockbuster titles take roughly 6–7 years to make as they are revealed too early to either attract creative talent or they build up unrealistic expectations.
Whenever a CG trailer is shown by PlayStation or Xbox now, I rarely ever get excited, because there is a sadly distinct possibility that it will be cancelled during production or end up taking on an entirely different form before hitting the market. Wolverine was first revealed in 2021 and still stands a chance of being delayed from its planned Fall 2026 release date, and god knows when Intergalatic: The Heretic Prophet is going to see the light of day.
Once upon a time we would make light-hearted jokes about triple-A games taking this long to make, but in our pursuit of photorealistic graphics and neverending experiences, it’s now our reality. We live in a bloated landscape where your game needs to sell millions of copies in mere weeks or be labelled as a failure, while projects take so long and are so expensive to make that there is hardly any chance to experiment in fear of slightly rocking the boat. Epic games like this are fantastic when they finally come around, but none of them are worth the price.
Duke Nukem Forever
- Released
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June 14, 2011
- ESRB
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m
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 1
- Multiplayer
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Local Multiplayer
