So,what went wrong?

Actually it would be easier to answer what went right :)

Rushed development after a long development time, obsolete ideas, character out of cultural context. Poor graphics, glitchy gameplay are what seem to have been highlighted. Did not play the game myself.

Graphic great, Story line like vintage Duke Nukem, and gameplay bad.

Maybe they should of made the game more open instead of going to an area, fight some aliens and you can't move to the next area till you kill them all. Felt like a rail shooter IMO and could of at least used a rader too know where the enemies were shooting from.

The glitches it had could of been forgotten if the game was funner thou.

Just about everything. Look at Bulletstorm to have an idea of how it should have been.

From what I've heard in interviews with different developers over the years, 3D Realms kept wanting to do more and more with it. They truly wanted to innovate the genre (and make fun of the genre at the same time) as best as they could. We kept seeing new tech, new concepts, etc.. so you could imagine it would be hard to "innovate" as you watch other other developers and tech jump ahead of you. Basically, they had no direction and by the time Gearbox got their hands on it (and pushed it out the door) it was just a collection of loosely tied together bits of unrelated gameplay.

Duke's downfall was the development time. If the team had just set a goal and gone for it, regardless of what the industry was doing, we could've had a great game.

*It doesn't help that Randy Pitchford made the game sound like the second coming of Christ :/

He worked at 3DRealms and then he had to finish this mytical game, he was just surpassed by the circumstances (and being a fan of the franchise didn't help)

Overall I agree, if they released it at the time it could have been an excellent game, but it has gone through too many changes to finally end being coherent and good enough.

Basically, it took too long. It feels like they kept adding to it with ideas from other FPS' that it feels a mis-mash of great FPS' but in a very bizzare package. They even incorporate puzzles and some design elements of Half-Life and it doesn't feel right when you're playing Duke Nukem instead of Gordon Freeman. The game is still fun but it tried to do too much and couldn't keep up with the competition.

Had the development been more focused and had realistic goals/milestones then it might have worked better. I also think that if it had been released at the start of the gen then it'd be appreciated more. Instead, it's released into a market full of good quality FPS'.

Everything... even the expectations.

See above post. I've already said something similar in 2 other threads about this, so I'm just gonna say, "ditto" here.

Let's start with the 15 year development cycle.