I think Duke Nukem is more relevant to gamers today than many people give it credit for; DN3D took the formula that worked with Doom and made it [i]cooler[/i], albeit while degrading strippers and Razorback Policemen wielding sawed-off shotguns.

I don't think it's going to blow anyone's minds, but I'm not sure comparing it to Modern Warfare or Uncharted, or Gears of War for that matter, is very fair.  That's as far as the "apples and oranges" argument can get I think.  Those games all had a serious plotline, while Duke Nukem's always been about over-the-top explosions, wanton violence and an exaggeratedly low-brow hero mowing down hordes of enemies, ripping heads off and shitting down their neck (Duke's words, not mine).

Do I think there's a market for that today?  Absolutely.  I think too many action games take themselves too seriously these days; I haven't seen a light-hearted shooter since Serious Sam that captured the action audience in a similar way, and I think part of the draw for that game came from Duke himself.

It's good to be the King, and I can't wait for this game to FINALLY come out.  Better late than never.  I honestly can't see this game being so terrible that it wouldn't merit a purchase simply because of its rich heritage.  Duke helped pioneer the action shooter genre; his return to duty is long overdue.

Pieces ranking on Duke Nukem Forever seem kind of...easy...to me. You should have seen the crowds at PAX. No, I don't think this game has any problems with being relevant.

Relevancy in today's mainstream gaming culture could best be measured in advertising dollars, so I'm not sure relevance is any measure of quality, potential or otherwise. Is Call of Duty relevant to the gaming masses? Of course. Does this somehow excuse the fact that Call of Duty has spawned three games in three years that offered essentially the exact same experience, with a fourth in a fourth year looking to be sticking to the "add a few more features on top of the gameplay without making any real tweaks to it" formula of game production? Twenty-two million mainstream gamers a year say yes, I say no, but hey relevance is pretty relative.

There is an aspect of Duke Nukem Forever that the media seems not to be picking up on, and that is it's dedication to many of the classic FPS standards that have been completely abandoned in recent years. There was a time when shooters just played faster, when to stop moving for a second was to spend the subsequent second staring at a respawn screen, when a zoom mode meant your screen actually zoomed rather than being filled with a bulky sight, when you could get a clean headshot kill with a pistol from clear across the level while moving at full speed. Most console FPS players today cut their teeth on games like Halo and Call of Duty, so I can understand why the relevance of the former pillars of the genre's design is lost on them. But I just don't think the overall relevance of Duke Nukem Forever, a game whose foundation seems to have been built with these pillars in the center, would suffer for it. If anything, it should be more relevant for having veered from the overwhelmingly popular style of play that has permeated all subgenres of FPS gaming in favor of the less popular classic style that suits it best.

I understand that the vast majority of people playing shooters today love the way they play, and couldn't imagine playing them in any other fashion. But there are a lot of us out there that lament the death of the classic style shooter, and have been waiting patiently for years for anything to attach our hopes to. Timeplitters 4 was the last great hope, and an entire community took a near terminal blow when it met a grizzly Haze based death. This new Duke Nukem doesn't need to be relevant to be relevant to us, all I needed to see was the fact that you can move and shoot without being penalized for it in the form of decreased accuracy and I was on board. This may mean the impact of it's failure would be amplified a bit, but I just can't keep staring down the same goddamn red dot sight in every game and continue to have fun.

Thanks for the epic responses Alan and Bryan.  Like you guys I do think their is a place for a Duke Nukem game today but I have to wonder if the transition to consoles will result in the PC version suffering in the process.

Gearbox did a rather poor job of Borderlands on PC and I haven't played a shooter on PC that played like a proper 'PC shooter' in a good 4 or 5 years outside of the afformentioned Painkiller and Serious Sam and perhaps Crysis. Maybe the PC version of Forever is going to be specifically tuned for the platform and play how those old shooters used to play but I just dont think it will happen. Guess we'll just have to wait and see. 

Now, see, I'll agree right off the bat that Borderlands translated to the PC haphazardly at best, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it was outright poor.  Yes, it was impossible to get multiplayer up and functioning, and I had to download a third-party program to set up a virtual network.  Yes, I had to go into my videocard settings and force a Vsync and anti-aliasing.  Yes, the game seemed awful easy compared to the con--

Wait.  Wow.  Is this really the first time I've considered how bad the Borderlands port was done?  Anyways, yeah, it was a pain in the ass and you should not have to work THAT hard to get it working at a level comparable to the console version, but did I enjoy it very much when it was done; was it worth it in the end?  God yes.

Referencing that for DNF seems odd, though, as this game was designed to be a PC game from the ground up, and all the problems I had with Borderlands on the PC can inevitably be traced back to "This is a console game that is now playing on a PC".  Not a valid excuse I think, but it's certainly a mitigating circumstance.  I've seen much, much worse ports that were literally game-breaking instead of just annoying.  I think when you take all the bullshit out of the equation, you're going to be left with, at the VERY least, the most shiny polished turd you've laid eyes on since Starcraft 2.

I say that because anything less than that would be the worst insult you could inflict to the fanbase who have been waiting for more than a decade for this.  I guess we'll see.