n/a

What do the price and marketing (c'mon, it's in early access) have to do with the game's quality?

if its going to sell like duke 3d, it needs to account for inflation in price

When Duke 3D was released, the Build engine was cutting edge and required more effort to make, so the price reflected that.

Ion Maiden is based not even on Build itself, but on eDuke32, meaning that both engines are very known and it takes less to make a game in it. Also, it's not even meant to be AAA. That moniker is reserved for the Battlefield/CoD/etc. levels of production with flashy graphics and less gameplay than this.

Why does it take less time to make the game? The sprites have a higher resolution… The levels are larger… The engine needs huge amounts of optimization (and a working netcode)… Maybe the con scripts are easier to write if you have a lot of experience, but I cannot imagine why anything else would be easier than it used to be.

Because you have to invest less effort to make a game where the engine is documented and almost done, not to mention that it isn't some Frostbite-grade thing where you have to also manage high-level lighting, particles, super-hi-poly models... Having eDuke32 developers, as is the case with Voidpoint LLC, helps as well, as experience makes things easier.

It'll be interesting to see if the game lives up to DN3D in terms of level design.