In an interview with Eurogamer, Gearbox co-founder Brian Martel has called the icy critical reception Duke Nukem Forever received earlier this year unfair, claiming that journalists allowed their passions and biases to tarnish their reviews.
“There were things towards the high and things towards the low, but the middle just didn't get any traction. It's pretty obvious that people were using it in some ways to kind of use it as a soapbox or whatever.”
That position, quite frankly, is shameful. Yes, Duke Nukem Forever was a game that carried a certain amount of cultural baggage, and that no doubt had a profound impact on its reception, but to claim that the majority of reviewers treated the game unprofessionally is absurd.
A critic’s job is not to judge a work not on criteria that the creator thinks are fair, but to express his or her own personal opinion about the experience. When that opinion is echoed by the gaming public, that’s a sign that the reviewers did their job well. If anyone is the victim of bias here, odds are good it’ll be the developers who poured years of artistic effort into the game, not the millions of people who were underwhelmed by the finished product.
The other major problem, in Martel’s eyes, was that the majority of gamers and reviewers weren’t used to Duke Nukem Forever’s retro-inspired design philosophy.
"It was what it was meant to be, which is a more old-school style game in what is today's technology. We've had this internal debate. Would Half-Life today be reviewed as highly as it is, you know, even today, as a new IP coming out with the same sort of mechanics Half-Life had?”
That’s perhaps a more solid point, but an old-school approach hasn’t stopped games like Painkiller and Hard Reset from faring better with critics. The core difference is that both those games innovated, while Duke Nukem Forever brought almost nothing to the table that we haven’t seen done earlier and better in other games.
Despite his staunch defense of the game, Martel acknowledges that the finished project didn't reflect the vision of his studio, but rather the decade and a half that 3D Realms poured into the title. "Gearbox made sure the world got to see what they made and I think everybody should really be thankful that it existed to some degree at all. Because it really would've just gone away."
"Is it a Gearbox game? No. When and if another Duke comes out it's going to be more consistent with what I think people would expect out of a Gearbox product. But this is the vision that 3D Realms had and that's awesome. It's just great that the world gets to see it."
There's certainly something to be said for closure, and I'll admit that watching the credits roll on Duke Nukem Forever was a relief, and about half of that was knowing that my decade-long wait was finally over.
Unfortunately, the other half was knowing that I’d never have to play the game again. The gameplay was uninspired, the humor felt sophomoric and desperate, and the puzzle-platforming sections were some of the most shoddily designed I’ve seen in my 20-year tenure as a gamer. If that puts me on a soapbox, so be it. At least I’ve got company up here.
