I've never worked on a AAA game, with a fancy engine and an art department and motion capture and so on. That said, I can't help but wonder how this has been in development 14 years. What failures of management and process took place here? It seems like once Gearbox got control, there was an entirely brand-new development effort (I could be wrong, that's what it seems like, though).
Importantly, could Programming, Motherfucker have fixed this? Or could the game have been so far ahead of its time that they were waiting on hardware able to run it? Or -- my personal theory -- were they not working on it for 14 years, and they just told the public they were ... some kind of 20% project that ended up having press releases and screenshots?
Ultimately it can be boiled down to that kind of incompetence, but I got the impression that they HAD to be the best by the time they released... but the bar kept getting raised each time a new game came out(Quake, Unreal, Quake II, etc), and thus got delayed to perpetuity.
The root issue is that they interpreted "the best" to be "the best at every single feature," which is completely ridiculous. The fact is that the Duke3d had an atmosphere, depth, and immersive-ness that most games since haven't matched. They definitely should have been able to release a game within a few years that was the best game for its time.
The comic touched on a good point, too. The controversy behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's airport massacre level went on for a little while but has since fizzled away-with that in mind, I can't see how long people will be really taken aback by this game mode.
There was also an interesting point about the curse of having too much money. With no pressure from a publisher or from outside investors to ship, they were relatively free to keep blowing deadlines.
These examples might also be due to collaborative pressure.
On Star Wars, Lucas worked with a great editor who could say no to him. Same for script on Empire. For the Star Wars films 1-3 Lucas had total control over everything.
Put another way: It's commercial pressure that made Lucas subject to collaboration. And it's subsequent commercial pressure that made collaborators subject to Lucas.
That Wired article is a great story and insight into perhaps the biggest pitfall of software development: over-perfection. I refer back to it from time to time as a stark reminder.
DNF was more like a series of half-finished games, all worked on for a couple of years and thrown away. Nothing they showed the public ever had more than a year or two between it and one of the many restarts.
The analogy to a 20% project is actually pretty apt. 3D Realms was mainly a publisher. The cash from that business let them screw around on DNF almost indefinitely without worrying whether it would ever ship or make a profit.
There's actually a really great post-mortem of 3d Realms that covers in good detail. It basically can be summed up with "too much money and an inability to settle for less than perfect".
Edit: Looks like I was a bit too little, too late. I don't like unpublishing, so I'll leave this comment untouched, but the linked Wired article is exactly what I was referring to.
Importantly, could Programming, Motherfucker have fixed this? Or could the game have been so far ahead of its time that they were waiting on hardware able to run it? Or -- my personal theory -- were they not working on it for 14 years, and they just told the public they were ... some kind of 20% project that ended up having press releases and screenshots?