Really? Another reason for me to avoid this and other steamworks games until they drop to bargain prices. If you're going to sell it on disc, put the whole damn game on the disc.

Nobody expected to be an "open-world", DN3D never was, but there is a lot of difference between DN3D level and most DNF levels were you are cramped into a corridor with door closing behind you. Also DN3D had much less "arenas" where you are locked into a room/closed area and have to defeat enemies enemies waves before the game let's you continue. The shortness of most level also don't help.

Once don't remember seeing anybody expecting it to become a Deus Ex clone. Personally I expected it to be either an old-school shooter or at least a competent modern shooter and IMHO it was neither.

Well, The Witcher 2 did the same thing. I think the key is to keep the size of the files you need to download low, like under 100MB. Downloading more than that is inconvenient and really bad for people with caps.
That makes it sound like you haven't played an FPS since 1999. They are all like this now except for Crysis pretty much. The modern style is to keep you going through a tunnel so you always know what to do as more casual players despise not knowing where to go. For the same reason open world games have quest arrows now.

It would have been nice for DNF to change that, but it was obvious from pre-release videos and previews that it would not. Sounds like you had expectations that this would be Duke Nukem 3D with modern graphics, which it was never going to be.

There's apparently some sort of a known bug that relates to the game and dual core processors. I'm not sure what the cause is, but apparently you can largely fix it by setting the steam.exe priority to low and setting the affinity to run on just one core. Then set the priority for dukenukemforever to high.

I'll have to do some more testing, but it seems to work for me. Although, I'd expect there to be a fix for it in the near future. From what I've read that's still pretty insignificant compared to how the Xbox version was working previously.

I will have to see what your suggestion does for me. But when I do this the game is definitely a lot more responsive.
Yeah, I definitely am noticing that. So far the levels are ridiculously linear. I'm still having a blast, and I can definitely see this game being influential in years to come, but the level design could use some more work.

I'd be shocked if this game doesn't end up with a mod community growing up around it the way that DN3D did.

Which reminds me that I haven't tried the aha relevant cheat code yet.

No, I never expected that, I was merely answering his "peoples expected open world" comment, personally I never had any illusion, like I said in my previous post, I was expecting EITHER an old school FPS (which you have been nice but again I didn't had any illusion) OR at least competent modern FPS (which would of course includes the linear levels and scripted sequences) and for me here I got neither.

If you re-read the impressions I posted some pages ago, my main issue with the levels is not how linear that are but how bland they are (except maybe the last couples of levels), if you want to make corridor-like levels, fine, but at least makes them interesting, that's what most AAA shooter manages to do with various level of success, not just some corridors conducting you from one shooting arena to the next with just some stops from time to time for some platforming and physics puzzle. (I am wondering if the "arenas" were there originally or if Gearbox add them to pad the game length)

An annoying things for me is that some of the "environments" were interesting and could have made great/memorable levels with a better level design.

That would defeat the purpose of then anti-piracy measure.
Dude, the definition of having an illusion matches your expectations exactly...you wanted it to be/thought it would be/hoped it would be your optimal way and it wasn't.

And no they aren't bland. There's plenty of interaction in this game which other linear shooters don't have. Again they can either make it less linear and less interaction or more interaction and more linear. You can't have lots of interaction and not much linearity without it costing alot of time and money.

Steam itself is drm and refuses disc installs until opening day so there's no need for the extra measure.

if they put the whole game on disc they'd have to add more drm on top of it....would that be more preferable?

Steam drm is on it. That's enough. I mean EA games on disc that require origin install completely off disc. So do GFWL games. There's no excuse. This isn't even Duke specific why are you even defending this?

I'm not defending it....please stop assuming things. I made a mistake, and now concur the full game should be on disc now that I reread everything.

You really need to learn what "or" means... (maybe I should have put it in bold as apparently putting it in uppercase wasn't enough...)

Come on, seriously, yes in some level you can play pinball, video poker, etc... and that nice but it's not like every levels of the game was like that, in a lot of the level the only interactivity you got it breaking crates or damaging some pillars or concrete block with is something a lot of other shooter have done, you make it sound like every single pixel in ever levels was interactive and/or destructible which is not the case. And it's definitely not an excuse for the level design.

Sometimes people just like a senseless game....get where i'm coming from?

I like the mix of interaction and eye candy like the museum so far, though.

And by interactive yes...there's much more to interact with in this game then in most Call of Duty games and many other modern shooters. Most of them have more open worlds but there's a tradeoff usually.

That last part about the defending was unnecessary from me. The drm is necessary part from you really came as a surprise to me since we are on GOG afterall.

Preordered the balls of steel edition. Picked it up today. It feels like it should have been released last gen. And it looks like polished Doom 3 graphics. It's not a bad game. I'm very happy it's not another CoD clone. Basically sticks to the old school shooter formula. Some of the platform elements are just tedious but the combat is solid. I've played for at least 4 hours and I'm not done with it. That's more than I can say for any other modern day FPS single player campaign. It could be better I suppose but I don't regret the purchase.