jeez most of the quick made indie games support more than that limit...so much for the 5vs5 clans

You're right, the game is garbage.

But you're not right in saying that more could have been done. The game has been a money sink for 2K for YEARS, and they weren't likely to throw more good money after bad in an effort to salvage it. And you can't just say "well, hobbyists are capable of doing better..." because it doesn't work that way. Money still has to be spent to get the artists to do the work, and at this point it made no financial sense. Given the time it would have taken to get some things presentable, other parts would have gotten even more dated. That's the trap that got the game where it is in the first place!

It was a lost cause. The amount of money and time that would have had to be spent to get this thing up to "completed and good" status would most likely have equaled the cost of just producing a new game. New assets were created, context was given to stage chunks that otherwise had none, the engine was made to run better. But it's like trying to trick out a Chevy Volt... at some point you're just running up against the limitations of what you're given and you'd be better off starting from scratch with a better base.

Gearbox did a lot of work to get this thing as presentable as it is now. That doesn't mean Gearbox is incompetent, it means the original content they were given was unworkable. You could give this shit to Miyamoto, Will Wright and John Carmack and they wouldn't know where to start. It is, at its very core, a completely flawed game, from the engine to the art design to the gameplay.

look at the list of developers that worked on the game
3D Realms,
Triptych Games,
Gearbox Software
Piranha Games

Looking back it was a bit jarring, everything else seemed just cheeky and in good fun. It was grim.

Fair enough, although polish is something I can look over if a game is otherwise sound. Take for example Gothic 2: Great game but lacks a lot of polish.

I was also willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they didn't actually know they were making rape jokes and the whole thing was a big tonal mistake.

Then a crying woman yelled "WHEN DID SOMEONE GIVE ME ROOFIES"

So... yeah. There's bad taste, and then there's no taste.

Oh dear.

In Manhattan Project, Mech Morphix strapping women to mutagenic slime bombs for no clear reason was campy, absurd, and pitch-perfect for Duke Nukem. Duke 3D went a little further than that with naked zoned-out women snared and entangled in alien sludge, but I don't feel that that went too far. All in the name of a little schlocky fun, right?

Based on Destructoid and some comments on the RPS article today, this scene sounds like it's not interested in fun. If it really is worse than it sounds, I don't think I want to see it.

Well now I have to trudge through this sad sack of crap to see the scene everyone's talking about. Classic case of bad publicity=good publicity in action. It sounds unbelievable.

Said women were also begging you to kill them because they'd already been impregnated by the aliens. And Episode 4 begins with a video of a woman giving birth to an alien monstrosity. I don't think Duke 3D is nearly as tame as some people remember. Although this scene sounds a bit more... extreme.

From Jim Sterling's twitter: So @JimSterling wasn't kidding about the rape stage in Duke Nukem Forever. There are girls crying "I'm too young to be pregnant."

I feel like something's wrong with me, but something about all this negativity surrounding the game makes me want to buy it even more. Maybe I'm a masochist, but part of me has always wanted to play a trainwreck of a game. Also, I'm trying to get into games journalism myself, writing about different topics on WordPress and Giant Bomb, and it feels like this is a must-play game in the same way Enter the Matrix or Daikatana had to be played. It might also make for an interesting article I could post. Maybe get onto FRAPS and record the most fucked-up parts of the game?

I expected Duke Nukem Forever to have some (a lot) of sexist actions, crude jokes, and to push the envelope but having women begging you to kill them because they had been raped and the roofie joke is just going too far. I don't plan on buying this game now.

The scene is on youtube.

spoiler alert

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0Yh4Aq54ek

I can confirm this quote, too.