I'm tempted to say the game's worth more dead than alive. It's been over 12 years now since it was first announced so anyone desperate to play it has probably come to terms with never getting that opportunity.

Beyond that I have to believe it would have found some way to get produced by now if it was really a great game. My guess is it's a mediocre mis-mash after 12 years of mishandling.

So in the end it's legendary as a game that was promised for over a decade and never delivered. But if it ever does get released, and it is bad, it will just be another sucky game that fell by the wayside.

There's nothing stopping them from licensing the latest id engine and writing a Duke Nukem game with it and just calling it Duke Nukem Forever, which is probably a more plausible line of action than continuing with what they have now.

…but that’s what they’ve been doing all along. They’ve been on the engines of all of Quake 2, Unreal, Unreal 2 and Doom 3 I believe. The trouble with that approach is that every couple of years the state of the art has moved on so much that you have to regenerate all of the graphical assets (models, textures, etc.).