Perhaps the phrase used in the game’s marketing (always bet on Duke) is accurate after all…

We’ve already written about 3D Realms’ second Duke Nukem Forever concept (i.e. the Unreal Engine version after the studio dropped the Quake II engine) leaked to the internet. It was said that the public would be able to get their hands on the blond macho’s unfinished 2001 E3 version in June. We were wrong, and it’s a good thing we weren’t right: you can already go to the Internet Archive and download DNF, which is, of course, unfinished…

Modders can also take the scalpel: the package includes the Unreal Editor used by 3D Realms to create the maps, and the source code is also part of the pack (although archiving the entire 4chan theme is a bit overkill and irrelevant, but whatever…), so if you know the older Epic Games technology, you can finish what the studio couldn’t two decades ago! (And if Embracer Group is innovative, they’ll swoop in and make an older version of Duke Nukem Forever. After all, they own both 3D Realms and Gearbox!)

Attention! You can’t just launch the game quickly. On Reddit, you should read about the tricks you need to use to render at the correct resolution, for example. Removing the D3D8 (=DirectX 8) wrapper is also mentioned, but you can also find other tips. Apart from that, it’s not more than a vertical slice, so it’s kind of the project’s skeleton. Still, there are some exciting things in it: interactive touchscreens, parasite-ridden civilians, BioShock-style “Pipe Dream” hacking, and a civilian (in a tense scene) to guide through the dark. So there are some excellent ideas here.

Of course, the leak has also had the consequence of opening old wounds, as George Broussard and Scott Miller, the two co-founders of Apogee, have gone toe-to-toe on Twitter, explaining what went wrong during development. They should reconcile.

Source: PCGamer