Scott Miller van 3D Realms heeft een posting over de multiplayer aspecten van Duke Nukem Forever op de GoD Developer's Corner geplakt:
>>> in designing the game how are you balancing the network/multiplayer with the story driven singleplayer(or maybe multi?) portion of the product? <<<The multiplayer game will ignore the story and simply focus on various Dukematch games. There will also be several multiplay-only levels, and possibly a weapon or two only available in multiplay. I doubt we'll include the more difficult game types like CTF, mainly because multiplayer focused games like UT and QA3 will do these very well already.
>>> the previous id products have always suffered in one respect or another from trying to do both, <<<
I love to read a developer say something like: "We're focusing on single-play and multiplay." In other words, they're not focusing on either! You can only focus on one because they are not compatible game design methods -- a great single player map has different design objectives than a great multiplayer map. However, with a Great Deal of Ingenuity, you can have a map that serves both masters well, and we achieved this quite often in Duke 3D, and many Quake and DOOM maps scored in this way, too. But, in general a single player level should be more linear in nature, and a multiplayer map should avoid dead ends.
>>>>with the networking bar raised by ut and q3a or conversely or games like thief that have totally eschewed multiplayer to focus on the single player experience (all games that have given up on the story/multiplayer combination), how have you approached this issue from a design perspective? what tradeoffs have you been forced to make in things like programmer/artist allocation, level design, weapon choices, etc.? <<<
Our focus is on the single player experience, but we know we can also provide a great multiplayer experience, too. This is exactly the approach we took with Duke 3D, and we did pretty well.
I'm not sure we've really thought about specific trade-offs. George would be in a far better position as project leader to answer that question.
Scott Miller