Do you like that distinct "Build Engine" look & feel?

[Diadu]

I like them for the nostalgia factor. I played around with the Build editor a lot when Duke 3D came out. It was a fun learning experience but kinda took away some of the magic. Then came Shadow Warrior and just the first level was mind blowing in some ways.

With enough explosives you could deform the cards parked in the street. Then there were those transparent water surfaces for the pools in the restaurant. Knowing how water and diving worked in Duke 3D, seeing a transparent water surface was pretty mind blowing. Or the concept of the remote controlled rc cars (or the tank in a later level).

Never checked these "marvels" out properly because I was busy making some Duke 3D levels that me and some friends could play and by the time I was done, I felt the burnout.

I knew Quake was a thing at the time and played it (with the music from Sonic 3D Blast) but Duke 3D and the Build Editor were my true loves at that time.

 

[diet_orange]

I like them for the nostalgia factor. I played around with the Build editor a lot when Duke 3D came out. It was a fun learning experience but kinda took away some of the magic. Then came Shadow Warrior and just the first level was mind blowing in some ways.

With enough explosives you could deform the cards parked in the street. Then there were those transparent water surfaces for the pools in the restaurant. Knowing how water and diving worked in Duke 3D, seeing a transparent water surface was pretty mind blowing. Or the concept of the remote controlled rc cars (or the tank in a later level).

Never checked these "marvels" out properly because I was busy making some Duke 3D levels that me and some friends could play and by the time I was done, I felt the burnout.

I knew Quake was a thing at the time and played it (with the music from Sonic 3D Blast) but Duke 3D and the Build Editor were my true loves at that time.

What surprises me, despite all the love for the Build engine games, you don't see too many custom map packs out in the wild like you do for Doom. I still remember the DN Forever mod for EDuke dropping and everybody losing their collective shit about it. Personally, I got motion sickness from it super bad (which is very rare for me) and I could barely play it

 

[Diadu]

What surprises me, despite all the love for the Build engine games, you don't see too many custom map packs out in the wild like you do for Doom. I still remember the DN Forever mod for EDuke dropping and everybody losing their collective shit about it. Personally, I got motion sickness from it super bad (which is very rare for me) and I could barely play it

Which is funny because when Duke 3D came out, there were so many unofficial map pack cds available, some containing entirely new episodes (Same was true for Warcraft 2 which came with a real decent map editor).

I think Doom just won out because it managed to stay in people's minds and had decent mainstream ports. With the PSX you had Doom and Final Doom, on the N64 there was Doom 64. Then there were the GBA ports and the Xbox got Doom 3. With PS3 and 360 they were made available digitally, so they were ever present.

Duke kinda fell off the radar, the console ports of 3D were pretty bad (Total Meltdown on PSX had a banger OST though) and the 3rd person shooters (Time to Kill, Zero Hour, Planet of the Babes) were "okay" but they weren't the fabled "Forever". The port from Devolver Digital for the Vita and other systems was pretty damn great though.

Any my personal guess is because the build editor requires a lot of fine tuning. My main gripe was that a lot of the objects you can decorate your level with had an unusual default size - usually bigger than they were used in commercial levels. So you always had to manually resize objects (That wasn't an issue with enemies, no matter what size you gave them, the game would bring them down to their proper size when playing the level). And while you could easily switch between the 2D map drawing mode and the 3D viewer, the camera in the 3D viewer wasn't on par with the in-game camera.
Then there's all that fine tuning for moving objects, various trigger events (earthquakes, explosions, Duke comments, chain explosions and so on) so you'd spend a lot of time going between the editor and launching the level to verify if everything goes off as intended. I could see this as another reason why people just say "no thanks"

P.S. I actually used to get motion sickness from Doom back in the 90s.